up and down

I'm in a "bad place" again. Not sure if it's just because studying depresses me or if it's PMS or what. Regarding PMS, I always thought it was a fake syndrome (never having experienced it myself), but it just occured to me that perhaps, if I tried to note on a calendar the times of each month when I feel like an utter piece of garbage, perhaps I would come to a realization that PMS does indeed exist. Interesting.

Often bad moods manifest themselves by me not being able to bear to even consider speaking to people, on a "social" level, that is. This is going on right now, as for the past 2 days I purposefully did not pick up a couple of phone calls from people I haven't spoken to in probably months. (I sometimes do that even if I am not feeling down - simply because speaking to people after a few months silence often involves the need to give up a few hours, and that's hard to do at times.) Just the thought of the obligatory "hi, how are you? Oh I'm great, what have you been up to?" and the even more horrifying chance of hearing a chipper voice on the other line, or stories of people's sucesses... well do I even have to explain my complete inability to deal with it (at times)? This is remarkably well correlated with my down times, because when I am feeling normal, having a long talk with a friend on the phone usually infuses me with energy. And I very often have this extreme hunger for human contact, for communication, a need to just talk up a storm where I actually go through the process of looking through my cell phone book and thinking who could I call next.

And that whole sucess thing.. A recurring topic with me. Today, for instance, I learned just how well this girl that is in one of my classes, is doing academically. It made me break into tears. I am not going to my law school graduation. I have an excuse - I am attending a very big bithday celebration that day, but I made the decision not to go even before the birthday was planned. Everyone asks why I am not going? Because I don't want to feel like a failure. I don't want to sit there for hours, pondering why I didn't take more opportunities in law school, why I didn't study more, why I didn't apply for that editor position, why I didn't make any true friends, why are all these people around me graduating with jobs, etc. That would be depressing. And I can get all depressing without extra help from events such as these.

We finally got our New Yorker magazine, a subscription to which was long ago promised us due to our contribution to NPR. I am very excited about this - I love the feeling of my own "informedness" when I read publications such as the New Yorker. It's a fake feeling, of course, because I am most often not informed at all. But every little bit helps.