Tonight I recieved a very welcome endorphin boost upon riding my cross bike fast up and down steep terrain, over rough and smooth singletrack. Its always a nice surprise when one feels more fit than one expects to feel, as I did this evening. I danced on the pedals ascending, and dropped like a rock descending. The ride to the top of Sidewinder, down Redsands, and over Your Mom/Freeway/Reserve took no more than 50 minutes.

Approaching home, at the corner of Straughan and Warm Springs Ave, I ran into an ex-coworker of mine, Antonio Gonzalez. We chatted and he invited me to coffee along with another ex-coworker of mine, Keith. As I expected, the Java in Hyde Park was closed, so we met at Lucky 13 instead. There we talked about all manner of things including cute dogs, sex, the physics involved in wheel design, a guy named John, and my girlfriend's profession, among other topics. I drank a beer, which is an especially enjoyable thing to drink after an endorphin-fest.

Only a little over a week ago I was mightly depressed. Having experienced depression off and on again throughout most of my life, I knew that the current depression would eventually turn off, as it did last Monday. For me, as I suspect for a lot of people, ups and downs are a fact of life. As serious and reasonable as the things which I think are causing the downs might be at the time, I know that the actual feelings are not very well justified, and that they most certainly arise from a pseudo-natural biochemical imbalance, and that its only a matter of time until I'm feeling much better. And I've got to admit that I'm proud of the fact that I usually come out of a depression feeling better than I did before entering it. Its almost like a soul cleansing in some weird way. A great deal of productivity often happens as a reaction against depression. My hope is that the productivity or changes I make will ultimately lessen the intensity and frequency of future mini-depressions.

I'm very excited about the most recent changes I've made. They don't simply constitute a reaction against a recent low, but represent a proactive step as a direct result of thinking seriously about the broad subject of happiness for some time now. Since I'm already sounding like the author of a corny self-help book, I'll go ahead and say that it feels as though I've made a "breakthrough" of some sort, and to hear more about it, you'll have to visit my blog again in the near future. Goodnight.