It’s that time of the month again, and I don’t mean my period. Depression, as I experience it, works like karma. For a month or two I’m happy, calm, stable, fun, and confident that I can take on all the curveballs life throws at me. Then the depression gets triggered by a minor disappointment, or something as arbitrary as the way shadows fall on a building. For about three to four weeks I move around in a zombie-like state punctuated by the occasional crying jag. Then, just as suddenly as the depression started, I bounce back into my “normal”, relatively happy self. Rise, wash, repeat.

At the moment I’m going through one of those downs and it’s gotten so bad that I actually cried in public no less than three times this week. My friends say they’ve seen me in worse shape before, so I guess there’s no reason for me to panic. It’s just one of those things I have to go through. Of course, it doesn’t make the present any less awful for me.

I noticed something interesting about this particular down though: my musical taste expanded to accommodate classic rock and folk music. Well okay, maybe it has something to do with the fact that the most depressing songs (in my opinion) fall under those genres. If you listen to most the sad songs made over the last five years, they’re usually about getting screwed over by love. Nobody sings about getting screwed over by life anymore. I don’t want to hear songs about getting dumped because I don’t have a broken heart; I have a broken soul. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. I wish I had a broken heart because at least I can point out where the problem lies. But I don’t even have the luxury of blaming some stupid boy for this horrible, inexplicable sadness I’m going through at the moment.

Because writing about depression is getting old, I figured I’d share what I think are the five most depressing songs I know. I’ve arranged them in ascending order, from the song that make me think about difficult but not entirely unpleasant things, to the song that I would most likely play whilst committing suicide, if I were actually suicidal. Which I am not.

( Fake LJ cut leads to blog. )

I'd like to think that I'm fairly open to criticism. There's always room for improvement and sometimes you need other people to let you know what you need to work on. What I really can't stand is when people give their criticism without any follow-through or suggestions on how to make things better. Then it's like, Jesus just shut the fuck up before I tear you a new asshole, asshole.

Yesterday at work, this blogger friend YM'ed me out of nowhere to tell me that he thinks No Girly Drama is better than my personal blog. Hmmm talk about double-edged compliments. I was in a semi-bad mood by then and what he said just put me in a bad mood, period. So I asked him, What do you mean? Content or writing style? His extremely helpful reply was: Content and writing style. I waited five minutes for him to qualify that statement and when five minutes passed and said nothing more, I closed the chat window and stomped outside for a smoke.

It occurs to me lately that my "personal" blog (laurganism.com) kind of sucks compared to the other blogs out there. It really is just a personal blog, a dumping site of the shit floating in my head. The trend of personal blogs these days is for them to have a niche, or at least has content that can be "useful" to other people. Unlike most blogs, mine doesn't have a niche. I'm not knowledgeable enough in music, literature, video games, or movies to discuss them in great detail. Gadgets make me sleepy and fashion makes me stupid. I don't have any important political views; hell, I don't have any political views at all. I'm mostly a Renaissance chick, but even that doesn't quite describe me since I don't know enough about everything to focus blogging on anything. In other words, the thought that my personal blog is a waste of internet space has been kind of floating over my head. And my friend just kind of confirmed that with a swift, unexpected kick to the writer's ego.

When people hurt your ego though (intentionally or not), it kind of makes you rethink everything you think about yourself. And you start wondering whether what you had in the first place was self-confidence or if you were just delusional. Yeah I kind of feel like crap, especially since I think I'm a pretty good writer who can come up with entries way better than a lot of those niched blogs out there--in terms of style and grammar. I don't know. To be perfectly honest, I don't think my blog sucks. My weakness is that I don't know what the fuck to blog about. Except myself. And that just makes my blog sound like a sixteen-year old who thinks that the universe still revolves around her.

So...I don't know. Until I can think of a niche to focus on, maybe I'll take a hiatus? Or I could just forget about what my friend said and just keep on blogging about my sometimes-emotionally-pubescent self and saturate the internet with angst. As if the intarnets doesn't have enough of that already. Argh. It used to be that I didn't care about what people think and that I'd rather die than give into the social pressure of following the trend. Perhaps I'm losing my youthful arrogance.

I can't really tell which frustrates me more--that I can't write fiction or that I can't write songs.

I've pretty much placed the fiction writing on hold since the band happened so I could focus my energies on songwriting and mastering the guitar. Despite having no experience, Kristel and I have been churning out songs like sweatshop workers. I play a couple of chords, she comes up with the lyrics, ten minutes later we have a song.

Here's what really gets me though. When I'm at home and I'm not really doing anything, I zone out and play random chords on my guitar. Somehow the notes start to make sense and with a little more focus, I have a nice little melody going. In my head I know that the song is going to be an angry song or a love song; I even know what kind of angle the song will take. But no matter how many times I sit there playing the same chord sequence over and over again, I can never figure out the right lyrics to go with the melody. I once spent an entire evening doing that and until now the song still has no words. It's incredibly frustrating.

Just now I was listening to last.fm when a song by a band I've never heard of before came on (Risque by Cute is What We Aim For). I had to stop what I was doing just to listen, then I went out for a smoke to try to get rid of this awful sense of impotence that invaded my waking mind. Risque's lyrics were succinct, honest, and semi-poetic; it's the song my pseudo-love song should have been if I had not failed to find the right words for it.

I'm obsessed and stressed with this mess
I can't think of things
To write down, to type down
And these fingertips are moving faster than these lips
So you can only imagine how jealous my mouth is

How the hell do people come up with lyrics like that?! Am I doomed to writing about pink cunts and frothy white cum for the rest of my life?!??!