Serendipity
Blue funk
I don't know if it's the crazy weather here in the East Coast, 80 degrees and sunshiny last week and then suddenly, freezing cold and wet this week, that's making me feel so despondent. I was looking out of the window today and mulling about what I was going to do, what with the rain and the cold and the fact that I wasn't equipped for this kind of weather when I packed my bags to go here.
In the middle of my ruminations, I felt sharp pangs of loneliness begin to coagulate in a ventricle somewhere in my heart. I know that melodrama in this column is a paradox even I loathe to admit, but hell, it is happening, and I'm writing about it now. My column is not just about making people's lives miserable; sometimes it's all about my own misery, too.
But somehow, in a twisted way, I like this. This blue funk that has taken over my entire self akin to a black (or blue?) cloud in the middle of a picnic on a sunny day; is making everything clearer, making me come up with better decisions and new realizations. I haven't felt this in a long time, probably because I've always been in the presence of my family, particularly my husband and kids. Happiness muddles the brain sometimes and makes us alien to the concept of "all-out misery". Or maybe I was just too busy back home what with all the demands of family and work, that I never really had time to feel the blahs - to really be completely alone and on my own.
Sometimes I wonder if all this thinking and reasoning is good for me. I've been doing a lot of that these days. The other day after going to mass in St. Agnes, a church a prayer away from Grand Central, I found myself almost crushed in a crowd of hostile New York commuters who were probably in a hurry to catch their trains, their dinner meetings, their eHarmony dates or shrink appointments. In a sea of strangers, I felt that I was the one most alienated, most alone, probably because they all seemed to know where they were going while I, the "seasonal" New Yorker that I was, had no clue where I was going to go next.
But I knew that each one of us there on that curb had our own crosses to bear; our thoughts in tune with the 'stop and go' blink of the traffic lights. Every one of us there must have been making life-altering decisions as we walked, deciding with one foot and justifying our decisions with the other.
Those who know me are probably thinking that I'm finally going soft, mushy or worse, going crazy. No, I'm not. This blue funk, I know will soon dissipate, what with the end of fickle spring and the beginning of constantly hot, summer days. If this is indeed all about the weather, then there's no reason why it should stay and make philosophers out of writers like me.