the sunny side of life

I may not seem like the most cheerful kid on the blog, but despite my tendency to chronicle the cloudy side of my life, things are really not all that bleak, much of the time. Personally, I mean; obviously, the political situation is bleak. Yet I remain optimistic, for no rational reason. Both politically and personally. After all, whatever we are experiencing right now, whether we like it or not, is nothing but a temporary state. If you can't cope without drugs, I say go for it.

The study of good moods reveals surprising parallels with my own life, though I may appear the very opposite of joyful. In "Exuberance," reviewed today in Salon, author Kay Redfield Jamison says, "Built into exuberance is an ability to, no matter what comes along, find something else to be interested in, to care about, to write about, to fall in love with. Like Watson says, it's the pursuit. If you're totally content you don't have any desire to pursue anything intellectually or geographically. Exuberance has a restlessness in it. It's not discontent -- it's a forward-moving, active restlessness." -- well, that's all true of me, except the part about the discontent. My motivation comes from a lot of discontent. I suppose that may disqualify me -- and clearly, I am not often what anyone would call "exuberant" -- because I am never satisfied with the status quo or less than my vision of a better, which is to say less flawed, circumstance. Perhaps the truly exuberant would say, "This is good, but it could be better," whereas the discontented would claim, "This sucks, and I can make it better." It takes both kinds to make the world, but it seems to me that most people would rather hang out with the former.

Exuberance is a lot like the manic end of bipolar disorder, but not so far along the continuum, more solid and sustained, Jamison says. Interestingly, she adds that "it's well known that there's a higher rate of bipolar illness in immigrants, and because bipolar is related to these temperaments it may be that there was some sort of genuine selection for that. [...] I wanted to think about what kind of temperament gets you over the mountain, gets you settling the plains. There's the group that came to the Eastern seaboard, and a smaller group from that who got restless and took off for the American West. And the people who stayed in Boston are very different from those who are a bit restless, who had this dream. Some people see desolation when they look out at the prairie, but some people say, Wow, these are going to be orchards. The people who left were more willing to take risks. They really had to be able to imagine the future and act on their optimism."

That reminds me of the old joke my parents have told so many times about the family problem of two kids, one overly optimistic and the other overly pessimistic. The pessimistic kid gets a roomful of toys for his birthday and sees them all as flawed and not what he really wanted, while the optimistic kid gets a roomful of shit, and responds with glee, "Where there's shit, there must be a pony!"

I guess, like most people, I'm a mixture of both.

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tribute to "superman"

I am somewhat shocked and very saddened by the news today that Christopher Reeve has died at 52. I know I join a huge number of people who had hoped he would someday be victorious in his bid to walk again, but now he's free of the limitations of his body, and no doubt he's very satified having lived an amazing, full, and courageous life.

Here's one quote from a news site that gives a hint of how large a life he led:

Before his riding accident, Reeve played the piano to professional standard, had done many of his own film stunts, was an expert sailor and skier and had twice flown solo across the Atlantic. After the accident [in 1995] he considered suicide but instead emerged determined to prove the medical experts wrong. Reeve threw himself into fundraising to highlight the need for more medical research.

Now that's exuberance.