rose-tinted

As I was walking home tonight from having an excellent conversation with a friend, I saw three people standing on the corner and squinting and pointing in my vicinity. I thought maybe they needed some directions, and so I paused and looked at one of the men. He did a double take and said to me, "Aw, it's all right, love, we were just admiring your beauty." I thanked him and laughed, and the girl in the group turned to me and said, "Do you have a boyfriend?" I laughed again and said no, and the first man told me (but not in a creepy way) that his friends were trying to hook him up and asked my name. As they seemed friendly and harmless I shook his hand and introduced myself, and asked them if they needed any directions. The second man in the group told me that he had simply been trying to get them to look at the twilit sky through his blue sunglasses, and offered them to me. I looked and admired the deep indigo, handed the glasses back, crossed the street and went home.
It was a surprisingly relaxed ending to an overall annoying weekend: it's been Pride here in Chicago, and I've been feeling irritable and left out because I had to work the entire time. I write on here so often about how goddamn happy I am, but that level of up tends to lead to the occasional day or two of feeling down and grouchy and generally much less happy. It's inevitable; it would be almost impossible for me to keep up this feeling of joy all the time, and so I accept my down days and wait patiently for them to pass so that I can feel sparkly again. This weekend was particularly rough, though, because I could tell I was headed for a downswing and I was also just so jealous of all of my friends, drinking in the streets and flogging each other on parade floats and dressing up in outrageous costumes.
I'm proud of my current ability to wait out these downswings of mood. When you know that it will pass, it's so much easier to prevent yourself from extending the depression into something that will hurt you for longer. Recognizing the roots of my discontent defuses it and makes it into just a phase to wait through. And so I take time to myself, write angsty journal rants, dress up in cute clothes for the hell of it, make myself smell the flowers at work and just generally accept that life is full of nights that make you want to scream and punch something but that those nights are just that: nights. They pass. And then I look at the dusky sky through a stranger's glasses and laugh my way home to bake a strawberry rhubarb pie to share with my friends.