I think about a lot of sad things. Last summer a friend told me it’s tied to the fact that most of what I listen to would be classified as “sad music”. I guess I feel like there’s a time and a place for happy music–and I don’t listen to it unless I’m already in a good mood. Happy music when I’m bummed out is like a guilt trip from your grandma about not calling her every weekend… which, if I spoke to my grandmother on a regular basis, I would avoid at all costs.
I can’t connect to something joyous during the colder months of the year, either. There’s something about driving around with the windows down once you feel “real” spring/summer has arrived, listening to songs that remind you of the best days and nights of your life. Even if I wasn’t listening to exactly those songs during that chain of events, they take me back. Really I just like any excuse to do a little time traveling, with sunshine on my face and a warm breeze blowing my hair into some ridiculous fluffy arrangement.
I guess I feel like happiness is not really conducive to productivity. Happy people like to admire things and feel content, while sad people lament and pick apart every part of their lives that leaves them feeling unsatisfied. Happiness leads to idleness, which just sounds like stunting of your growth as a human being to me. I learn best through those rough and tumble ‘bad’ experiences more than the good ones. If things go well, I must have done them right; in contrast, if things do not turn out as I wanted I must have done it all wrong. Most of us have heard the phrase about the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly, but expecting different results. While I’m not sure if that’s even true or one of those phrases that everyone just says, I do feel like there’s a degree of truth to it. As I fuck things up, I learn from them. To the best of my ability to self-assess, I feel like I don’t repeat most of my mistakes. I try a new approach, or to change my line of thinking about something… which still might not lead to the outcome I was hoping for, and that is okay in its own way.
Regardless, I am hardly an optimist. If something can go wrong, it will. I stand by that viewpoint based off my own experiences. Yet sometimes when my inner secret optimist shows up and suggests that just maybe things will be different this time, I buy into it. I don’t want to be a bitter, sad, emotionally weathered old woman in the future. (Not that I want to be a disappointed daydreamer either, for the record.)
I feel like all these sad songs are really just my way of making sure I keep a reality check on hand. Like those “break glass in case of emergency” gag gifts that contain a cigarette, or a bottle of whiskey. Reality is a lot scarier than those two coping mechanisms, obviously. I guess that’s why they’re the gag gifts, and nobody has ever received a “reality check” behind glass from their coworker that does all their holiday shopping at Spencer’s.