Sometimes it’s a stay-up-until-1:00-a.m.-making-a-collage kind of depression. I had an old magazine lying around with an ad for neck cream. It said, “You’re only as young as your neck.”
I mean, yeah? My neck is the same age as the rest of me.
Play tag, solve everything
I propose that we all go out and play tag because it’s going to solve multiple problems, because it’s going to be fun, and because it’s logical to have fun.
The connection between chocolate and depression in real life:
“I’ve had mild, pervasive depression for two weeks, but since science says this 85% dark chocolate bar can raise my serotonin, I’m waiting for a barely perceptible lightening of my mood.”
The connection between chocolate and depression in Harry Potter:
“A dementor gave me depression so hard my soul almost ripped out of my body, but I ate a chocolate bar that’s been sitting in this guy’s jacket, and now I’m a thousand times better.”
Depression is a hole
Depression is a hole, and it sucks you down again and again, but there are ways out.
Tomato soup for the morbid and depressed
Combine a missing tomato soup recipe with scream-crying depression, a baby I am responsible for taking care of, and the fact that I can’t chop onions anymore because of how quickly and painfully my eyes tear up.
The universe “takes care of it”
There is a certain view that if we just sit back and stop worrying, the universe will take care of it. But there’s more than one meaning of “take care of it.” Sometimes, “take care …
“Checklist,” a blackout poem
What I like about blackout poetry is that it’s sort of an inverted version of pinhole cipher, where a hidden message is concealed in printed matter by pinholes under the words of the real message. I used to make pinhole ciphers on discarded newspapers in cafeterias and coffee shops, just in case someone noticed.
If I had nine lives, I’d use one of them to be a spy who retires and opens a coffee shop. Preferably, the spy part would be in the early half of the twentieth century, before analogue cryptography was completely outmoded.
With blackout poetry, I can just sort of pretend that someone sent me a secret message and pick out whatever words or syllables interest me.
I didn’t have any particular plan when I did this one, but it’s clear to me that this poem explains how I deal with a lot of social niceties, particularly being asked how I’m doing when I’m not doing well, but I don’t want to say so. Smile, smile, find some sort of lie, and try not to sigh depressively.
Not that I would put on such a charade at my spy coffee shop. I like to think I foster an atmosphere of erudite grumpiness.
Dungeons & Dragons & Depression
Excluding my flower inspiration message, it’s been three weeks since my last post. One might think that I haven’t had anything to say, that nothing noteworthy has happened in my life or crossed my attention …