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As many residents of Oregon do, I suffered from the winter blues. Whether you call it SAD (Seasonal Affectiveness Disorder) or simple a hibernation instinct I find the rainy season particularly difficult to handle on any year. This year, however, I am finding it particularly tough. After an entire year without seeing winter (I left for Australia in October and returned in March) I feel the cold and the inescapable wet as an almost physical weight on both mind and body. I don’t want to do anything except eat, sleep, take hot baths, and sleep some more. However, I must go to school, play with the dog, cuddle the cat (best done while napping though) and perform other seemingly pointless chores every day. How do I do this? Honestly some days I dont. I stay in my pajamas, I drink lots of tea and cocoa and I play video games if I am not napping or bathing. (Some times I think I should grow gills the amount of time I spend in the tub.) Previous years I have battled the blues by retreating to that haven of warmth and skin cancer known as the tanning salon. Peter has made me promise that I will save my skin and future health by ceasing that uplifting practice. So I have replaced it with workout at least once a week (twice or more is best) and sitting in the sauna in the women’s locker room when I am done.
On the plus side, the complete lack of any desire to go outside has given me many long days in the office working on school and research. I have come up with a couple of good ideas and gotten some rather good experiments run.
So, how do you deal with the rainy season?
When I was more involved in my own musicality I took a few classes ranging from Music Appreciation to History of Music. In one of those classes I first heard of the Doctrine of Ethos. A simple explanation (lifted from Guitar Press) is that the doctrine “describes the effects of sound on human behavior and therefore its moral influence. Aristotle, in his Politics, explains how the different kinds of music, imitating specific feelings (anger, kindness, love), can affect a human being with the same kind of feelings. Therefore, says Aristotle, someone who listens to the wrong kind of music will grow up to a bad person, and vice-versa. Consequently, Aristotle (and also Plato) recommended the right kind of music in the education of young citizens.” In other words, the idea that music can effect a change of mental state. Knowing I paid attention to my emotional state to different music and quickly realized the truth in it. Heavy Metal and Punk Rock (both of which I was a fan of at the time) made me angry, rebellious, reckless and generally unpleasant. Since this wasn’t really how I wanted to feel I quit listening to music that put me in that frame of mind.
However, some nights, such as tonight, I am feeling a little melancholy and I leverage the doctrine in order to wallow to my hearts content, feeling sorry for myself, lonely and sad to the accompaniment of some over dramatic emo folk music. I know that it’s probably not healthy but at it is cathartic.
So next time you are feeling blue listen to them! Are you happy? Nothing suits that better than poppy upbeat Irish traditional or Irish rock. Feeling particularly dramatic? If your leanings are towards opera then try any number of quirky female artists. As for me, tonight I am tucking into a glass of wine, a stack of machine learning papers and an IPod full of Kate Heidke-Miller. A quirky female vocalist that has tendencies towards the melancholy with enough perky tunes to keep me smiling in a sad sort of way.
So today I talked to the species distribution group about some of the work that I did while I was in Australia. The group today was composed of Tom (my adviser), Weng-Keen (another professor), Rebecca (name may be wrong, but new post-doc) and Phoebe (another IGERT student). While I felt that I could have gotten more done during my time in Australia I really felt pretty good about the progress. I was proud to show the maps I had created and was pleased with my grasp of the data, the data collection process and the policy impacts my work could have. Tom however seemed less than impressed. I am not, nor have I ever been, a student that was interested in the nitty gritty details of machine learning algorithms. I am however, endlessly intrigued by the possible applicaitons of them outside of the field of CS. Perhaps this means that I dont pay enough attention to the details of such algorithms and I am sure that this frustrates Tom but I told him I wasn’t interested in theory. It was just a real downer to come from ARI where the ecologists really like my work back to my university where it apparently isn’t meeting standards.
I take my quals this month. I am wondering if Tom is going to pass me or just suggest that I get my masters and go. That would crush me but I would try to get into University of Melbourne and do my PhD there I guess.
Le sigh.
I have long battled the winter blues that are so common found in those that reside in the upper left coast. The rainy season here last from fall through to late spring. The skies are heavy grey and laden with rain. The sun rarely shows it’s face. After weeks of rain you never really feel dry. Your clothing is damp, your car is damp, the ground becomes a quagmire. Any step can result in a comic flailing as you try to keep your footing on a surface that seems to have ignored the laws of friction, sliding madly, arms windmilling as you try, and sometimes failing, to keep from falling. Every step squelches and carpets take on the color of the mud tracked in no matter how carefully you clean your shoes.
Spring in my yard
Then, without warning, the sun peeks through, burns off the grey, dries out the damp and spring has arrived….at least for today. Even after spending my entire life here these days surprise me. You begin to feel as if nice weather will never return and then its here. This morning I sat on my porch with a book and a cup of coffee and soaked up sun as if I was a sponge. The swallows are swooping and diving over the field below my house. Trilling and twittering, “here’s a bug! I fly faster than you! I need a mate! I have a nest site!”. The brush along the fence line is alive with bird song, small beetles and butterflies bumble past on wings either stubby or graceful. Hummingbirds dart past fighting for territory and searching for early blooms on which to feed. And I am at peace. This is why I love the upper left coast.
I was wondering if I could ever be happy here after living in Melbourne. Coming from warm summer weather, and dryness that at times was oppressing. But the birds remind me of why this, no matter how long I live else where, will always be home. Our birds may be less colorful than the lorakeets and parrots of Australia but their voices are infinitely more soothing, bright and happy conversations taking place over head with never a squawk or screech to be heard. I still miss the strange chortling warble of the magpies but the twittering swallows, operatic red wing black birds and the clicking chirps of hummingbirds speak to my earliest memories. I’ve returned in time to see the tree budding, flower tentatively unfolding, the entire world rejoicing in the return of the sun. Tomorrow it may rain again but now it will be spring rain. Rain that brings colour and life. This rain I can handle.
