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emotional management
Tuesday, September 26 2000
KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic is my favorite listening experience every workday morning. The music is relentlessly diverse, although it is rarely noisy or abrasive. Often it lingers for a time in early 50s lounge or contemporary semi-ambient DJ music. In the latter category is this wonderful tune containing the following sample, spoken by a gentleman with a refined Appalachian accent,
"Dr. Walter Doodah is a nationally-known musician and has taught many teachers and boys and girls how to play the autoharp."
I'm still developing my strategy for recouping the money I owe on my unexpectedly large phone bill. I've been doing research to find the email addresses and phone numbers of AOL big shots. By land and by sea, I'm going to do what it takes to make those fuckers pay, and if this means being an annoying nuisance, then that's what I'll do. It doesn't seem easy; I've been told that AOL is more hardass than the Mafia. (Well, no one has actually put it quite like that.)
My emotions have been in a state of disarray ever since I checked my phone bill back on Sunday. It's not exactly disabling, but it's definitely depressing. It keeps me from being able to enjoy life in the way I had been as recently as a week ago. The intensity of my depression is clearly related to the fact that I have no one except my housemate to talk to about it. Keeping my frustration bottled up inside of me isn't healthy, but it's difficult to distract myself from the feeling. I try to compensate by looking extra hard for good things in the alley (with the conviction that all I need are a few good things happening me to turn my mood around). I actually did find a nice genuine wood (that is, not Ikea) bookshelf. But after that, the pickings were slim: a Star of David bracelet (I kept it - it had a three dollar price tag attached).
One thing providing me a certain amount of reassurance is my belief that, barring chemical changes, no one stays outside their average level of happiness for very long. This works both for me and against me. If I were to win the lottery and suddenly have five million dollars, it would only take a month or so before I'd be exactly as happy as I was back on Saturday, which was exactly how happy I was on a certain average day in, say, December 1994 or January 1989.
Now I know what you're thinking, that I'm completely over-reacting, that this is just a small bump in the road. As big as the phone bill was, it was still smaller than the smallest of the unexpected car-fixing bills Kim found herself paying soon after we moved up to Los Angeles. And that's absolutely true. It's just that I've mapped out a financial survival strategy for myself for the next several months, and this strategy depends on an absence of such stupid expenses.
To better deal with my lousy feelings, I'd topped off lunch with the last codeine pill remaining from a prescription my dentist gave me back in June for a root canal. I hadn't been impressed with codeine before, but it's a damn effective anti-depressant. It made me feel amazingly good the rest of the day.
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