Ups and Downs on Wednesday evening

Things are going really well right now, and life is, as I mentioned previously, 99.99% perfect.

Whatever the cause, my depression has been pretty much on hiatus for many weeks now, and the past two or three weeks have been especially good. I've been able to motivate myself to do some things I would previously have put off or avoided – trivial stuff, mostly, which made it easy to delay.

If there is a down side to this, it would be that while all these 'good vibrations' have been happening, I haven't been as mindful as I would like to be about the Buddhist practices of right speech and right thought. I've said some things I wish I had not said – not terrible or hurtful things, but just little snarky things that I feel mildly poison me more than the persons at whom they are directed.

I've also fallen back into my bad habit of over-analyzing certain things. I'm much better at being aware of this as it happens, and the degree of obsessing is a fraction of what it was five or ten years ago, but there's still some habitual behavior present. I wouldn't categorize this as being harmful so much as being counterproductive and a devourer of time.

When I was a kid – maybe ten years old – I was home alone one night and ate, out of boredom, about a two pound bag of BIKE banana caramels. I wasn't hungry, and they didn't even taste that good, but I didn't have anything else to do, so I did that. They made me sick to my stomach and I threw them all up.

It's kind of the same way with over-thinking, over-analyzing and obsession. It's not really that I need to figure these things out, and it's not that pleasant to do it, but I'm bored and I end up filling my time with this stuff. It doesn't make me throw up, but it does make me sort of emotionally queasy.

I just Googled BIKE banana caramels and didn't get a single hit. Maybe they don't make them anymore.