Mood Swings

But the really rough part came in the evening. I drove out to look for some shoes - new sneakers and cleats. I'd failed to find some at some stores in Sunnyvale, so this time I drove to south San Jose. And boy, is it ever a depressing place: All strip malls, no hills, very little greenery, and endless traffic. To top it off, although I found the sneaker I wanted, I couldn't find it in my size. I found a few other shoes in my size, but none of them were quite what I wanted. In particular, the insole seemed woefully inadequate for jogging purposes. And I had no luck at all looking for cleats.

While driving on this errand, I slowly became extremely depressed about my housing situation. I've been trying to keep my chin up by telling myself that there's surely an apartment out there for me which will make me happy. I just need to look. I may pay a little more, but my home is so important to me - I really need a place I can call and feel like it is home - that it would surely be worth it.

I even made a breakthrough the other day when I realized that it's not just the distance that makes people never come to visit, it's that I rarely invite them, and I feel uncomfortable inviting them because if we decide we want to go out for dinner or to hang out somewhere, I haven't become familiar enough with my locale to know of good places to go. Because I do all of my hanging out on the peninsula. I've felt a little self-conscious that I keep thinking or feeling that moving to the peninsula will solve all my problems, because of course, it probably won't solve all my problems. But now I feel I have a nailed-down reason why moving up there will be good, aside from the fact that it will save me some driving time.

But, earlier this week I drove by a couple of addresses of apartments that I got out of the classifieds, and found them to be places that I definitely don't want to live. Moreover, while talking to Subrata about the whole housing thing last night, I admitted that I'm not exactly sure what I do want in a new apartment. Although I'm pretty sure that a decently-sized place near downtown Palo Alto would do the trick. But of course, that would be pretty much the most expensive option I could go for.

So I was driving around this depressing part of San Jose on a fruitless search, dreading going back to my apartment which I'm hating, feeling especially glum about the prospects of finding a new apartment. And, ironically, having been invited to a second party this weekend didn't make me feel better, because it will cut in to time I can spend driving around looking for places with "For Rent" signs! (I will go to the party, of course. But still.)

So I finally came home and did in fact lie down and cry about it for a little while. And then, the strangest thing happened.

I picked up Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, which I was about two-thirds done with, went into the living room, lay on my futon/couch and pulled a blanket over me, turned on tonight's episode of Mystery! (a remarkably good piece starring Diana Rigg as an amateur sleuth in 1920s England), and finished the book while Newton curled up on the blanket alongside my leg. And by the time all that was over, I was feeling considerably more calm and content.

There's got to be a moral to this story somewhere. Maybe it's that sitting down and reading an enjoyable book with the TV on in the background is a good thing. I wasn't trying "to get through" something on my backlog of tapes, I wasn't reading a book I felt I "ought" to be reading, I wasn't working on one of my projects on the computer. I just set everything aside for a few hours.

And perhaps I need to do that for many more hours. Maybe I'm pushing myself too hard.