Feeling Blue   Wednesday June 16 2010

You can tell that I’ve been feeling a little depressed lately, because I have been watching lots of The Dick Van Dyke Show, and I have also been thinking of ways that I can rearrange all of my furniture.

The Dick Van Dyke Show is one of my all-time favorite TV shows. Though its representations of husband/wife relationships would be unacceptable in today’s post-Feminist Movement world, Laura Petrie’s life seems, to me, a wonderful ideal. Probably, the realities of her life would be far more complicated, but when I watch the show, I can escape my own stresses, uncertainties, and concerns by becoming absorbed in a pleasant vision of myself as a contented housewife and mother.

Plus, I can dance.

Furniture rearranging is another way I deal with feeling blue, because if I feel unsure about life and at a loss to control its trajectory, I can at least control the placement of my couch, altering its position on a whim to meet my immediate furniture location-related desires. At least, that’s what I did when I lived alone–or even with roommates, limited to my own bedroom in that case. But now, I can’t use this technique as a stress reliever anymore, because of a certain person I have decided to share all of my space and possessions with.

Certain people prefer to have all of their things in the same place when they come home from work as when they left the house that morning, and are not willing to acknowledge the therapeutic value of total home redecoration, noticing only the stress-inducing qualities of suddenly having to go to a different side of the room to find your underwear drawer. I have decided that these feelings are reasonable, and I will not move all of our furniture around. And not just because all of the furniture that Mike contributed to our apartment is extremely heavy and not conducive to my pushing about the room whenever I want (my furniture, by contrast, is very light and also probably scuffed on the bottom from dozens of quick relocations). No, I’ve decided that Mike is right, and as roommates I must respect his desire to have things in one spot for months at a time. Instead, I have taken to downloading cool iPod applications that let me enter the precise measurements of all of our rooms and furniture, and then move the digital models of my things all around the digital apartment floor plan. It is not quite the same, but in the interest of being respectful of the man I love, I suppose it will have to do.

The question remains, though– why am I feeling depressed? Here, I will show you.

On Memorial Day, I was rushing around trying to get ready for the barbecue we had, when I fell into the following drainage ditch:

Now, this is a drainage ditch that I step over every single time I am walking to or from the laundry room or the pool. I could avoid it by taking the actual road, but the back way is much shorter, and the only possible obstacle is this one drainage ditch, which would not be much of an obstacle, really, to anyone who had much walking experience. Walking experience that I wrongly believed myself to have.

Gravity and clumsiness came together on Memorial Day. While dashing out to pick up the load of clothes I had over at the laundry room, I stumbled into the aforementioned ditch. My first thought was, “I hope that I am within shouting distance of my apartment, because I don’t have my cell phone, but I definitely cannot walk.”

My second thought was, “Guests are about to arrive, and my house is still a mess.” Hostessing urges took over, and I proceeded to get my laundry, return home, clean up my house, shower, dress, and then, once guests arrived, play a game of horseshoes, go for a swim, and then–in excruciating pain by this time–hobble slowly back home.

And now I have to wear this boot.

It is pretty depressing, because it is the middle of summer and temperatures are soaring up into the nineties every afternoon, but no matter what I wear, the boot is uncomfortably hot and sweaty, so instead I stay inside. The gulf is filling up with oil, but I cannot swim in the last of the clear waters, because I would find it difficult to walk across the soft sand in this boot, and then I’d have to remove it and crawl from my beach towel to the water, which sounds embarrassing and unpleasant. Also, I am mostly unemployed and my days stretch out before me, no task requiring haste or a nice outfit, and yet I cannot ride my bike anywhere. Early morning bike rides through Wilderness Park while listening to hours of NPR podcasts and basking in the dappled shade of the trees are becoming a distant memory to poor old me. Plus, my family’s camping-road trip of the national parks out west is rapidly approaching, and I cannot help but wonder if I will miss out on the stunning vistas of Yellowstone because my injury makes hiking up a trail impossible. It is, to be frank, a total bummer.

Of course, I can still get around fine, and do almost every other activity I want to do. And my foot isn’t broken, it’s only sprained, so recovery should be coming along here in the fairly near future. There is really no reason for me to feel overly encumbered or upset about the injury. Plus, it has helped break the ice at job interviews.

Still, I am feeling a little down these days.