(from October 18, 2005)
Back to my old self again! Thank you, Sherah, Rai, and Angellica, for cheering me up when I needed it the most!
I should know by now that it's cyclical, that it won't last, these horrible feelings of nihilism. It's just so easy to get caught up in the undertow! It's amazing how our body chemistry dictates how we feel, sometimes in the absence of any apparent stimulus. For a while now I believe I've had Season Affective Disorder, which, for those who don't know, is a condition in which sunlight plays a large role in mood regulation. The more sun I get, the happier I feel, and vice versa. This might not be surprising, considering I'm originally from Hawai'i, where absorbing solar radiation is a matter of course.
Here's something I just recalled: When I first moved to California, I would get shocked by nearly all contact with conductive metal, if I weren't careful to take precautions. The most frequent jolts came from metal doorknobs, which turned out to be problematic. I was often found standing outside a building, working up the nerve to grasp hold of the handle, knowing I'd get a shock. Call me Pavlov's Wolf.
While this is a common occurrence, and not at all the stuff of Fortean dreams, I observed that I seemed to be afflicted with this phenomenon more often than my friends did, even if I followed them through a door, and they hadn't been shocked by the handle or knob. It became ridiculous, and the subject of hilarity among my close peers. (As an aside, Chris Hudak (of whom more will be written later) once wrote his own lyrics to a favorite song of the time, "88 Lines About 44 Women". His lyrics were all comments upon friends and acquaintances of his. It was a great piece, and neatly skewered us all. My stanza went like this: "Littlemouse was pure conductor, static shocks off every knob". That's how prevalent my outraged yelps were -- they had become a part of my personality. (Littlemouse? I hear you asking? Later, little ones, later.)
My friend BJ West once attempted to understand what was going on with me and came up with this hypothesis: Born and raised in Hawai'i, I was used to having my body act as a conduit for sunshine. Sunlight would enter my body through the top of my head (is that why my hair's so thick, because it's like electrical wiring?), channel itself down through my corpus, and enter the earth through my feet, thus grounding me. Something about the conductivity of the water particles in the air (Hawai'i is very humid) facilitated this process, not to mention the general and remarked-upon holistic nature of living in the Gathering Place.
When I moved to California, BJ reasoned, that direct link with the sun was broken, such that sunlight now enters my body like usual, but does not now discharge through my feet. I have become a walking broken circuit, discharging my pent-up energy at the merest touch of the right kind of metal.
What do you think? Does anyone else have any other ideas on why this happens to me? I'd like to stop looking like a big puffball, please.
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It's all right
-- "Here Comes the Sun", the Beatles