Ninth salon: for the bad days.

[jenett]

Welcome to our ninthsalon discussion thread. Wander in, invite a friend to come along, and chat! (Not sure what's going on? Here, have a brief FAQ.) You can find previous ones in my salon tag. Please take a quick look at the reminders at the bottom of this post, too.

I have been having the sort of week where there's nothing exactly wrong, but wherein I have no energy, spent four hours napping on Sunday (the cat considers that 'right' and approves highly, but it's not very productive) and I feel like I am not making progress on useful things. (And actually, today is worse than yesterday, and it's the fact I really have stuff that has to happen at work that has me here.)

So. Today's discussion. What do you do when you have a bad week? (Or weeks?) What stuff do you keep handy?

Me: I try to have food around that I will eat (and is sensible for me to eat) even if I'm not very hungry. I try to remember to listen to music, because that generally helps, really. I keep stuff to read that is interesting but not demanding. I keep a stock of Awesome Bath Stuff For Bad Days (my purveyor of choice tends to be Fantasy Bath, but y'know. Bath stuff is good.)

And I keep links. (Um. If you are reading these at work, they reliably make me crack up out loud. You are forewarned. My humour is probably not your humour, but all of these have the kind of content you'd expect from the brief descriptions.)
* Folksongs are your friends: A long digression (comments are worth reading) on useful things one can learn from folksongs.
* I has a sweet potato: One dog. Several sweet potatoes. Much laughter.
* Gaming group meets hellhounds Ursula Vernon's gaming group encounters some hellhounds. Who need rescuing. (the rest of that tag is also excellent, but the first one is good even if you're not a gamer.)
* And because it still makes me crack up, nearly a year later, I present a discussion of the Alternity-verse's version of 50 Shades of Gray which shares a title with one of the assigned Dark Arts/Noble Arts books. (For this, you basically need to know that alt_antonin is the subject's professor, and he's just started teaching at the beginning of term, less than two weeks before this.) Once you've read that, his discussion with Narcissa is also deeply amusing (or you can back up and read the whole set of comments in general.)

Comments

[maribou]

Oh, alcohol! very very good for the high-energy high-stress type of bad week (as long as I am not in need of sleep). very bad for me physically when I am low energy but sometimes the mood assistance of 2-3 drinks outweighs the late-the-next-day exhaustion, if the next day is a Sunday. I... don't react to alcohol the way most people do? It makes me increasingly cheerful and increasingly more awake .... it's an anti-inhibitor, for sure, but not otherwise a downer *at all*. I once read Beowulf for the first time at 6:30 in the morning, still tipsy after a couple hours of sleep, while everyone else was sleeping it off until noon. Because I woke up SO FULL OF GLEE that reading Beowulf seemed like the only logical choice.

(It's self-medicating, but since I go without drinking for months at a time, drink to the point of true inebriation only a couple of times a year, and always end up happier than not - I have deemed it good.)

Speaking of alcohol, this summer I developed a ritual which really helps me leave bad weeks behind. Friday nights, I sit on my porch from 6 pm until midnight, or I get too sleepy, or people go home, depending on the week. I may or may not have anything alcoholic to drink. I always drink lots of water. I may or may not order food delivered, or we might make something. J might join me, or not. Other people might come over, or not (a very large group of my friends is always invited, but not urged, so one night there was 20 people, but most Fridays it's 1 or 2, different people each time). I might read books - actually I almost always read books unless I have a lot of company. I might or might not make phone calls. It might or might not rain, necessitating frequent spells in the dining room porch adjunct.

It's different every time, but it's always Friday night, and I always do nothing that feels like work once it starts, and it always helps. Even on nights when I'm so exhausted that I initially feel like cancelling it and crawling into bed. (I only cancel it for travel, or Extreme Circumstances like the time our friends wouldn't take no to an expedition for an answer and then I found out they were expecting a new baby.)

[jenett]

Your Friday nights sound *gorgeous*. I keep contemplating doing something like that, and I have not yet hit on quite the right thing I can sustain. In better health years, I was making a habit of doing some house cleaning to make things tidy on Friday as close to before sunset as I could manage, and then cooking something enjoyable, and having something to drink, but the last couple, both the cooking and cleaning parts are somewhat problematic.

(For those wondering: I'm not Jewish by raising, but my mother's father was, and there's a certain pleasure in picking Fridays for that kind of 'set the week in order to begin nicely' that I like the echo of, besides it being the end of the workweek.)



(Mine, alas, suffer from the fact that I do not have local friends to do such things with, in a plural number, and that one's Imaginary Internet Friends, as they were, require being at the computer.)