I decided to break with a tradition that goes back a good decade this year and actually decided to make New Year’s resolution-ish things. In order to make up for lost time I made three.
1. Be less jaded.
2. Actually make a good-faith effort towards a real dating-esque relationship with a woman.[1]
3. Try to find good things about being in Texas.
By about four o’clock this afternoon I’d completely revised those plans. The new ones:
1. Be more pessimistic.
2. Fuck that noise.
3. Leave Texas. Like, now.
Geds, in case you’re wondering, wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy at all.
My enthusiasm for 2011 lasted all the way until 6:45 PM on the 5th. I got all the way to the 6th (which was the third work day of the year) before the first morning I woke up and seriously contemplated calling in sick due to a complete lack of desire to go to work. By the time I was pulling out of my complex’s parking lot I was convinced there was no way I’d survive the year 2011 and the whole thing was going to be a joyless, painful slog through hell.
I’m better now. And it’s only partially due to internet pictures of baby echidnas.[2]
Anyone who’s read this post probably knows that I have a wonderfully self-reinforcing tendency towards nihilism and fatalism. What that basically means is that if something is going bad, I immediately assumed that it will get as bad as it possibly can. I then follow up that leap to the bottom with the assumption that there will be no way to get back out and, really, why bother trying?
This cycle is triggered at weird times, too. I can respond to genuinely bad stuff, like discovering that I won’t make it home for Christmas, with a shrug and a, “Win some, lose some.” But then I can have an otherwise fairly run of the mill conversation and, well, death spiral. It seems I have a carrying capacity for negative emotion and I only really lose it with the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Several years ago I had one of those days and decided I really, really wanted to just nurse the hell out of the bad mood I was having. So I listened to angry music and stomped around and, y’know, just kinda acted pissed off. Within a couple hours I discovered that the bad mood I’d wanted to really revel in was completely and totally gone. Weirdly, that kind of annoyed me. But it was the first step in a long journey of self realization that was, once again, reinforced today.
Most people have this attitude that if someone is having a bad day the proper response is to tell them, “Just smile, you’ll feel better,” or to remind them that other people have it worse, so quit your bitching. I’ve always been annoyed by people who try to force you to feel better. I think they’re often genuinely trying to help, but the message is, basically, “You’re not happy and that bugs me, so look happy and it will make me feel better.”
I realized today that the whole, “Other people have it worse, so quit your bitching,” is actually a different strain of the same idea. One of my co-workers pulled that on me and I flat-out said, “Yeah, but they’re not me, so why does that matter to me right now?” She was actually taken aback and said, “Well, aren’t you selfish?”
Not really. I was just being honest. I fail to understand how reminding myself that an abstract set of other people are having a worse day than me can help me feel better. Am I supposed to have empathy for this amorphous “other?” Or am I supposed to say, “Hey, I imagine some random person I’ve never met and will never meet and who may or may not exist up in Poughkeepsie doesn’t have a job and his dog just died and he’s a Larry the Cable Guy fan. I guess I feel better now that I’ve thought about him.”
I have learned in my nearly three decades on this planet that when I am having a really bad day and I’m totally losing my shit there really is one best response: take a swan dive to the bottom and wallow in that feeling that life will never, ever get better. Because the saving grace of that weird emotional carrying capacity thing with which I am burdened is that I am incapable of holding any one strong emotion for an extended period. So I use that fatalism/nihilism combination to my advantage and basically overload my system.
It might not be pleasant in the short term for people who would rather not be burdened with the idea that someone around them might be having a rough time of it. It might not be as visibly pleasing as a pasted-on smile or as schadenfreude rich as a good reminder that, “Yeah, you’re having a bad day, but what about those other people out there who are having a really, really bad day?”
But you know what? Fuck it. I had a bad day. I don’t feel bad any more. So in the long term, I’m pretty sure that it’s better for everyone involved. Of course I think it helps that I tend to become rather withdrawn in those instances and I’m able to fairly effectively wall off the part of my brain that handles emotional meltdown from the part of my brain that needs to get stuff done.[3] So I don’t really make myself a burden while I’m working through shit. And, again, it corrects itself literally in a matter of hours.
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Also, speaking of bad days, I learned today that I’m not the only one who thought that the music of 2010 really, really sucked. Album sales were way down while digital sales were only up by 1%, which means that music sales were down overall. The article also takes a shot at illegal music downloads because, y’know, it’s all the damn freeloading internet pirates’ fault.
I have several serious questions:
1. Can we just admit that pop music is a vast wasteland at this point and that maybe, just maybe that has something to do with the fact that people are buying less music?
2. Can we stop shouting, “Oh, noes! Pirates!” as if that’s the answer for everything? The linked article compares Eminem’s Recovery, which had the highest sales with 3.4 million copies last year to The Marshall Mather’s LP, which sold half that many units in the first week it was out back in 2000 before going on to ship 10 million in the year. It’s interesting that they went with that comparison right before bitching about the pirates. Do you know what else was in full swing back in 2000 when The Marshall Mathers LP was selling like hotcakes? Napster.
Now, fewer people had high speed internet a decade ago so it’s kind of an unfair comparison. But lawsuits have successfully pushed a lot of the free internet stuff back, too. Napster is a subscription service. I don’t think Limewire is around any more. Most of the big torrent sites have shut down and the ones that remain, like Pirate Bay, are shadows of what they were a couple years ago. I don’t have any statistics on this and I strongly suspect I won’t find any honest, comprehensive data sets. But I’d be willing to bet that internet piracy isn’t really a pervasive, industry destroying threat, it’s probably less of a threat now than it was in 2007 or 2008, and that the real threat, again, is that the music industry is filled with morons who are putting out utter shite in an attempt to make a quick buck.
3. Can anyone explain to me why album sales are counted separate from internet sales? I figure that it’s partially about the fact that people can just buy one song instead of a whole album on the internet. But I also suspect that it’s because the people who keep track of the music industry, like the people in the industry itself, are morons.
4. Why the hell does the article I linked to tell me about a Pew study, then link to an LA Times article about the study that lowers my comprehension of what I was just told? Are our journalists really so that incompetent and incapable of understanding statistics? And why can’t I get a link to the actual raw data from the study itself, given that no one explained the study in a way that’s even remotely satisfactory?
5. Do I really need to try too hard to get answers to the questions in item number 4?
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[1]You would not believe how hard it is to figure out how to phrase that idea. It was really just one of those half-formed thoughts that I understand because, y’know, I had the thought. The vagaries of life are such that I can’t say that I’ll fall in love between now and next January. But, “Go on a goddamn second date,” seemed a little too…I dunno, checklist-y. So I figured that somewhere in between those two extremes was the idea of actually trying to meet someone I couldn’t immediately reject due to outright craziness and then try not to screw it up for no damn good reason on my end.
[2]Seriously, that picture makes me totally happy every time I see it. That baby echidna is adorabubble.
[3]As long as I’m not, like, really tired. Which I was today, thanks to two nights of relative sleeplessness.
I can't get the image of a snowball fight- with baby echidnas replacing the snowballs- out of my head. I'm considering breaking my "no new year's resolutions" rule so that I can keep motivated to hold a baby echidna fight at some point in 2011. Although really, if the thought of the event itself doesn't motivate me, nothing will. That is all I took from this post, and it was worth it. Thanks.
Posted by: The Everlasting Dave | 01/07/2011 at 04:38 AM
My physical condition makes a huge difference to my bad moods (whether I'm likely to be in one, or fall into one; and how I'll cope with it if I do). Right now, for example, I am weirdly, unaccountably tired[1]. As a result, towards the end of the day yesterday, I got into a Facebook argument with one of my wife's aunts - one whom I rather like, in fact. But it took a massive effort to keep it civil, and not just go off on her for listening to Fox News and Republican politicians instead of actual, y'know, economists.
My point being that your unexpected death spirals may be influenced or even caused be environmental factors, and not just your emotional makeup.
[1] This being Texas, it may very well be something in the air. Or I may be trying to fight off some illness again... dammit.
Posted by: Michael Mock, who may have survived 2010, or might be typing from beyond the grave | 01/07/2011 at 09:20 AM
Um, Geds? That's a baby hedgehog, than which there is nothing on earth cuter. Baby echidnas are little naked critters with snouts and no spines. Kind of cute, in a naked-mole-rat way, but not as cute as a baby hedgehog.
Posted by: bluefrog | 01/07/2011 at 09:51 AM