Roller Coaster
As I noted in my dreams section, I had the roller coaster dream again a couple of nights ago. I'm sure there are all kinds of Freudian interpretations (many of which I'm aware of, via my undergraduate studies in Psychology, but which I won't go into here), but I'm wondering if there are any implications in terms of the clichéd concept of an "emotional roller coaster" mental state.
Right now, for instance. I met a group of friends for Vietnamese food for dinner (a big bowl of phò always hits the spot, not to mention the strange unseasonal Christmas music they were playing helped reinforce my snowstorm sensations from yesterday), and we hung out at my new place and talked for a while after dinner, and, since then, I've been an emotional mess. What's worse, the messy part is that I don't know whether I'm depressed or hyper — I'm just really anxious, and both depression and happiness can go so full circle that they kind of meet on the other side.
You can be so happy that you can't sit still. You can be so depressed that you're not satisfied doing anything. What does it mean when you're so anxious you can't stand it, but you don't know which of the emotions (or both) caused it?
Incidentally, besides work anxiety — which the last 2 weeks have been totally fraught with — I've had some inner grumblings over a conversation I had with my mom about a week ago:
"Matt, you need to find a girlfriend. You need to start going to church. You need to make some friends outside of work."
Her apology about the friends comment a few days later didn't help all that much. (I had told her it wasn't fair of her to judge my friends, few of whom she knows, a lot of whom I don't work with, anyway, and of the ones I do, most are so far in another department that I might as well not work with them; not to mention I knew most of the co-worker friends in college before we happened to work together anyway).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but regarding a girlfriend, 1) When I'm happy being single for a while, let me enjoy it, and 2) if I am concerned about meeting someone, I'm stressed enough on my own and don't need any help worrying.
Also, as one of my best buddies related to me regarding when he had the same talk with his parents: "Mom, do you want me to marry a gold-digger?" "No." "Do you want me to settle for someone pretty inferior whom everyone else has rejected too?" "No." "Okay, then. Me neither. So cut me some slack here while I find the right girl, not just a girl."
Lastly, regarding church, it's finally been long enough for me to work through some lingering church-oriented career issues from several years back, so that the actual concept of God no longer includes a huge pang of job stress anxiety or a pang of unlocalized paranoia (kind of like when you realize, after some sort of traumatic experience, "Wait a minute, policemen are the good guys. Without them I'd be dead."). The idea of attending church as a "mere mortal" again (instead of a staff member) is just recently resuming its appeal, and any external pressures of it being an obligation, rather than a privilege, kind of blow the whole deal for me.
Anyway, enough about me. How are you?
Right now, for instance. I met a group of friends for Vietnamese food for dinner (a big bowl of phò always hits the spot, not to mention the strange unseasonal Christmas music they were playing helped reinforce my snowstorm sensations from yesterday), and we hung out at my new place and talked for a while after dinner, and, since then, I've been an emotional mess. What's worse, the messy part is that I don't know whether I'm depressed or hyper — I'm just really anxious, and both depression and happiness can go so full circle that they kind of meet on the other side.
You can be so happy that you can't sit still. You can be so depressed that you're not satisfied doing anything. What does it mean when you're so anxious you can't stand it, but you don't know which of the emotions (or both) caused it?
Incidentally, besides work anxiety — which the last 2 weeks have been totally fraught with — I've had some inner grumblings over a conversation I had with my mom about a week ago:
"Matt, you need to find a girlfriend. You need to start going to church. You need to make some friends outside of work."
Her apology about the friends comment a few days later didn't help all that much. (I had told her it wasn't fair of her to judge my friends, few of whom she knows, a lot of whom I don't work with, anyway, and of the ones I do, most are so far in another department that I might as well not work with them; not to mention I knew most of the co-worker friends in college before we happened to work together anyway).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but regarding a girlfriend, 1) When I'm happy being single for a while, let me enjoy it, and 2) if I am concerned about meeting someone, I'm stressed enough on my own and don't need any help worrying.
Also, as one of my best buddies related to me regarding when he had the same talk with his parents: "Mom, do you want me to marry a gold-digger?" "No." "Do you want me to settle for someone pretty inferior whom everyone else has rejected too?" "No." "Okay, then. Me neither. So cut me some slack here while I find the right girl, not just a girl."
Lastly, regarding church, it's finally been long enough for me to work through some lingering church-oriented career issues from several years back, so that the actual concept of God no longer includes a huge pang of job stress anxiety or a pang of unlocalized paranoia (kind of like when you realize, after some sort of traumatic experience, "Wait a minute, policemen are the good guys. Without them I'd be dead."). The idea of attending church as a "mere mortal" again (instead of a staff member) is just recently resuming its appeal, and any external pressures of it being an obligation, rather than a privilege, kind of blow the whole deal for me.
Anyway, enough about me. How are you?