melancholy

for no reason that I can think of, melancholy.

the onset of Fall?  cooler days?  not quite sure.  Just a vague feel of being unsettled, wanting to get in a different place----in shape, skilled, working, talented, something.

it's a soup of stuff:

first, politically.  I never considered myself a very political person but I've become more so.  And I'm just disheartened and dismayed by the incredible lack of information on which people makes decisions.  How could hundreds and thousands have died for our freedom only so we could become imprisoned by ignorance and bought by billionaires only looking out for their own best interests?  How could we come to this?  Actually, in a word:  FOX news.  That's how.  It seems grim and depressing to me at the moment, and for the first time in my life, the thought of Europe or Australia or Canada doesn't seem so alien.  We are a country of intellectual dwarfs.  People's perspectives are narrow and biased.  There's no worldview or world perspective.  There's no desire for facts or more information or expanded knowledge.  Learning more, becoming informed, apparently takes too much effort and people just settle for what's emotionally comfortable.  And the standard for that is so incredibly low.......  So that's part one of the soup ingredients.

second, which is connected to the first, I think of someone I know who recently just *bam* out of nowhere has decided that she apparently can't be our friends anymore.  Our politics don't align and I guess that's the only thing that matters now.  Every single day I'm bewildered by this.  Our history is long and entwined and intense in parts, distant in other parts, but always connected.  So every day I'm bewildered as to how---without even a conversation between the two of us---she could decide that she just apparently can't mingle with the likes of liberal me, liberal us.  Since we haven't had political conversations, she really has no clue where I stand on anything.  She's decided tho, I guess, that she knows...and so....here we are.  I'm not crushed or devastated.  Baffled.  Flummoxed.  I mean, really?  Where did that come from?  Really?  Sigh.  Whatever.

there's probably more ingredients to this melancholy soup but I've bored myself so I think I'll just resign from this exercise. :)