June 12th, 2007

Deep thoughts for this week: Boredom and bad moods are correlated, as are activity and good moods, but the causation can go either way. I used to think that if I wasn’t feeling well, the cure was activity, but that’s not exactly the case, because I’m not likely to enjoy the activity if I’m in a bad mood. When I’m in a good mood, however, I enjoy pretty much any activity at site. I now find that when I’m in a bad mood, I might just be in the mood to do “boring” things. I put “boring” in quotation marks because I’m referring to the solitary, non-active type activities that are unlikely to appear on any Tri-Annual Report.

Case in point: today I woke up in a good mood and spent the rest of the morning running between the health center and the municipality writing, stamping, and signing (but not delivering, it has come to my attention that there’s someone who does that for me) letters to all the people Roger and I invited to a meeting this Thursday to tell them the meeting has been postponed, and I LOVED it. In contrast, when I had just returned from the U.S. and was in a bad mood (a subtle one that I did not want to admit to myself I was in), all the activities I wrote about before (the barbecue, sports day, parade, French ambassador visit, etc.) amused me, quite a bit sometimes, but did not alleviate my underlying emotional state. As such, I read two books (The Time Traveler’s Wife and The Tipping Point, both outstanding), worked toward the perfection of my homemade hummus and tomato sauce, watched both Buffy Summers and Veronica Mars live out their junior years of high school (thanks to a trip to the bootleg DVD market in Lima, I now have material for all my varied television-watching moods, from “I want to watch a small blonde high school girl fight evil with superpowers” to “I want to watch a small blonde high school girl fight evil without superpowers”), and poco a poco I was doing better.

I need to chill out my parenthetical usage, holy crap.

But anyway, the point is the Peace Corps service is inherently an emotional roller coaster, no matter what you fill it with, so I might as well ride it out when it’s going well but not get too down on myself for the occasional bad mood/period of inactivity. Things are looking on the up and up for me with my soon-to-be main project, GALS (Local Sustainable Environmental Management) Certification, to be discussed later, so daytime boredom is becoming less of an issue.