Phillip, I have to second what the old hands here have said. I am so grateful to you for all the work you've done to make this place and make it a welcoming, useful and fun place for so many people. It's so easy to take it for granted, then I read all you were going through when you were setting it up and get really in awe of your combination of energy, technical knowledge, political passion and human warmth.
I hope somebody, maybe a creative doctor or maybe you doing your own research, can find out what the summer blahs are about. Chances are it's a couple unrelated things mixed into an unhealthy brew. Those unholy alliances are always so hard to fight, you concentrate on fighting one of the bad partners and the other gets behind you unawares. So often one is physical and one is mental. I would definitely try to find out if others with hypoglycemia ever experience this.
I know I hate the heat and the humidity this time of year and have the AC grinding almost all the time. If that means I get less exercise than I need, of course that makes it worse. The Northeast usually goes from too cold to too hot without anything between (I'm living in Boston). A lot of times I don't get out on weekends till the early evening when it moderates. At least in my neighborhood there are pretty places to walk, from the Emerald Necklace (a string of parks and ponds running through Boston) to Arnold Arboretum and the beautifully landscaped nineteenth-century Forest Hills Cemetery. I did that last night, walked around an hour, said good night to the birds as they did their last things between the grass and trees and felt a lot better for it.
GLBT contra dancing is another local resource I just started using, just down the street at the UU church. I 'cant' dance' but I'm learning and so is everybody else. It's fun to try to move through all the brain-challenging patterns and in the end you have taken everybody's hand and spun everybody in the room around a few times. And looked in their eyes, which keeps you from getting dizzy during the swings!
There are definitely times of the week where a sadness is more likely to come over me, and I know it's from past associations. Sunday nights when the fun was coming to an end and I had to do the homework I had put off, while my mother was also getting depressed because she had to get planning her week's kindergarten activities. These things can stay with you long after you stop having homework. You have probably already dug around in your past to know what came into or went out of your summers when you were growing up. My experience is that it's working crawling around in the muck just a bit just in case you have the Eureka experience and find that one bad summer event from way back that you had repressed. Or maybe, it was the structure and stimulation of the school year you always missed, since I have the feeling you really enjoyed and excelled in some of your classes.
Anyway - hope you're getting the better of it this year. My warmest wishes and thanks!
Andrew
