| Current mood: |  drunk |
| Current music: | Saber Dance by Khachaturian |
| Entry tags: | answers |
Friday - My body is sober, but my mind is always drunk
Today on my drive into work, I was thinking about how my mood is always drunk, despite the fact that I barely drink at all. If I drank any less than I do, I would have to become a Baptist. Without going into it too much detail right now, I would make a lousy Baptist.
My physical sobriety is almost prudish. When I do have a couple of glasses of wine, I always forget to go back and finish the rest of the bottle within a reasonable amount of time. As a result, I find I have an almost a full bottle of vinegar when I come across the wine a few months later. It's a waste. I should swallow my pride and buy my wine in a box, since even time cannot make boxed wine taste worse than it does, but I can't make myself do it. I also have a well-stocked liquor cabinet, but all of the bottles are getting a layer of dust on them since I severed ties with my partying pal, Patty. If I wanted to get drunk, physically drunk, I wouldn't have to go far.
Still, there is this inebriated mood of mine to explain. When I first started writing here and I was going trough the list of moods, I thought it was funny that drunk was listed as one of them. Drunk, to my mind, is a state of being, not an emotion or a mood. If drunk can be a mood, then "full" and "cold" and "headachy" are moods. So I started to think about what kind of emotion "drunk" would be.
I concluded that if anyone could have an emotion that could be described as drunk, it would be me. So I went with it. I finally had a word to describe what I feel like. I decided that my mood would, from here on out, be drunk. Not that it always hasn't been, but now I would label it as such.
With this drunk mood of mine, I live in my head a lot. Like a drunk in a bar, I am always shocked that time has flown and it's time to go home. It always feels like I just got where I am and that I've been there forever, both at the same time. The past and the present collide in my consciousness, and things that happened to me ten years ago are as real and as current as things that happened yesterday, sometimes more so.
Because my mood is drunk, I tend to do things that seem inappropriate to people who's moods are sober.
I laugh when I feel like it, and apparently I laugh too loud. I get "shhhed" a lot for laughing. Sometimes I am the only one to see the humor in what I am laughing at. The world is funny to me, and the people in it are funny. I can't help laughing. Because my mood is drunk, I don't even want to not laugh since we drunks laugh at everything. This seems to bother people the most at funerals, so I try to curtail it when I am at one, no matter how drunk I feel. I can't say that I have always succeeded, though.
Like a drunk, I say what I think when I think it. I once had a coworker complain about this to me.
"You say things, and people let you get away with it, just because you're you," she said. This drove her nuts for some reason.
I had to agree that she was right, though I still don't know why it bothered her; I've always just thought that this is a benefit to being me. It is actually my favorite part of being me. I may get away with it in part because I am short and I have a small voice, like a child. To illustrate this, I will tell you that I still have solicitors ask if my mother is home when I answer phone. Because I am childlike, people tolerate my directness the way they would with a child (or a drunk, for that matter). Also, like a child, I have no malice to my almost perfect honesty. I don't come across as hostile to most people, just very blunt. If I don't like something, I say so. But I don't attack people or deliberately try hurt them.
I tend to have a polarizing affect on the people around me. This honesty either endears me to people or it makes them hate me. Thin-skinned people usually avoid me, and I prefer it this way. To paraphrase Monty Python's Flying Circus, people who are easily offended should not spend time with me.
Like a drunk, I might focus intently on something in my vicinity and not notice something obvious that is happening in my peripheral vision. I might get lost in a song, or a painting, or a movie, or in the color blue.
Let me clarify that my honesty is almost, but not completely, perfect. I am almost never really listening to Saber Dance, for example. Because I get lost in whatever music is playing around me, I can't listen to music at work. I wouldn't get anything done. Saber Dance represents how the world outside of my mind jumps and leaps around me. I'm sitting still, but everything else twirls, pulsates and jumps. Saber Dance is a metaphor for the world as I see it.
Keep in mind that I am a poet in my spare time, and I find that some of the best truths can be found in well-written fiction. This means that even when I am writing something fictitious, such as some of you may think that my encounters with the Carney may be, I am doing it to tell a larger truth. It all comes full circle, I think, and the perfection of my honesty is restored in the end.
When all is said and done, I can think of some advantages to my drunk mood. You can't smell my mood on my breath and it doesn't affect my coordination, so I am able to drive to and from work without getting arrested. It doesn't show up on a breathalyzer test at all. My drunk mood has no detrimental effect on my liver, so I don't have to worry about cirrhosis. Best of all, I don't have to worry about loosing my buzz, ever. I was born with this buzz, and it's not going anywhere.
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neanahe) wrote,
