A wave and a smile can work like magic, writes GinaBarreca.
You know how you get into those moods where you convince yourself that the only thing to do when you're absolutely miserable is to make yourself even more miserable, as if misery were some kind of contest?
And when you're in that kind of mood, there is some part of you determined to make yourself so thoroughly unhappy you are guaranteed to take home the poor-me crown?
Picture me, then, having a perfectly rotten day.
Waking up to a washed-out gray morning, I'd started to feel as if every decision carried with it the potential for a cataclysmic spiritual crisis.
And I mean everything.
Choosing the wrong font for certain emails, for example, might act as the harbinger of ruin; parking too close to the building where I work would mean somebody else would attempt to squeeze a vehicle so close to mine that it would simply be easier to park their car inside my car.
Parking far away would prove I was the abject failure I always imagined myself to be. (Who but a schmuck pays $300 a year for parking and then walks more than a kilometre in the rain to get to the office? Sure, people do that all the time when they work in a city. But who does that when her building is on hectares of open farmland and rolling hills? For several hundred bucks a year, I want access to what by implication is promised when the money is routinely deducted directly from my pay cheque under the heading ''parking.''Not that I'm bitter.)
I was facing a day filled with budget cuts at work, computer problems and calls from home about a repeatedly (not direly, only annoyingly) sick cat - and I was fully intending to cap it all off by driving in the rain to pick up a cheap pre-cooked chicken for dinner.
You've had those chickens, right? They sort of look like very short extras from a zombie movie.
Basically, they're dried skin pulled tight over brittle bones with a little bit of ooze emerging from somewhere.
Frankly, you don't want to make inquiries concerning the ooze's origins.
I don't even really like the cheap pre-cooked chicken, but it seemed like the kind of half-baked idea, literally and metaphorically, to signal the day's finale.
Then a stranger wrecked the whole thing.
I was coming off a ramp and on to the highway, eyes narrowed against the blur of rain, fists clamped around the steering wheel, radio news station in the background announcing the end of the civilised world as we know it (plus additional rain) and some guy actually permitted me to merge.
Then he had the nerve to smile and wave.
And without thinking about it, I smiled and waved back.
It wasn't a fake. I meant it. I think I even said ''Ooh, thanks, mister!'' out loud in my car.
It turns out that, when it comes to changing moods, I'm a cheap date.
When I realised that my fundamental perception of the day could pivot both immediately and entirely on the smallest of incidents, I admit to being startled.
I was happily surprised, of course, but still ...
was it really just so easy to feel better after feeling bad?(Not always, of course. Not when there's real cause for sadness or when I'm caught by sense of loss or longing emerging from somewhere deep or damaged. That's when I check in with the professionals - the therapist, the doctor and the old friends who know me best - to see if I need some kind of real tune-up.)
There was a small, flinty part of me that wanted to clutch the misery and hold it close.
But you can't wave with a clenched fist and you can't really smile with gritted teeth.
Maintaining unhappiness was too much work.
Trust me when I say that I didn't mean to forget being frustrated, angry and sour-pussed.
It just happened.
One kind gesture and shazam, there I was with my heart opening like a parachute and my hand waving like a 5-year-old's at a Fourth of July parade.
I still picked up dinner on the way home, but decided to get fresh pizza.
It went better with the parade.
- Harford CourantGina Barreca is an English professor at the University of Connecticut and a feminist scholar.
