Since we are clearly also a depression forum, here is something good to do when you are sad: have a specific food that you eat. I call mine "Sad Soup." (Brilliant, ey? It's probably a Shel Silverstein poem.) Anyway really it's Tom Yum from this place Cosi Noodle up the street from my office. It is super spicy, so that it burns your throat. Whenever I am sad I go eat it. There was a time when I ate it every day for several weeks until I eventually got sick of Sad Soup. I don't think I stopped eating it because I was happier, just because it became gross to me, or maybe sadness and wallowing became gross to me.
Today I am super sad. What follows has nothing to do with anything. Today while I was eating Sad Soup, these two Evanston "ladies" sat down next to me and talked about their college-aged daughters who "can't seem to find a place in the world." One of the daughters, who is twenty and in school someplace in Boston, feels really bad because she is going to waitress this summer rather than save the world, which, the mom says the daughter has saved the world every summer since she was 12. (Daughter is in school for something involving saving the world via hanging out with old people, which sounds to me like the worst way ever to save the world.) The mom says the daughter should give herself a break and waitress and go to the beach this summer. But now they are in a fight because the daughter says she can't live without being passionate about something.
Also this lost daughter has a boyfriend that the mom is totally in love with. The mom is ready to go "dress shopping" with the daughter, she says, because the boyfriend is so "special." But the boyfriend is in Argentina until July and the mom won't let the daughter visit because "it's Argentina" even though the daughter just got back from backpacking around Amsterdam.
This has no point, except maybe that I want to be the daughter, because I think I was the daughter at sometime, minus the old people and the perfecto boyfriend. You know that the boyfriend is banging a lot of Argentenians behind the daughter's back. You know what the daughter did in Amsterdam. You know the mom and the daughter are not going dress shopping in relation to this boyfriend. You know the daughter will save the world this summer, despite the mother's wishes.
The daughter made me happier than the sad soup.
