Very Odd Week.

This has been a very strange week. On the one hand, lots of good things have happened and I’ve had lots of fun; and I’ve mostly had lots of energy and no worries about my blood sugar dropping like a rock. On the other hand, having more energy apparently has given my usual winter depression more scope for making me feel depressed and getting sick. Yay.

So instead of my usual blah feeling or gray uncaring gloom, I have variation. One hour, I’m so sad I can barely face the world; and then a bit later, I’m totally normal; and then a few hours later, I’m back to feeling horrible. It’s like being a teenager again, except that I have nothing to focus on being depressed about, so I can’t convince myself that my life is ruined because of X, Y, and Z. Also, chocolate is not being particularly effective. Fish seems to help. Also caffeine and sunlight, but only for a while. Exercise doesn’t seem to help at all, but of course I’m perfectly used to walking and angsting.

My best guess is that maybe my blood sugar is bouncing around in different ways than I’m used to, because it also has scope. Honey did seem to help, and that’s a very low glycemic index food. But it really could just be the time of year.

The really weird thing is that, the other day when I was really feeling bad, but I had to go to a party for a coworker and had to have a drink to be social, it actually made me more cheerful. Alcohol never makes me cheery. Never. It’s a relaxing sort of thing to drink, sure. But it’s never made me all smiley. I mean, sure, I’m thankful for small blessings since I was rather dreading the effects of a depressant on top of feeling lousy. But it was creepy. Maybe it was all the caffeine in my blood…?

I don’t dare talk about this to my mother, because I know she’ll probably attribute it all to menopause. She’s been talking that up for the last five or ten years, even though there’s no sign of that happening yet. You guys out there can just be glad, because your mother isn’t trying to persuade you to use hormone lotions for absolutely no reason. I know sooner or later it will be that, but I didn’t see any sense crossing a bridge a full decade before you can even see the railings of it. If I start having hot flashes, that’s time enough to worry.

Oh, well. One more day of work, and this week will be over, for good and ill. Not looking forward to the icy weather, but not too worried, either. I just have to wear shoes with good traction.

Danta De online!

Thanks to some very very odd formatting of accented vowels, that very weird Irish hymnal, Dánta Dé, has been hiding in plain sight, on archive.org! (Since May 2009, apparently.)

It doesn’t list the editor. It doesn’t list the name, even. But darn it, there it is! An exercise of Murphy’s Law which is entirely in keeping with the twisted history of this ill-starred but good-intentioned publication.

Mwahahaha! Enjoy it, my friends! The tiny Irish font with the super-tiny lenition dots! The handwritten scores! The even tinier handwritten lyrics on the tiny handwritten scores! The multiple variations of spelling from every kind of Middle, Early Modern, Modern, and “New” Irish Gaelic! The abbreviations nobody else uses! And the tempos tallied up in half notes! Yes, enjoy it all, for now it can be yours.

It’s really not as bad as all my complaints would paint it, though. It’s got a good chunk of Irish religious poetry from both folk sources and great poets, and it sets them either to the melodies that go with them in tradition or with solid dignified tunes, most of them well-known. It even tries to create choral, liturgical sean-nós singing.

As an attempt to create a national Catholic hymnal in the Irish language, it was a magnificent try. The more I work with it, the more I see how others (like the great Sean O Riada) have built upon it. So even though I curse it, I recommend it too.

And I’m sure the Zoom function will be a great relief to my poor eyeballs. Heck, those scores look pretty legible when you jack them up to twice their size.