Tuesday, February 8, 2011

A Bad Mood is Just a Lie I Tell Myself

Tell it one thing you like:  I really dig the Be Good Tanyas.

Despite how worried I was about our discussion of The Tortilla Curtain in Lit class today, I was able to get out of the way and let the room go where the room needed to go.   I lost sleep over it last night.  I suppose my teaching anxiety has a real and necessary place in the process.  

I'm asking myself what place this mood occupies in the house of my soul.

To wear my hair up with long earrings and a dress.  This might scare my bad mood away.  So would sweatpants.

To dominate a jukebox somewhere lonely until the waitress and the busboy and the cook quit their jobs just to dance for a single shift.  That would be good for a bad mood.

A bad mood gets hungry, eats 4 day's worth of calories while watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore show.  Bad moods like crunchy food, food your teeth have to gnash over.  Food that sounds like ice breaking.

If you let the bad mood convince you that this is what you're actually like, you'll cling to it like a new and sour skin.  This isn't you, girl.  This is just a ghost passing through.  Why hold its hand while it's crossing?

It takes strong Word medicine:  be faithful in the little things.

A bad mood can't stand hands that hold anything good: yarn that weaves into some useful pattern, a child's hand in need of help crossing the ice, the book you've read and read and read because you want to know how to talk about it with others, a hammer working out its shelter nail by nail, dirt crusted fingertips and the hand cupped to the mouth holding the whisper, "I love you."




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