Day Fifty-Three: Negativity is Contagious

Try as I might, every morning I wake up and attempt to be optimistic. Granted, it's not the first thought that pops into my head (it's usually, "ugh" when the alarm goes off), but as I'm making my bed I try to pick out the positive points of the day. For example, this morning I was positive about it being Thursday. I was also a little negative that it was ONLY Thursday, but it's a good start. I was positive about breakfast, because I love it. I was positive about it not snowing outside, which is a rare occurence these days in such parts. I was also positive about the idea that tonight is I am not held down by an appointment, and can go home and eat a nice, leisurely dinner as usual and putz around the house, go to the grocery store, or do what I felt like without rushing somewhere else.

But somehow as the morning progressed, I got increasingly negative. The people on the phone made me negative. People I communicated with made me negative. And while some of them definitely had specific reasons to be negative, I still got negative just the same, from a combination of that and just growing generally annoyed by little things. Then, it became only Thursday. It wasn't snowing out, but it was cloudy. My breakfast had worn off and I'd gotten hungry. I was thinking about not being able to spend my weekend as I liked. I started thinking about how the afternoon would probably seem to drag on for days. I wanted six chocolate chip cookies in the middle of my negative spell. And then I mentally smacked myself.

Just because others were negative, it didn't mean I had feel their negativity, too. I tried to ignore the people who are pointlessly negative, and help those who are upset for good reason. And when it comes to myself, I'm trying to be at least 60% positive all the time. Usually, I'm pretty good at being optimistic, but for some reason, I feed off the negativity of others and become negative myself. I usually take the mood of whoever I am around at the time, which is completely unhealthy and one of the reasons I don't want a roommate. I don't want my mood affected by a stranger. But negativity really is quite contagious. If one person is negative and brings down someone else, they could bring down two more people, and in no time everybody's pissed off. It's no way to live. So try to stay positive.

Day Twenty-Four: A Chronicle of Pinching Pennies

After almost a month of writing, I had an epiphany today. In the midst of all this ridiculous apartment-hunting, budgeting, and adding the numbers over and over, I had the thought that approaching my new life and the challenges that come with it might make a decent blog. I could write about starting out; about saving, calling the cable company, cooking for myself, cleaning my bathrooms, and building Ikea furniture. Okay, so it sounds about as exciting as morning church services on TV. But who knows? It might make for some fun and interesting reading at my own expense. Consider the possibilities.

Hopefully, I've been a little persuasive so far. If not, this may change some minds. On Sunday, as I previously mentioned, I was in an absolutely terrible mood. The storms of female times hung over my head and rained on anyone I tried to involve in conversation. Everyone who opened their mouth in my general direction was talking entirely too much. Needless to say, I was about as warm and inviting as a gila monster. I was definitely not in the mood to trudge out in the rain and look at an apartment. And then, my boyfriend called and I become an absolute disgrace. Cue the ominous music.

Bless his soul, he's nothing if not honest with me. After hearing my girlish groaning and childish stomping that I was absolutely not going to burden myself with looking at a potential place to live because I was too stressed out, he said something to the effect of, "...about what? Go. Go see it. You need to go see it, and you're as ready as you're going to be to start looking. Just go look at it." That's all it took. The flood gates opened, and I was a blubbering, incomprehensible mess. He was at a complete loss for words. My mom got annoyed at him for not supporting me, and annoyed at me that I was going out anyway. In ten minutes, I managed to send everyone in my life into a tizzy. Ah, the power of female ways. This was not a good way to start a new leg of my life.

So although I've leveled out since then and I don't feel nearly as stressed out, I'm still on a pretty rocky road with this apartment-hunting mess. I might make this a full-time writing topic if it's interesting enough, or I might not. But it's definitely a possibility.

Day Sixteen: Do We Make Ourselves Miserable?

I think my life is pretty common in that, as the saying goes, "when it rains, it pours." When one thing goes wrong, at least one other major tragedy puts more than a hiccup in my day, thus making the first ripple in the wave of unpleasantry harder to overcome. From what I can tell, most people have the same mark on their own lives. If a car breaks down, the paycheck that would pay for it is lost. If a family member becomes ill, a family heirloom will get lost somewhere in the house, never to be found. And usually, both experiences magnify each other, making the other seem more important and tragic. Since the situation is so difficult, is life trying to tell us something by sending us sometimes an almost overwhelming plethora of horrible?

I'm not entirely sure if I'm a believer in the idea that there are "tests" in life that are meant to make us stronger and help us better understand ourselves and what is most important to us, but I still believe there has got to be something to this strange little phenomenon of life. Do the planets align just right to make our lives fall apart little bits at a time every once in awhile? I don't know of anyone (who hasn't had a real, major tragedy occur in their lives, like a child dying or a house burn down) who has steadily had a regular pattern of bad happening to them over a course of time. It always comes in clusters of multiple annoyances and tragedies that put a real cramp in a day, week, or even month. But the possibility also exists that such things don't happen in multiples, and that people are just more mentally weak when they're emotionally distraught, so other, smaller problems that they would otherwise be able to handle seem mountainous. Excuse me, but I need to get philosophical for a moment.

How much of our tragedy to we create? If there is nothing to fear but fear itself, is there nothing to feel sorrowful about than sorrow itself? If someone close to a person dies, they feel sorrow because they are gone, but they also have the potential to feel happiness because they are no longer suffering, or because they've possibly just left to experience another plane of existence that might be pretty damn cool. So who knows, they might actually be the lucky ones. Although this is a pretty far-fetched reality, it is possible. We are capable of feeling anyway we make ourselves feel. If we choose to embrace tragedy and remind ourselves of the negative aspects of a situation, are we causing our own pain?

Partially, I think my own theory could very well be a load of crap. While it's possible to try to change the way we feel about certain situations, we can't help our subconscious from being truly upset about something that makes us unhappy. But it is an interesting thing to think about. I know more than once, I have been what seemed like unbearably unhappy about something, and then suddenly I physically could not feel sorrow anymore, so I stopped, immediately. I literally woke up, and wasn't sad or angry about my situation anymore. So either that was my body's way of telling my brain to stop going haywire because my sadness would start physically affecting my health soon, or I subconsciously decided I didn't want to deal with waking up sad anymore. I don't think I've lived enough to know whether or not this is true, but it definitely is worth pondering. Do you think you make yourself sad?

Day Seven: Resolve to Be Better

I've actually been rethinking this whole New Year's Resolution business. Having unknowingly and unintentionally made some myself, I can't help but think about the motivation that surrounds them. People choose to do the things they need help doing, things they usually hold themselves back from doing otherwise.  Even if they don't realize it, New Year's Resolvers need that push that comes with a clean slate. For some It wipes away the failure of breaking the same resolution last year. For others, it might just be a chance to learn something new about themselves, to push themselves to the limit and see how far they can go. So many people have no idea what they're capable of, mostly because they're too lazy or cowardly to try. I'm extremely guilty of that. While it might just appear that people make New Year's Resolutions because they like the fresh start of a new year, or why else would people resolve so strongly, and work so hard to change something about themselves? It makes it seem like we're a little more permitted to forget the bad things about the past, but keep them in the distance to motivate us for the next year.

I think now I might understand a little more about New Year's Resolutions and what they mean. They aren't neccessarily things we aren't motivated enough to do the rest of the year, but things we truly need courage to accomplish. Maybe they aren't so bad after all. After all, it seems as though no one choose to accomplish small tasks at the start of a new year -- those are everyday things. Instead, we take this opportunity and the unexplained courage that comes with it, and set out to complete certain tasks in our lives by trying harder, being better, and taking more chances. I won't personally say what I plan to work on this year, but I've already stumbled. But I am determined not to fail. For some people, like myself, there is much more at stake that just another failure -- there's the possibility to lose things we don't want to live without.

So make your New Year's Resolutions with optimism and hope, and may you work as hard as you can for as long as your courage holds out. Happy New Year.