What the Middle East and I Need, or The Solution According to Rollie

I have been kind of down the last couple of days. I do get depressed sometimes, but have realized that my depression is usually situational, not chemical, although I do tend to get it a little worse around that time of the month. Most often, though, when I am depressed it seems to be the result of stress of some sort, or something sad happening in my life. The other thing that seems to effect me is boredom and monotony. I have had a little of that the last few weeks, too. The hot weather and our attempts to curb family spending have left me with a decidedly "rainy summer day, age eight" feeling. You know the one. The one where it is raining and you are bored (so much so that you have already built a fort out of chairs, tables, and blankets) and your mom keeps suggesting activities and NONE.OF.THEM.SOUND.AT.ALL.FUN. In fact, the only thing that would make you feel better is to be in someone else's skin, and so you actually wiggle around and flail and try to get out of your skin, and it only results in you feeling worse and more trapped.

So, part of my depression is the boredom I am feeling right now, and part of it is the stress of keeping a house clean, day after day, while trying to sell said house, but then nobody ever comes until the one day when you DO leave it in disarray. So, I have been depressed and thought it might be the usual. As I usually do, when i feel a little down, I made it to the gym. Seems like sweating always puts things into perspective somehow - I guess it just makes me feel better being present in my own skin (and maybe a little endorphin boost is responsible, too). Oddly, though, today I ran a mile and was still just . . . blue. I actually felt, while running, that I could cry. Usually by the time i make it to a mile, I am already feeling better and thinking about how much farther i want to run. Today, though, I just realized that i needed to get the kids home to meet Todd for lunch, and I quit at a mile. (Okay, there was some chatting about the depression with Vanessa, which took a good fifteen minutes up before i ever started running. I can't blame it all on the depression. I'll blame Vanessa and the kids, too for taking so long that I didn't have time to run.)

So, i was still feeling down, and then i was talking to my friend Harmony (yes, I was late as fuck for lunch), and she said that she was kind of down after hearing the news this morning and I realized that is the source of the blues. More than anything, I am depressed because no matter how good or bad my life is, it is still better at its worst than all the SHIT that is going on in the world today. Hell, I'm not depressed, so much as I am world weary.

Too bad that Rollie doesn't run things. He was reading after his nap, and opened up to a torn page, and said:

"Mama, it's broken. Rollie broke it."
[He looks thoughtful and then something dawns on him.]
"Let's get some new ba-err-ies [batteries] to fix it."

Ah, if only things were that easy. If only everything that was broken could be fixed with new batteries, the way that Rollie thinks they can.