February 3, 2008
Sunday

 

Above is a scan of the mood watch scale I invented to use sometimes — well, at times like this, when tracking my mood might be useful — in my food journal, that notebook I use (also sometimes) to track the algebra of nutrition (fat grams, fiber grams, energy quality, etc.) that determine the value in Weight Watchers points of any meal or snack I consume. (If you don’t know what “Weight Watchers points” are, how they are determined, how many you can have,  and how many you have left for today, you are probably better off.) At the far positive end, “Dwelling in Possibility,” I’m so sunny that I am probably irritating to others. Any position that side of Zero is good. I usually experience the lower values on the plus side when I am feeling a temporary sadness brought on by external sad events (the death of a famous person I liked, such as the Princess of Wales, the cancelling of a favorite television series, the final event in an activity I enjoyed). I’m sad or subdued for a while, but I know that such times are part of life. For normal life I like to stay somewhere between +3 and +5.

In times of real personal difficulty or a sad external event that touches me more intimately (such as the Events of October 2, 2006 in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania) I cross the line and begin sliding into the Slough of Despond until I am certain that I don’t know the meaning of life and I feel overwhelmed by the futility of existence. (In the words of Tony Soprano, “You watch a movie, you lift some weights, you go to Italy. It’s all just a series of distractions until you die.”) -1 is not necessarily a bad place to be. Nor is it an inappropriate response to troubling events. I haven’t been to -7 and beyond in a very long time. The present difficulty has me mired between -3 and -5.

I spent most of today at -4. The sky lightened some, and I even went out shopping, treating myself to some fairly expensive body wash and body lotion in Clinique’s Happy To Be. I like the perky orange package it comes in, and the fragrance takes me back to 2005 and the days when I began to wear it, also as a means of lifting myself out of a depression. (“This particular variety is being discontinued soon,” said the clerk. Not something I really wanted to hear today.) Outside Circuit City I watched two big plasma screen TVs being loaded into SUVs. “Should we save all the boxes and things, in case it doesn’t work?” a woman was asking the young men who were doing the loading. It was late in the afternoon, and the Big Game kickoff was only hours away. Those things are not exactly plug ‘n’ play, you know.

And how about them Giants? In my hierarchy of favorite sports, football is a distant third after baseball and basketball. But I’ve developed an affection for the Giants, since Ron and Ernie Accorsi, the team’s recently retired general manager, grew up together and remain good friends. I watched a little of the first quarter, got irritated with Ron when he disparaged the artistic merit of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and thus sulked for the third quarter, but then came back and saw the spectacular finish.

I’m still less than zero on the mood watch scale, but the Giants won, I have a clear strategy for working on a  manuscript this week, there are at least two new episodes of Friday Night Lights left, and only twenty-six days left in February.

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