Just like a self-breast exam

Man I sure was in a bad mood yesterday. The first in a long time though. I was just irritated by everything at work; how my coworker clears her throat constantly, people standing by the copy machine while I was printing and moving my papers around...And then later at Local Yokels, someone said something seemingly innocuous that really upset me and I just couldn't shake it. Even jumping up and dancing to the Irish music with the ladies and this one old Irish dude didn't help. Nothing that happened yesterday was even that big a deal, I was being completely and consciously irrational. At least I notice when I'm in that mood these days and try to moderate it. I promised myself I wouldn't drink for the next week (whilst staring myself down in the mirror inside the elevator to my apartment, all serious and intense). Clodagh has the right idea about holding off on drinking for a while.

I woke up this morning from a balloon nightmare (yup, those things filled with helium), feeling only a fraction better. I was gearing up for another bad day on my walk to work this morning, when I noticed myself going through the emotional process on a ridiculously minute scale. "This is where I am at this moment, oh and watch how I deal with that, hmmm, that's interesting, my heart rate changes as I consider that comment that made me so sad, maybe if I walk up this hill faster...oh yeah, that seems to work a little by making it seem like my heart rate is increasing for purely physical reasons, maybe I'll think of someone neutral now, like Pete, oh he said that funny thing last night about asking for nachos with tons of meat and little flavor, lol!" I actually grew excited during my walk about getting over my bad day. I've had LOTS of bad days, and this is the first one where I've ever experienced such a fascination with the whole recovery process. I started off the day feeling like Natalie, with rage and frustration sweeping my body uncontrollably, but now, 2 hours into it, I'm in complete control. I can't believe this is happening. So then I vowed I would seize the day and make my job more interesting, and that working really slowly only makes things worse, even if it seems like it should be better because I'm earning money for nothing. The things I thought made me happy because I was "winning" (for example when someone bought me something I won because I got it for free) were so wrong, so I'm gonna carefully analyze my behavior and correct those bad choices. Sure, I'll be a winner, but not because of some arbitrary winning scale society made up based on more money for less work. I want to win in the life satisfaction scale, which, it turns out, doesn't necessarily even mean winning in the happiness scale. What I went through this morning was fascinating, and reminded me that happiness does not equal satisfaction! Challenge, contrast, interesting problems, and a full engagement in life seem to have greater effect.

I think I probably also need to be more conscious about spending too much time with certain people, because they tend to for whatever reason distract me from the truth. This person I'm talking about from last night has a lot of issues of his own, I should just let him work that shit out and deal with my own and not get too involved or dependent on him or anyone else right now. I have to maintain this freedom. It's interesting and different, and there's plenty of fish in the sea.