when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.

Some days, you wake up frozen in a state of what can only be uneloquently referred to as a "really bad mood." You can dress it up if you like and call it "the mean reds", Holly Go-Lightly style, or you can gently couch it in song lyrics and vague metaphors, but at the heart of it...it's just a bad mood.

This happens to me on a shockingly rare basis, and I generally feel blessed for it; however, the flip side of this is that when the bad mood hits, its force can and will knock me down entirely. Yesterday was one of these days, and I felt lucky to have a day off with which to deal with it...but what do you do when you have a whole day to yourself to turn your feelings around? How do you reverse where your head is at, and how do you ensure that your efforts actually work?

These are the kinds of questions I thrive off of, and I love hearing other people's answers. I turned to a few friends for advice on this matter and was told multiple times to get myself to a museum posthaste. This forced me to face a very deep-seated truth about myself that I've never admitted to anyone before: museums make me feel really, really weird. It's not a bad kind of weird, but it's an anxious kind of weird, and as much as they make me want to slow down and look at things and really think about them, I will always find myself slightly impatient for the part where I get to leave the museum and not be looking at beautiful things alongside a bunch of strangers, most of whom are having really horrible conversations about the beautiful things.

So I figured a museum might be a pretty bad idea for my pretty bad mood, and I struggled hard to figure out what to do. For me, productivity is usually the key to happiness, but I knew that if I wrote some awful words or tried to bake something too ambitious, there'd be some serious fail fallback to attend to. Shopping can work wonders for a bruised heart, but retail therapy in January just doesn't seem right. A five-mile run would probably have done the trick, but I'm bound by a blistered foot that just won't heal.

Still, it was sunny and unseasonably warm outside; still, as the morning hours passed into the afternoon, I felt sure that I could grab my mean reds by the throat and strangle them into a land of laughter and mirth. Sometimes, you have take drastic measures; sometimes you have to change things about yourself to change the way you're thinking about yourself.

So I ended up doing the thing I thought I'd never be able to afford (at a time I definitely can't afford it), which is also the thing that I'd actually just convinced myself a few days prior that I never wanted to do. My bad mood has waxed and waned and, honestly, returned since then, but I'm left with a lasting impression of the way that my brain regularly projects my dreams into my actual life.

It's kind of cute, also.