Cheering myself up

A few youtube videos, mostly just with pretty pictures under the music (the pictures as much of the music being why they were chosen) because I'm just tired and sad today:

1. It was 77 F when I got up this morning. It's brutally hot. It was 80F in my office yesterday which is not conducive to work, but what I'm working on right now, I have to do over there.

2. My allergies are bad. Something is making pollen. I have one eye that is slightly hived up.

3. The news of the world is bad. This morning on some chat show they were talking about "bad guys" and "good guys" and I just wanted to scream at the tv, "They're ALL bad guys! WE'RE all bad guys!" Feeling rather....Calvinistic isn't quite the right word there, but I don't know what is. That all of humanity (self included) is selfish and exclusionary and there's no one who is good.

4. Concern that all that's going on societally and all is going to lead to a "hardening" of people, where they only want to interact with people who are exactly like them or who agree with them 100% or fit some "purity test" for their group. And as a weirdo who has always had friends of different groups and orientations and everything, I worry I'm going to be left on the outside of every group, because I have not chosen to ally myself with one.

(Possible source of this, I realized: when I was in 4th or 5th grade, I had two good friends who for some reason strongly disliked each other. They then decided they wanted me to 'choose' between them who my better friend was. And I couldn't DO that, I was like "I like you both equally but we do different stuff together" and it ended with them freezing me out for a week as a "test" of my friendship. Yeah. Girls are strange and weird and anyone who does the "girls are just such little angels" gets a hard stare from me because I remember those kinds of experiences growing up as a girl. Don't know that boys are any better, but my stereotype is that they tend to be more direct - or at least, used to, when I was a kid: if two boys had some disagreement they'd usually fight over it - like, a real "fight! fight! fight!" schoolyard fight, and then they'd have it resolved. Girls would let stuff *fester* and would bring up junk from two years ago as evidence and it was just one of those no-win situations....)

and that's my greatest fear: that I will be left alone, with no one who cares about me. I'm sure part of this is a legacy of my childhood. And yeah, I know it's not fair to the friends I have now to say "Oh, they'll reject me in the Great Hardening" because intellectually I know they are better people than that, but emotionally - yeah, my emotions right now are as swampy as the weather. (I get a form of emotional athlete's-foot-fungus in the summers, I think).

So anyway. These are in no particular order, and as I said: some are music and nice images, some are just nice images. (And, yes a couple of them are hymns, but they're not particularly Christian-specific: they mention God but as more of a general Creator/Protector God)















It occurs to me that maybe part of the problem is with it being so hot, I've only been outside minimal amounts of time, and haven't really "looked at the world" in the way that second one discusses.