Wobble.

(cross-posted to the AFWT blog, Andrew6 liveJournal, and Foley MySpace blog. It's personal, and it's also business. Still having a hard time keeping the two separate.)

In the last 48 hours or so, I have gone from being inexplicably upbeat about my future prospects to completely down about the whole writing thing, a change which, while hardly unfamiliar, also falls on the inexplicable end of the Foley behavioural spectrum. I mean, nothing particularly major changed in reality, but my mood just crashed. If the two Big Things I'm waiting on at the moment failed to pan out--then I could understand feeling like this. But they're still up in the air, and by being up in the air, they were making me very happy just a day or two ago. Now, I'm hardly thinking about them. I'm hardly thinking about anything, really. I'm just...feeling stuff. Which is a less than productive use of my time.

I'm trying to put my finger on what's bothering me, what's actually changed in the last 24 hours that altered my way of looking at things so dramatically. The odds are I've simply been over-indulging in dairy products again and it's entirely chemical. Things that have actually had an effect that are based in something resembling objective reality, or at least had the potential to have an effect, include:

-A lengthy and ultimately kind of pointless e-mail conversation with another creator whose position on life in general and experiences with a mutual publisher in particular are so vastly different from mine that I am actually starting to take his self-confidence, optimism, and seeming success as a personal affront.

-Getting some commentary on a script that amounted to: "I liked everything but the beginning and the end. And the bits in the middle."

-Wrapping my head around doing something I almost never do last week. I didn't think it would bother me as much as it is.

-Wrestler Chris Benoit's death, and the details surrounding it. I was at a local wrestling show the other night, and now I feel strangely guilty.

Maybe not so strangely. Several years ago, a friend of mine jokingly explained his interest in watching downhill skiing by saying it was the most likely place you could watch someone die live on television. A few days later, a skier actually did die--I can't remember her name, but it was all over the news for awhile. Being a callous jerk, I didn't have much sympathy for her, on the grounds that anyone who deliberately throws themselves down a mountain with only a layer of lycra for protection doesn't deserve a lot of sympathy when they hit something on the way down. I made a joke about it the next time I saw my friend, and he practically bit my head off. He clearly felt guilty about having made the original remark, and I didn't really get it. I think I sort of do, now.

I'm sure it's just the dairy.

Foley