User Profile

Grumpy, moody wingy, snappy, tetchy, devious, and fretful; not the cast list for a Darkside production of Snow White (with Crabby, Demanding, and Spiteful as understudies), but a summary of your defining gracelessness. Depressing, isn’t it? Notice that they are all diminutive Disneyfied versions of big, bad feelings. You yearn to be Wagnerian, but are too negative-and who ever heard of Valkyries riding down to snatch squashed crabs off the battlefield to glory in some crustacean Valhalla? You’ll never be more than just another pebble on the beach, negligible in the scheme of things, and you are perversely proud of your strong grip on the essential futility of existence.

Let’s cheer ourselves up some more, why don’t we? You distrust life and have no faith in the future-not surprising really, considering the behavior of the tides. One minute there you are on a nice, wide moonlit strand, with executive rockpool, plenty of lugworms; then whoosh-everything’s covered in saltwater, and your whole life is sucked away; you regroup, restart, then six hours later it happens all over again. What’s the point?

To build immunity against fate’s random cruelty, you look for homeopathic doses of gloom wherever you scuttle; to you, everything is a potential Bambi’s-mom moment, and you can well up over anything lonely, plangent, and hopeless that can’t fight back: pieces of string too short for use, individual fruit pies, the last Christmas goose in the store (a pointless sacrifice left unsold in the deep freeze).

And let’s not get you started on the potency of cheap music. At the same time (I did mention mood swings, didn’t I?), you love to whine about everyone and everything and are shamelessly addicted to Schadenfreude-that delicious trickle in the heart that you get when a dear friend falls off life’s carousel.

You remember everything nasty anybody ever said about you (you dismiss the good stuff) and all your friends’ transgressions (people tell you the oddest things), but you never, ever give away your own emotional secrets. The undiscerning think this is because you are shy and diffident, and you work hard to promote that illusion; actually, it’s because you are afraid people might use them against you, just as you would against them. You are always looking through the blue glass (which is of course half empty), scanning for anything that could, at a certain angle, be defined as an insult or a slight, to add to your impressive grudge-mountain. You may forgive, but you never forget (actually, delete forgive- you don’t do that, either). Bygones? Ha! Closure? Move on? You?

If you ever feel in danger of enjoying yourself, you activate your powerful fret drive, so that you can worry ceaselessly about stuff you can do nothing about. This stops you have to take action about stuff you can do something about: you are constantly crossing bridges that don't even have a building permit.