Life on the funny farm has improved since my rotten Tuesday. The tile guy continues to make good progress and, so far as I can tell, do good work. I talked again with my friend Sue from Alaska, something I always find heartening. And my friend Joe and I also had an extended phone conversation. Indeed, by the end of the day, my cordless phone battery was in desperate need of a recharge, and believe it or not, that’s usually a sign that I’ve had a good day. I like to talk with people.
So I’m happy again, an unsurprising mood swing perhaps since my default setting (if you will) is optimism. I never stay depressed for long anymore. This wasn’t the case during my teenage years—when I was depressed for years on end—but a lot of things that are true for me now weren’t true back then and vice versa. Happiness and optimism are more fun if nothing else, and I have so many blessings in my life that it’d be hard to perpetually bummed.
I’ve started re-reading The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Last time I picked up this book was in high school, and though the recent movie of the same name has chopped liberally from the story line, I can’t fault the filmmakers. Unedited, LOTR:TFOTR is simply too large a tale to tell in a 2-3 hour film format. So they’re necessarily different, but I think both book and movie deserve high praise.