Up Periscope

So since I got rejected from uni I guess I fell into a bit of a funk.  Except that funk sounds a bit too glamorous.  Funk sounds like I grew a massive afro with a door in it and started wearing tie-dyed purple bell-bottoms, listening to a flute along with some slap-bass in the background while simultaneously making love to voluptuous black women.  I don’t mean that kind of funk.    

I said I mellowed out but I didn’t really. I just stopped panicking, but I was already in a funk to begin with, so there was no sudden miraculous recovery.  I was just waiting for my attitude to improve about stuff before I could act constructively.  It sounds stupid to wait for something like that – you make it happen, right?  I don’t know.  I don’t have bipolar, but I reckon everyone has seasonal moods in the same vein, which aren’t necessarily attached to circumstances – at least not caused by them anyway.  And people seem to psychically know when I’m in a good mood, without me talking to them first.  If I’m feeling all chipper and optimistic, chances are that I’ll get a million invites to do fun stuff.  If I’m already feeling like shit, it seems to seep out my pores, across suburbs and up everyone’s noses, so they act like shitbags too and take everything the wrong way or just say things to me that I take the wrong way.  All very coincidental like.  People even look prettier to me when I’m in an up mood – even the ugly ones.  I wonder how much of it is just perception – that my brain chemicals just get in a good balance and it makes the world look different.   That makes more sense than psychic mood waves.  

It really bugs me how unreliable perceptions are.  I feel like Ive got nothing to rely on. 

I’ll add this to my list of invisible undiagnosed diseases:  invisible ADD, invisible Alzheimer’s, invisible type 2 diabetes and now invisible bipolar disorder.  

I’ve had a lot of things to do recently, and especially this weekend.  Tonight is a breakcore gig, tomorrow is finishing off a cake for the Palex’s school’s cake stall, then board games and Shakespeare in the park, Sunday is lunch with my family and Mexican dinner with an ex-colleague, then Monday is a French film.   Busy busy busy.  These are the things to do on an up-mood season.  If I keep busy, everything stays up.  It’s like those people who keep plates spinning on top of long sticks. 

The afore-mentioned ex-colleague is the guy I was going to go into the Ghost Hunting business with.  He went up to far north QLD to live with his sister for a bit and ended up working in the mines.  He started at the very bottom, working the radios, and now he’s been promoted to an underground job being paid 95K.  95K for unskilled manual labour.  **whistles**  He’s down here for the weekend and he told me about his new salary after I shouted him lunch.  Anyway, he’s up there for good, so Ghost Hunting is on indefinite hiatus, although he has scoped out some possible sites up there that I could come visit later in the year.  And there’s still a trip to Tassie on the cards, for ghost hunting purposes of course.  So it’s not completely dead in the water. 

People I don’t usually hang out with are making an effort to seek me out to do stuff, join in on the things I’m doing.  Up mood magic. Boris, who I knew originally through drain parties and Mikey, invited me to a warehouse party and some gigs.  I’m also hanging out with his ex-fiancee and becoming good friends with her.   I suppose that’s a bit weird to happen at the same time – I’m sensing that I’m the rebound healing time friend.  That’s cool.  And another guy who comes to some picnics and parties and stuff that I thought I annoyed the hell out of was making an effort to be included and contribute and shit, which was good too.    Then another group of my friends decided to start Japanese Suicide Movie Club , which is where we commit to watching obscure East Asian (mostly) movies every fortnight together.  We watched Akira to start with.   We were totally like a club. There was this club-like feeling of camaraderie.  If it weren’t for the up mood aura, we’d probably all be bickering about whether to watch the subbed or dubbed version. It’s eerie I tell you.  EERIE.  

My flatmates moved out and my landlady has rejigged the house (the flats are actually parts of an old fibro house that has doors separating each unit) so that she’s in the bedroom next to mine and her mother has moved into my flatmate’s room and a single mother has moved her kids into the unit next door which used to partly be my landlady’s bit.  Complicated yes?  It’s actually not that bad.  I don’t see them much at all.  It’s no different to before – I’m hardly at home to do anything but sleep and eat.   Plus they have this baby who is really cute and well-behaved, and I like patting his spiky little hair when he’s playing with his grandma outside. .And I’ll probably be moving out in June, so it’s only for a little while.  Back in with the Palex and yes, Jones, as that seems all OK.  Or maybe all this tolerance to living in the same place as my landlady and thinking that everything is all sorted with Jones is just my vision being coloured by my special mood waves at the moment.   Who knows?  We’ll check back on this come June time. 

The real test of whether these mood seasons are magically independent of everything else will be winter.  Will it survive when all these people return to their burrows to hibernate?  Will it survive when the air starts smelling more like an industrial meat freezer and the cold starts biting my skin hairs and making my fingers numb?  Will I want to stab my landlady and Jones in the face?   Will I start ordering in vats of hydrofluoric acid to melt things in?  Will I fantasise about setting myself on fire on peak hour public transport?  Will I be seen screaming in the faces of people who dare tell me that my shoelaces are untied? (God I hate being told my shoelaces are untied.  I’ve never tripped on them yet, so mind your own business, lady!)  Stay tuned for another exciting episode of As The Roach Burns.