Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Your Dream Is Over

You know how they say in times of questioning a decision, you should write down the pros and cons? Well, in my decision to describe to you my day, it would go something like this.

Pros

1. Pad Thai

Cons

1. Everything else

Yep, one of those days, which means it's rant time. But what do I have to rant about when there's "everything else" to choose from?

I could write another political blog, in which people start to peruse only to go, "Yeah, yeah, Chad, we get it. You're liberal. Moving on!" I could write a civil engineering blog complaining about Norman street lights, but that's in the "preaching to the choir" column. I could write the usual "week 2, fun's over" semester blog, but I've written those since 2000. I could rant about every single Facebook friend writing a status message about Sooner football, but that's going to be somewhat hypocritical, I imagine, by this weekend. I could write about work issues, but this is not really the venue for that. I could write about Oklahoma summers, but it's meteorological fall now.

All of this, I guess, means that I'm just in a bitchy mood. I guess they happen every once in a while. I'm not sure why. I don't have that much to complain about. I'm a pretty lucky guy, in fact, in seemingly innumerable ways. Isn't it a little petty to feel this way?

But enough about me. This is a blog, after all. Oh, right...

It is petty to feel this way, and I feel guilty every time I'm in a bad mood. I feel guilty right now, actually. Some days, things get to me that 99% of the time would not scathe me in the least. Today is one of those 1% days, sadly. Frankly, it makes me wonder how people who live with a lot more than these 1% of days function. For me, a bad mood is crippling. It makes me avoid people, avoid problems, avoid any stresses. It removes any motivation I may have for any topic I may have vested interest in otherwise. In short, bad moods are like a personal shutdown. The process is a positive feedback until sleep tends to wipe it away.

Normally, I feel fine the next day, and the bad day is a distant, somewhat troubling, memory. Even this past weekend, when a nasty computer virus completely wasted two days of my life, I retained a sense of humor. My friend Somer and I were headed to Edmond for our weekly Friday night restaurant tour. We were planning to go to Cheeseburgers in Paradise, which, upon our arrival after a 30+-minute drive, we realized was closed down. Instead of being completely irritated by it, Somer and I just laughed it off as the "perfect day" for which something like that to happen. Today, I would not have laughed.

Bad moods, for me, are unpredictable. I don't understand why I get them, and I don't understand how they go away. All I know is that they make the good days seem really nice. And I'm looking forward to "really nice" really soon. In the meantime, I will be guilt-ridden in my trivially ungrateful attitude toward everything that was today. Except Pad Thai.