Melancholy on a Snowy Day

KEYS to feeling bad... and to feeling better

The first time I wrote with any frequency on close to a daily basis was my senior year in high school. My girlfriend at the end of the my junior year, my first serious girlfriend, gave me a journal suggesting I might like writing in it. I’d never been terribly interested in journaling, you know, lazy, lazy man, but someone I like gave it to me, so I gave it a try. For some reason, I never opened the copy of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland that she gave me at the same time. I still have it though, and one of these days, I like to imagine I’ll read the masterpiece through a thin fog of remembrances of high school angst, and think “Man, this guy really hated Jews.”

I filled the volume up and continued journaling through my freshman and into my sophomore year of college. I stopped in fall of my sophomore year following a nasty period of depression induced by untreated OCD. I wrote about some of my darker feelings during that period, and then a month or two later, I read it back. I read all of my journals back and discovered that I mostly wrote when I was feeling down, creating the illusion that my life was an unending continuum ranging from sadness to ennui. But was not my life. I was mostly happy my senior year of high school, if a little bored, and my freshman year of college had been difficult but not without real periods of joy. I tore out the pages from my depressed period and threw them away—I never wanted to read them again—and stopped journaling. I saw no point in making a chronicle of my worst moments. (Note: Which is perhaps why I’m not omni TikTok.)

I didn't really start “journaling” again until 2004 when I started the blog Jose’ Melendez’s KEYS TO THE GAME. I wrote maybe 150,000 words a year for four years, but the writing was mostly joyful. The Sox won two World Series in that span, and the sad was baseball sad, not depression sad (note: save for after game 3 of the 2004 ALCS … and also after every other loss.) Yes, I wrote about some real hardships in there, but it’s in the form of complicated metaphors about the incompetence of Alex Rodriguez (note: I dare you to figure out the metaphor in KEY 1), or some such. And often when I read them back, I’m not even sure what I was upset about. I started doing travel writing on a 2005 trip to South America and continued writing about my adventures in Africa (note: which are still available to be represented by a literary agent with vision!). And while Africa is sometimes sad, much of what I wrote was so joyful that it could have been an ineffective campaign message. In other words, my writing these days is a more well-rounded chronicle of my life’s adventures than the moody missives I want to forget from my youth.

In that spirit, here is a moody missive, albeit from middle age.

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These last two weeks have been incredibly hard. My kids are sick, my wife is away, DC wrongly sent me an enormous tax bill that took two days to fix, certain political events have transpired. (Note: Note my use of passive voice. This blog is non-political!) It is also raining. Constantly.

It is the sort of environment in which little things become big things, and big things become crushing. Thankfully, there have been no big things. Still, it’s been a banner week of me questioning myself. Mostly, I’ve questioned my competence as a parent. When I can put on my professional analyst’s hat (note: not that kind of analyst) and think logically, damn near everything I’ve done has been more or less the right decision. Harm reduction, baby! But when I put on my exhausted, stressed-out dad hat (note: which fits a lot better these days), I have taken an impressive series of short cuts and done a remarkable number of half-assed jobs. In the last nine school days, I have had both kids in school a grand total of one day. I tried to get them both in this Monday and they sent C home 45 minutes in. As a result, they have watched an enormous amount of television. For the last two days, my son has watched at least three Despicable Me movies a day. And when the healthy kid gets home, I have no energy, so it’s “kids dinner” (note: read crap) in front of the TV. When I finally get everyone to bed by nine, if I’m lucky, I am in such desperate need of me time, that I stay up until one, doing nothing in particular, thereby setting myself up for another hard day.

Tonight, I decided to make a real dinner. Seared duck breast, Japanese rice, and roasted cauliflower. When I told my daughter, who has loved duck every time she’s eaten it, she informed me that she is now a vegetarian and no longer eats meat. I was incensed.

To be clear, while I regard vegetarians as joyless rainclouds hanging over a meal and society in general, I completely accept and celebrate their right to choose this terrible lifestyle. (Note: Do not send angry notes. That was a joke… mostly.) And if my daughter committed to vegetarianism out of a belief in animal rights, environmentalism, or simple preference, I would support her in any way I could, save for cooking a separate meal or putting in any other kind of physical effort. What I could not tolerate, however, was her appropriation of vegetarianism as a way to get more crappy kid food. I’m pretty sure that in her world, a vegetarian diet is comprised mostly of cheese pizza, mac and cheese, buttered noodles, and fruit. I am in favor of children experimenting and exploring. I am opposed to children playing me.

Thus, I responded by noting that she is going to have to eat a lot of beans and pretty much every vegetable if she is going to be a vegetarian. She doesn’t like beans, and she’s iffy on a lot of vegetables, but she insisted she would. (Note: And in fairness to her, she’s a pretty adventurous eater for a six-year-old, which is great except for when she eats $20 of raw oysters.) I was getting desperate. I noted that vegetarians do not eat chicken nuggets. She did not care. (Note: If my friend Karen is reading this, I remember in your vegetarian and even vegan days that when you would get meat cravings, it was always hot dogs.)

“I can just be a vegetarian except for sausages,” she declared.

“Sausages are the least vegetarian thing in the world,” I explained. “If you still want sausages, you aren’t a vegetarian, you are just a girls who doesn’t want to eat what I made for dinner.”

She had two helpings of duck.

(Note: If my friend Karen is reading this, I remember in your vegetarian and even vegan days that when you would get meat cravings, it was always hot dogs.)

I’ve also questioned my value as a member of the workforce, which as everyone knows, is the most important measure of a human beings worth under capitalism. (Note: But seriously, I love capitalism. Well-regulated capitalism, with an ample social safety net.)

I am a reasonably accomplished guy. I have had two successful and interesting careers. The first as a Boston guy doing Boston stuff in the greater world of Massachusetts politics and public affairs. I helped the Red Sox get funding for the new Fenway (terrible); I helped them with the sale of the team to John Henry (good but feeling bad these days); I promoted cranberries (good bordering on saintly). I also organized communities and got more than $35 million of investments into the Massachusetts workforce development system, including some programs that became recurring line items and national models.

The second was as an Africa analyst learning the ins and outs of various slices of an impossibly interesting continent and writing things about them that important people (note: sometimes) read.

I have a good resume. And yet as I’ve searched for work in Geneva, it’s been demoralizing. On the bad days, the interviews ending (note: and in some cases starting) with “we’re not hiring” and the applications outright ignored are exhausting. On better days, I’m able to realize that the problem is that I’m an Africa expert based in—get this—not Africa, and that comes, very reasonably, with fundamental limitations on one’s employability. There are just not that many jobs here for people like me, at least outside of the UN system, where open jobs these days are largely filled by UN employees whose jobs have ended, which is fair enough.

The other problem is that I like the deal I have. Spending time with my kids and traveling Europe is extremely nice, and I kind of don’t want to give it up. (Note to prospective employers: But I would totally give it up for you.)

There is an upside to this, however. When I am applying for jobs that I don’t expect to get and am not desperate to have, there is a certain freedom. Most job applications still involve cover letters, which are a chore to write, especially when you’re probably writing them to be scanned by AI for keywords. So for jobs that are long shots, I’ve taken to using them as writing exercises. How can I make this letter stand out without outright insulting the employer? For example, I wrote a letter today to an organization combating overfishing starting with my direct descent from a whaleman. Hopefully, I won’t get dinged because whales are not fish.

I think this strategy can work. When I applied for the workforce development job, I thought I was a long shot. Liberated by this belief, during one of my interviews, I did a magic trick. It was simple sleight of hand with a quarter. I used it to make a point about corporate social responsibility (note: that it’s an illusion). The entire time I had the job, I wondered how they’d still decided to hire me after that bit of flare, but didn’t want to ask for fear of getting negative feedback. At my goodbye dinner when I left for graduate school, I finally asked the remnants of the panel that hired me and got the most heartbreaking answer possible: No one even remembered.

This is good. When I started writing this the kids were awake, I was sad, and I was on my first glass of wine. Now, the kids are asleep, I am on my third class of wine, and recalling that magic trick has made be feel a bit better.

I suppose that’s the thing to remember. There are always reasons to feel worse and reasons to feel better; the trick is not to neglect the reasons for feeling bad while focusing on the reasons to feel good.

It has been two crushing weeks; I am exhausted, and I am not quite the father or the prospective employee that I wished to be this week. But you know what? At about 9 this morning the rain turned to snow, and for an hour or two, Geneva was white and soft and quiet. My daughter and her best friend built a very small snowman (bonhomme de neige) at recess. And even my son managed to chirp out “It’s snowing” in between hacking coughs.

This is what happier looks like.

And that, my friends, is why you can’t just write when you’re sad. It’s good therapy, perhaps, but your journal of misery is never going to remind of that soothing sheet of frosty white.