Inventing Reasons to Be Sullen

It’s not hard to imagine exemplary instances of shittiness that would justify a certain level of morose grumbling. Say your cubicle is so far inland and the windows on the outside edges of the square building are so tiny that sunlight doesn’t penetrate your work universe except as a far off glare. Say your upstairs neighbors have a large stereo and are big fans of Daddy Yankee. Say Cholie’s pizza goes out of business and the 2 for 10 deal on which you’ve relied every Tuesday and Thursday for about three years goes out with it. Say you have hemophilia or at least go around acting like you have hemophilia and being careful at all times. Say the last true physical adrenaline rush you felt involved a reenactment of Michael Jordan driving on Craig Ehlo with you reprising the role of “spotup-shooting white guy who gets burned.”
All of this shittiness could exist, but the desire to fixate on these or other manifestations of it is no good. I do not condone the diametric opposite of bootstrapping – it’s a pet peeve. Being sullen may not always be a choice, in the same sense that being sane or being joyful or being slow-witted may not always be a choice. But increasingly I’ve found myself hovering in physical space with people who seem to enjoy not enjoying anything at all, and I want to kick their shins repeatedly. In my particular circumstance, they are dreary teachers with tenure, feeble imaginations, and unbridled animosity, but I’m sure they take many forms. The exuberance they feel for bitching and moaning has had a salutary (if also antagonistic) effect for others: we appear to be relatively stoic in keeping complaints tethered or at least in not expending a lot of energy trying to find things to complain about. I have no thesis – the glass is not always half-full, nor should it be, given our current liquid predicaments, nor is silent suffering necessarily an end worth seeking – I’m just thinking out loud to drown out the braying from next door. Maybe this situation is better than being around people who are constantly finding little instances that called for joyousness and constantly called attention to it.