Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

So, I've been going through something of a midlife crisis lately. If you spend any time in the Music forum, or in one of the guilds composed largely of MF regs, this is old news. It's been a very public midlife crisis. Then again, I've always had a bad tendency to reveal a little too much intimate detail about my life. It gets me in trouble a lot... especially with women. xp

I also tend to get overly dramatic about things, and amplify minor problems into enormous soul-crushing dilemmas. That's pretty much what happened, and the result was one of those self-pitying states of depression that are entirely uncalled for and unnecessary. When I first decided to write a new journal entry a couple days ago, it was going to be called "I Want To Vanish" after one of Elvis Costello's least cheery numbers (the song concludes with the lines, "I want to vanish/This is my last request/I've given you the awful truth/Now give me my rest" wink , and I wrote an opening paragraph about having a premonition of ending up alone and unloved. It was dire stuff, and would have been infuriating for any random person browsing through Gaia journals to slog through. Maybe I should have gone ahead and posted it anyway for exactly that reason.

But anyway: I woke up this morning feeling much better than I have in a long while, and I'm not entirely sure why. For whatever reason, I realized everything I was agonizing about wasn't that serious of a problem after all. And I also realized I've been taking everything way too seriously lately. Life is inherently absurd, and instead of moping and sinking deeper into self-inflicted misery and gloom, it's better to find the humor in it. I'd rather laugh about my mistakes and move on from them than brood over them the way I have in the past.

And I'd also rather laugh about things here on Gaia. All too often, I've found myself reacting to the overload of idiocy and spam in the MF with bitterness and negativity-- or, worse yet, extreme rationality, and there's no way to get trolls and spammers to listen to reason. So, I've resolved I'm going to approach the place with a sense of humor and respond to it from that perspective, instead of being so ******** serious all the time. This means you're all going to have to suffer through more of my jokes now. You've been duly warned. xp

Finally, I plan to keep this journal updated a little more than once a month. There's an enormous piece on Persepolis I planned to post after I first saw the film, but never got around to finishing, so it's next on the agenda. I'm a horrible procrastinator, but if I put my mind to it I can get this thing back on track.