Artificial Mood Enhancers

Mournful weather like this is very depressing, isn't it? Does it bring you down too? I have a favorite episode of Father Ted where a suicidally depressed priest comes to visit the somewhat shallow Ted, who is enjoying the song "Shaft" too much to pay attention to his cohort's troubles. Fortunately, "Shaft" is such a righteously excellent song that just hearing it for a few minutes is enough to raise the unhappy priest's spirits completely; he leaves Ted's parochial house and goes on his way a healed and happy man.

But as he boards the bus to leave, the driver turns on the radio, which is playing Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)." By the fourth bar of the song, the priest's face has collapsed into an expression of bleak and utter despair.

That's me all over, except that I can no longer hear that song without giggling.

But this weather is miserable: it's cold, it's still, it's depressingly drizzly, and it feels as if I can't get warm no matter how high the heater's turned up. Having large picture windows - undoubtedly the cheapest money could buy - in every room is probably the crux of that problem. I need some warmth and sunshine. Early this morning, I lay awake and listened to the soft, resigned patter of chilly raindrops on the window and heard in them another sad song:

Goodbye to spring, and all it meant to me,
It can never bring the thing that used to be,
For it must be you, or no one...
And so I'm through with love.

Setting the iPod on "happy" would fix everything. But no, I had to leave my headphones at work, didn't I?