that my mood is low and so my responses to things are tinged with anhedonia and irritability. I learned a long time ago that if my darker moods were not susceptible to being jollied away, I could at least be aware that I was in one and should refrain from doing anything or making a decision about anything that flowed directly from.
I used to use the image of the centaur, the horse and rider, the horse in the barn, etc, to calibrate how possessed I was by my mood. (Of course, one is "possessed" by a very good mood, too, but somehow that doesn't seem as conducive to introspection.) In centaur mode, I am my mood, identified with it as if it were simply "reality"; with horse and rider, it is carrying me along, but I know that we are two rather than one; standing next to the horse, in the barn, I am impinged by it, but not depending on it.
Nevertheless, respond I do.
So today I pretty much hate gay men.
Homophobia makes complete sense to me. A walk through the Castro and an hour at my moribund gym provided me with enough material for that. There's a new store on the street, dedicated just to drag. I once would have found it humorous, now it's kinda disgusting . And then there's the usual issue of the queen voice and style: the intonation, the sibilance and tight-throatedness, the vocabulary and phrasing, the topics, the gestures.
Lemme outta here.
3 comments:
"The very seeing of one's friends is pleasant, especially if one is
in adversity, and becomes a safeguard against grief (for a friend tends to comfort us both by the sight of him and by his words, if he is tactful, since he knows our character and the things that please or pain us); but to see him pained at our misfortunes is painful; for every one shuns being a cause of pain to his friends. For this reason people of a manly nature guard against making their friends grieve with them, and, unless he be exceptionally insensible to pain, such a man cannot stand the pain that ensues for his friends, and in general does not admit fellow-mourners because he is not himself given to mourning; but women and womanly men enjoy sympathisers in their grief, and love them as friends and companions in sorrow. But in all things one obviously ought to imitate the better type of person."
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Doesn't "imitating" the better sort of person amount to just one more version of drag? er
P.S. Good point, though, that a 'good mood' is just as much a mood as a bad mood is. Augustine could have made that point.
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