At times, I notice I am in a bad mood, and I decide I should do something about it.

Of course, the most obvious thing to do is blame the universe. This is an all-purpose remedy for all kinds of terrible feelings. The laws of thermodynamics mean that eventually humanity will disappear, the Sun will fail, and the vast diversity of time and space will resolve into an undifferentiated absence. Sometimes, thinking that way helps, because it reminds me that in the grand scheme of things, I don’t matter and neither does the tendency of things not to go the way I want. My bad mood is, I realize, beside the point. Mostly that doesn’t improve my mood, though. I don’t know why.

It is also only marginally useful to argue inside my head with people who aren’t there, though that’s one of my go-to methods of cheering myself up. Lately, I have been having a running argument in my head with the young veterinarians at the practice where I take my overweight cat, because they insist on lecturing me about his weight. The downside of hypothetical arguments is that even though I always win them, they keep cropping up again, and I just get mad all over. I can be annoyed at my overweight cat in person, mind you, and I do, because he is obsessed with keeping his weight up and he takes action to ensure I overfeed him. But getting mad at him doesn’t fix anything. He just head-butts me, gently bites my arm, stands on me, follows me swatting me in the legs, and drags his toys over to the food plate, all the while screaming in his little baby voice at me and staring holes in my upper arm.

Sometimes I argue with people who aren’t there and who I will never see again. That’s always a strategy. They are still wrong, though, and they still think I’m wrong, and arguing with them just doesn’t seem to lift my mood. It does distract me from any possible other reasons I might be grumpy.

The next most obvious solution for a bad mood is to escape, whether with a mindless movie, non-nutritional snacks, texting cat pictures to friends, reading social media, or re-reading a Terry Pratchett novel. The Terry Pratchett novel is usually the most successful escape strategy, except that his funny cynicism sometimes backfires and I reflect gloomily that there is something wrong with me if I don’t think human beings are amusing. Snacks, however, just don’t taste as good as I think they should. Yesterday I had to tip most of a bag of peanut M&Ms into a trash can, which seemed a waste. As for movies, I rewatched The Rock with Nicholas Cage and Sean Connery the other day, and though it still had the iconic Cage weirdness and Connery in a long wig, plus the neat chains of glass balls full of poison gas that mysteriously did not kill someone if they injected atropine right into their hearts, the film was even dumber than I remembered. Reading social media these days just takes my bad mood and turns it into disbelief and outrage that people are falling for AI slop and relentless algorithms. Texting cat pictures to friends is probably the best escape solution, but there’s only so many times I can do that in a day, especially when it reminds me that Louie is still hungry.

Watching baseball games helps the mood considerably, except when the Phillies lose, whereupon I have to turn off the game and only sneak peaks at the results from time to time to see if it’s safe for me to look again. I do not take any joy in complaining about the players, which seems to be the point of baseball for many fans. I have too much sympathy for most of the athletes, young men who will be old and washed up by the time they are in their early thirties.

For relieving a bad mood, I can also recommend taking a walk, organizing a desk, cabinet, bureau, or closet, or calling a friend. This is only effective if I can persuade myself to get the hell up and do it. That also goes for the things that have been on my task list for several months now, like tightening the bobbin tension on my sewing machine. Procrastinating about those things puts me in an even worse mood.

Hanging out with like-minded people is an excellent strategy. I have many opportunities to do that, every day, because I belong to an organization that has frequent free & open meetings. I usually cheer up if I go to one of those, although there is often a feeling later on that human beings, including me, are pretty exhausting. Yes, I am an introvert, and if I recharge my batteries by engaging in chat with my friends and acquaintances, I pay for it later on in nightmare fears about having said the wrong thing or having talked too much. Also, it reminds me of how little I know about anything.

I am probably going about this in the wrong way, which wouldn’t be anything new. It occurred to me this morning that what I need to do when I am feeling glum is not to add anything to my day. I should subtract something. Useful things to subtract include feelings of obligation, caring about what other people think, judging myself and others, wanting control, thinking I’m the center of the universe, and resentment.

I mean, that’s all very good in theory, but that’s honestly the last thing on my list of strategies.

Or I could write a blog post about it, go run some water in the third floor bathroom that I never use any more, and look to see if I and look to see if I still have a knitting pattern for socks. Yes, I think I’ll do that. There you go. Better mood already.