I'm having another bad day, although I expect that this evening will be nice. Czr and I are going to the Stanford Mall so he can buy some slacks, and then out to dinner, probably at St. Michael's Alley in Palo Alto. Roasted garlic & brie -- yum! They used to have that all the time, then it vanished from their menu. I hope it's back.

The day is bad for uncertain reasons. Lack of sleep probably contributes, although the pleasure in having gotten up before 8am on two days in a row really ought to ...

You know, I just realised I haven't eaten anything today. And although I had a huge yummy lunch yesterday, I didn't have any dinner. (A can of BBQ vienna sausages -- my secret vice, imported from Oklahoma -- doesn't count.) Nor have I had anything to drink today. And I'm sitting here, feeling on the verge of tears and depressed and shaky, and I noticing that I'm hungry. So I look at the clock, and tell myself that I can go get food in fifteen minutes or so. And then the time goes by, and I still feel completely dysfunctional, and I tell myself that I can go get food in fifteen minutes or so. I've been doing this for three hours now.

Silly of me. I'm going to go buy a Dr. Pepper right now, and maybe even a sandwich if the cafeteria food looks appealing.

I'm back, with food. I've eaten half my sandwich and drank some Dr. Pepper, and I no longer feel broken. Just very tired and a little sad. This situation is so weird. I'm not sure where this loop of unhappiness -> self-denial comes from. I'm certainly not sure why I can be conscious of both being unhappy and needing food without realising that the two just might be connected. At least this time I managed to break out of it in three hours instead of eight. That's clearly improvement.

I hate being so attached to something outside myself. I enjoy eating, and I can get very excited about food, but in the end it's just, well, food. You eat it when you're hungry, if you have time, and if you don't have time you wait until you do. But lack of food leading to an emotional breakdown? I don't get it. I used to go days without eating a real meal and I'd never notice. Am I just more fragile than I used to be? I think the real answer is that I'm more together than I used to be, and that I'm closer to being a whole person, and thus my body's happiness and my emotional state are very closely entertwined.

I wonder if people on anti-depressants feel this way at all? Do they look at a bottle of pills and think about how strange it is that their improved mood comes out of that bottle? At least bottles are more elegant than sandwiches. Mood improvement due to tuna salad on wheat bread doesn't have quite the same ring.

I've been writing nightly in my paper journal -- just the last two nights, but it's a start. Sometime soon I'm going to have to figure out what I'm doing here (in the online journal) and why. I want to improve my descriptive writing, but it never occurs to me to write about the physical things around me when I could be writing about the intellectual/emotional ones. More thought is clearly required.