2001-03-28 - 4:19 p.m.

On the internal soundtrack: "Two of Us", Beatles. This is one of the default songs. In fact, "Let It Be", "Abbey Road" and the Smiths' "Louder Than Bombs" seem to be full of default songs.

Yeah, so, I was tired of the BRIGHT WHITE! letters on the ROYAL BLUE! background and decided to use Netscape Composer to cheat and get the HTML code to reset the colors and font. I am too lazy to find out how to change the buttons, though.

Font is a pain. I can either use Times New Roman or Arial. Beyond that it interferes with readability. I found something similar to Times New Roman but not exactly that. I'm not totally happy with it but barring complaints, it'll do for now.

If anyone finds the format overly hard on their eyes or finds that the something's gone haywire, e-mail me and I'll either fix it or revert back to the old version.

Oh dear. It looks on my stats as though someone may have been in the process of reading through multiple entries when the colors suddenly changed on them. That must be a little freaky.

Speaking of freaky, I was ecstatic to discover that Michelle has found her earrings, with a little help from St. Anthony. They were of priceless sentimental value to her and she was quite distraught at having lost them. I was worrying about it.

The rhyme she refers to is one of those Catholic things. I no longer consider myself Catholic (or even religious), but I was raised that way so I know some of the in-jokes. Reading her entry, a memory tickled the back of my mind. I remembered my mother telling me that her mother used to use a rhyme to find things. I was making myself crazy for a while trying to remember it, but I finally remembered enough of it to search and find it online:

"Tony, Tony, look around! Something's lost and must be found!"

Michelle and I were discussing other sentimental items lost. I haven't been able to find, in any of the expected places, Poindexter's e-mails from the first six months of our relationship. Fortunately I have not yet performed a full search, so there's still hope.

This led to the following irreverent conversation with Poindexter over IM:

E: That Tony poem is going to help me find the printouts of your early e-mails, dammit.
P: Damn well better.
E: Tony Tony look around! Something's lost and must be found!
P: Hi Evelynne. This is Tony. I don't even know where those e-mails are.
E: LOL
E: You're terrible.
P: Yes.
E: WELL FIND THEM, TONY!
P: You won't find them if you don't look.

Clearly "St. Anthony" subscribes to the notion that "God helps those who help themselves."

Due to the great mood I've been in lately (probably due partly to the fact that I'm doing fun stuff at work), I think I'm going to have to start with happiness today and get to love later.

Woooo! Latest Google search: attractive with glasses girls

There are men out there who think glasses are SEXY! It is a FETISH! Clearly I need to meet some of these people to get over that last hurdle where my glasses are concerned. There are people who like their porn stars to wear glasses!

I'm amazed! Although I really shouldn't be. There's a fetish for everything. There's probably a fetish for toe jam.

I'm happy anyway.

Last night I got home and did my requisite bulb-checking and saw a wondrous sight.

Snow glories.

Three of 'em.

I don't know when they came up! They're barely above the ground, but they've already got flowers starting to come out! I think I didn't see 'em because their leaves are almost brownish, and they blend in well with the wacky bark stuff (that is, mulch, for you people who insist on technical terms).

I am SO EXCITED! I didn't kill them after all!

Then I got inside, and found that my mug and baby-doll t-shirt from gnomeloaf.com and my long-sleeved WhitneyGirlst-shirt had arrived!

And they fit!

To borrow (and paraphrase?) a phrase from Whitney, happy joyous rapture!

I had a fit of impulse buying last week, plus I needed a 15-ounce mug and some more t-shirts. So today I am wearing my WhitneyGirls shirt and drinking tea out of my Gnomeloaf mug. I am a walking advertisement for the Fitzgerald sisters.

Some other things that made me happy in the last day or so:

Waking up at 7:30, and realizing I had half an hour left to sleep

The fact that the sun was shining so brightly

The goofy mood I was in after waking up, laughing to myself remembering funny things about Poindexter while getting ready for work

My pop-tart

Driving the VW to work

Complimentary ("mutual admiration society"), thought-provoking, and entertaining e-mails from Kevin

Arguing with Poindexter over IM about whether oatmeal can be eaten at 11am (I say yes; he has weird rules about when he eats what)

The boss made fresh decaf coffee (we don't get decaf every day and I hate making it)

I had some tears-in-eyes laughing fits over this and the second paragraph of this.

When I got home, Poindexter and I sat and chatted and gossiped for close to an hour

I was able to help a friend (not Michelle :) find something she'd lost

When you look at the mundaneness, banality, and common-ness of some of the items on the list, it seems kind of nutty that these things would make me "happy". But they do.

Contrast this, then, to what happens when someone's body chemistry doesn't let them be happy. He sees the same things, appreciates their beauty, but he's not getting the joy out of it that I would.

Why? What's the difference between him and me?

Clearly, it's partly chemical. I've been blessed with what's probably an overabundance of serotonin.

On the other hand, how much of my wonderful body chemistry is due to a deliberate effort on my part to focus on the positive?

I do this, you know. I consciously search for things to enjoy. I try very hard not to take ANYTHING for granted. It's easy, really, if you try to consider things from a very basic perspective -- the mere EXISTENCE of ANYTHING is exciting! It all started as a bunch of rocks hurtling through space! And what's space? Where does it end? Where'd it come from? It's AMAZING! If you believe it was created by God, that's miraculous, too -- taking dirt and nothingness and making light and life.

One thing I've noticed in the readings of people suffering from depression is that their worldview is consistently negative. The "glass half empty" analogy is trite, but it's ridiculously true.

The thing that's the most incredible to me is that there are people who have noticed the same things that I have, and yet they do not get a positive charge out of it. They see it all as meaningless, pointless, a waste of time, since we're all going to die anyway.

But what about the interim? It's filled with possibilities! And the only thing that matters in the end is whether YOU had a good time!

So I wonder: Did the negativity cause the depression, or did the depression cause the negativity? Obviously they feed on each other, but how much can consciously directing your thoughts counteract the chemistry?

There have been studies done that show that if you act happy and smile a lot (even if you don't feel this way and think the whole thing's stupid), you will start to feel happy.

I read one of Bear's journal entries recently that illustrates how important perspective can be, even in ordinary, everyday situations. She gets focused on one thing she perceives as negative, and it overwhelms the rest -- everything else becomes peripheral -- until she gets home and her HoneyLove says, hey, look at the periphery.

In Richard O'Connor's book, Undoing Depression, he talks a lot about learning to restructure the way you think. Beyond medication and psychotherapy, he believes that people need to change their mental habits. You can read the introductory chapter to the book on his website -- it's excellent. He also has suggestions on how to "live well" that are covered in far more depth in the book. In particular, check out the stuff at the bottom under "I'm spinning my wheels".

The thing that amazed me while reading the book was that I had nearly none of the destructive thought patterns. Things like pinning your happiness on a particular event or person, blaming yourself for failures that are actually the result of forces beyond your control, things of that nature -- I never do those things. What I can't remember is whether I've always thought that way or if I learned how.

Is it really possible to learn how? I want it to be. I don't want anyone to be unhappy.

It's all so very complicated.

One final musing of the day: How much of who I am -- happy, introspective, rational, rarely angry, careful about making decisions -- is by choice, and how much is set in my genes? It makes me crazy. I know that there are things I'm consciously aware of, things I've chosen to do to move me away from one end of a character-trait spectrum toward the other. But how is my movement on the spectrum limited by genetics? At some point, headed toward one end or the other, I'm going to hit a brick wall.

Ugh. Too many deep thoughts today.

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