It was well into the second margarita that I remembered: drinking sometimes depresses me. I'm the kind of person that needs to find something to not be satisfied by: some long-standing project, some personal grievance a professional colleague has long since forgotten, things like that. I think I need to feel angry frequently. Or something in my neural wiring makes that response desirable.

I am not a cheerful person by nature. It takes a proper stimulus to induce happiness. When everything is social obligations and noise and bluster, I want quiet. In the times when there is quiet, after my wife and son go to sleep, I think about the past, very seldom the future, and am not enthused by either of them. What happened before is a mess of barely remembered vignettes, emotions, and circumstances that made sense at the time but seem a waste of resources now. Everything but the most meaningful interactions. Just haphazard madness. For the future, I don't see possibilities. I see painful obstacles and misery, interspersed with some good moments. It doesn't excite me. It fills me with quiet dread.

So I have taken to being in the moment. This is not an empowering "in the moment", but simple being. In taking the circulator to work, I will sit for 40 minutes, catalog local color speech, and barely think about anything at all. It feels right.

I should get back to finish the rest of the classifier manuscript for Neuroimage.

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