Dewdrops of the mind

Current mood: Introspective
Current music: The sound of silence. No, not the Simon & Garfunkel song - the actual sound of silence.

Where has July gone? Where has August gone? Where, in fact, has the whole ruddy summer evaporated to? It is now September and the world is suddenly teeming with schoolchildren. Aaaagh!

I know, I know, I haven't posted in such a terribly long time that you're probably convinced that I'm dead, or that I no longer have Internet access (which is worse, I wonder?). I've been SO busy at work. And in the free time I did have, I've been:

- Performing at the opening of an international youth choir competition - my choir wasn't actually part of the competition, but it was fun. The other choirs were amazing! Would've been a tough contest if we'd been in it.

- Going on a choir tour to Beijing - a terribly short trip, most of it spent rehearsing the Fauré Requiem, but I did do a bit of sightseeing. Very interesting place, but awfully big - worth revisiting, I think!

- Attending a Coldplay gig - woohoo! Great to see the guys on tour. Unfortunately, the stage was so far away that it looked like a postage stamp, and Chris Martin had to be observed through binoculars as though he were an endangered species of bird.

- Watching 'The Phantom of the Opera' musical, also on tour - fantastic stuff, though the chandelier drop was still slower than I'd like. I'll have to see the Australian version for the thrills and spills.

I've also been involved in a couple of ridiculously short relationships - hardly worth mentioning, since it's really my business and not anyone else's - but they got me thinking. The result? A little essay, which I shall include below.

PS My blog has now had over 1,000 hits! I think a celebration is in order...

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DEWDROPS

Note to the reader: The writer of these lines is blessed with the gifts of dramatic exaggeration, disarming earnestness and idle sarcasm. It is up to the reader to discern which of these qualities has the upper hand in the various passages of this essay.

My folks constantly admonish me for not getting up in the mornings when the alarm goes off. Granted, I do often try to grab those last vital minutes of sleep - hardly surprising, considering my constant state of sleep deprivation. But other times, I lie awake and motionless, to calmly collect the dewdrops of my thoughts before they evaporate in the morning sunshine. Below is a little pool of dew from the dawn of my mind.

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Thoughts on the Nature of Lovesickness

The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'lovesick' simply as 'languishing for or with love'. This gives the impression that lovesickness is merely a psychological malaise, composed primarily of passion, obsession, depression, and longing, in varying degrees. However, it fails to mention the physical symptoms, which include involuntary muscular spasms ('shivering', to the layman), nausea, and headaches induced by dehydration (which, in turn, is caused by excessive lachrymation). In extreme cases, acute paranoia, hysteria, delirium, and suicidal tendencies may also be observed. The severity of this problem cannot be underestimated and, indeed, usually goes unreported. The direct impact this ailment has on businesses, particularly on workplace productivity, is substantial but is almost never documented. I shall consider writing to the British Medical Journal and suggest that a proper study be conducted. Firstly, lovesickness needs to be classified as a proper illness. Then, appropriate guidelines on its diagnosis and treatment (possibly involving the patient's object of desire - or failing that, Valium) must be established. Finally, I would recommend an epidemiological study of the extent of the problem and its subsequent impact on the economy (for example, lovesick women are probably vital in boosting the chocolate and ice cream industries). If I get the privilege of conducting this research, I shall probably win the Nobel Prize.

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The Dark Side

Words dreamt up in the midnight of the soul (usually, anywhere between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., depending on the soul) should never be read in daylight. The sunlight mocks their melodrama, and the shadows of fear that they cast shy away from the illumination. So, gentle reader, please look out of the window and make sure the sun is down before proceeding. Or at least draw the blinds or something.

All things considered, nothing truly bad has happened to me (as yet... Touch wood). I've had a pretty easy life, really. I've never been in a war or a terrorist attack; I've never been kidnapped; I've never even been mugged. I am by no means rich, but I've certainly never starved out of lack of capital. I've had just one major health scare (which resulted in a minor operation and turned out to be nothing, albeit a very expensive nothing) and the only accident I've had resulted in a couple of stitches on my fingers (awfully painful, mind, so I don't recommend it). Why, then, do the nights seem so black, the road so tortuous, the pain so real? I can only conclude that the night is only as dark as whatever darkness you put there.

Basically, it's psychological. In fact it probably all boils down to optimism/pessimism, and general attitudes towards life. Let's take an example from A A Milne's characters. Winnie-the-Pooh - a laid back kind of bear, blessed with very little brain (lucky thing) - will, when encountering a fine day, probably admire it, write a little poem about it, go for a stroll in it, and idle it away with his friend Piglet. Tigger, who's full of vim and zip and other three-letter words of an energetic nature, would make use of the fine day to go adventuring with the equally audacious Roo. (Quite frankly, Tigger and Roo would go adventuring whatever the weather.)

Eeyore, on the other hand, will certainly acknowledge that although it's a fine day now, you really ought to bring an umbrella when you go out because, just you wait and see, it's going to rain this afternoon.

Having a mix of mainly the Eeyore and Pooh personalities, with occasional Tiggerishness or even Owlishness (as far as a tendency towards bombastry and using ridiculously sesquipedalian words goes), this tends to steer my world view towards pessimism and apathy. Thus, I am quite perplexed as to how anyone acquires an optimistic point of view without being born and bred into it.

In any case, being an idealistic and hopeful pessimist puts me in a rather strange position in this world - which is why, more often than not, I prefer to stay out of it. Escapism is something I'm developing a talent for (without the aid of computer games, thank goodness), hence the slightly surreal nature of my writing.

I was trying to explain about the dark side before I got sidetracked into a discussion on optimism and pessimism. Right.

The thing is, the side I project to others is generally all 'sweetness and light', as the incomparable Sir P G Wodehouse often said. This is my take-it-easy Pooh, my bouncy Tigger, my delightfully pompous Owl. Let's go out, let's have fun, let's idle away the time and chat in a café somewhere. Darkness? What darkness? Hah!

But the sun has to set sometimes.

I'm one of those people whose moods are somewhat magnified compared to everyone else's. If you averaged out my highs and lows you'd probably find a nice flat line, but zoom in a bit closer and you'll see a mood line as jagged as a great white shark's dentures. When I'm high, I can touch the sky, but when I'm low, who knows? 'Hang-gliding over the pits of hell' (to paraphrase a line by Terry Pratchett) might be a good general description. Dark fantasies, morbid obsessions, bad dreams - all the demons of self-torment lie in wait... Waiting for the trigger.

So all the pain, anger, and frustration are sitting on one end of the see-saw, carefully concealed in the garden shed, while the other end is where the hyperactive happy bunny is busy bouncing up and down in the sun. You can't glance at the happy bunny and swiftly conclude that that's all I am. You can't poke about in the garden shed and declare I'm nothing but a depressive. You've got to look at the light side and the dark side, because I am both, and I jolly well intend to continue doing so. Without the dark side, I wouldn't be able to introspect and write essays like this, and without the light side - well, I'd be nothing but a nutcase. Obviously it would be ideal if there were lots of light days and very few dark nights, but one would only get that if one lived in the Arctic or the Antarctic every summer. I can't pick and choose my personality. Light and dark, yin and yang - I have it all, so it's simply a question of balance.

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Watching Me, Watching Me

I've been giving the impression that I have two sides to my personality. Actually, I tell a lie - there's at least one more. Say hello to my practical, intellectual, scientific, unemotional thinking side, who keeps an eye on things. If I'm feeling angry there's always a little inner voice saying how ridiculous it is for me to be perturbed by such a trivial matter; if I'm upset, the voice points out that crying does not, in fact, achieve anything. If I'm toying with unhealthy ideas, such as jumping off a 20-storey building, or playing with razorblades, the thinker calculates, with scientific exactitude, the time it takes to hit the ground (3.35 seconds, which really isn't long enough to change your mind on the way down, even with a parachute on your back), and reminds me that I don't like sharp objects and despise mere paper cuts. So yes, there is a little control room upstairs that prevents me from doing anything stupid. That's all well and good, isn't it? The world might be a better place if everyone had one...

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The human mind is a strange and interesting thing - so fickle, so obstinate, so simple, so complex. Always shifting, changing, and growing. It would be fascinating to peek, first-hand, into other people's thoughts. This being quite impossible, we settle for the media of language, music, and art. These, then, are the dewdrops of our minds.