"You seem to be oddly sensitive."

For some reason, some things hit me really, really hard. Between death, intolerance, a broken health care system, blatant dispassionate acts, child abuse, dictatorships, loss of jobs and homes, hate groups, murder, chronic preventable diseases running rampant, gang wars, deliberate waste of life and resources, unequal access to education, slavery, illness, puppy farms, corruption, religious extremism, domestic violence, terrorism, illiteracy, flagrant abuse of the environment....well, I can get myself depressed pretty easily.

So, I try not to think about these things too often: idealistic pragmatism...I will not be in any state to solve these problems if I am just crying all the time and an absolute wreck.

Thus, my grievances with the real world and sadness gets a lot more local - things like roommate issues, a touching scene in trailers I watch on apple.com, having the subway doors shut on me because of obnoxious teenagers not letting me through...and then I get even more frustrated because I am upset about these things when I have no reason to complain. At all. I don't have malaria, I wasn't gang-raped as a child, I make a salary in the top 1% of the world's 6+ billion inhabitants, I have a safe place to live and food...and I get sad about flour beetles.

But most people don't really think of me as a depressed person, per se. I can get sad sometimes, like when I started crying 20 minutes into Blood Diamond and lasted about 10 minutes before I just had to leave ("I thought you wanted to see this!" said Scott - "I thought I did too!" I said through sniffles after I had finally calmed down. After ten minutes of sobbing).

So what to do? Lose myself in science? Write really angry or sad posts? Console myself with baked goods? I don't really know. Throwing myself into schoolwork has always been my refuge, but I think that has shifted to cooking...unlike studying, lab work doesn't always have that feeling of accomplishment, because like it or not, experiments fail. And most of the time, recipes don't.

I don't mean to be a downer on a Friday afternoon, but the past couple weeks have been rough...and the fact that the sun has decided to hide from Boston for the past three weeks doesn't really help. But--I'm going strawberry picking tomorrow, which should be beyond lovely. Strawberries do make everything better!