A few days ago, my psychiatrist suggested I listen to "motivational speakers." These are the guys and gals that get paid to stand in front of an auditorium full of people and tell them, "I'm happy, and you can be, too!" In a strange coincidence, the company I work for pays one of these guys to make videos to show to the employees. Every couple of months, I'm paid to sit in a cramped office in the basement of the store and watch this guy tell me how I, too, can be happy.

I might not sound like it in this diary, but I tend to be happy. I smile a lot. I laugh at my own jokes, and often at the jokes of others. I can be optimistic, and I hold others when they are crying and tell them life isn't always so bad. I even mean it.

However, I believe it's important to keep perspective on things. Life can be a shitty mess, sometimes, and it's foolish to think it's anything other than a shitty mess. If it's a shitty mess, you clean it up as best you can and move on. If you only see roses, you won't clean up the mess. It'll sit there and stink until you HAVE to do something about it.

You don't clean up the mess, and you'll never see the roses.

OK, I have to admit something, here: I used "roses" to represent the beautiful things in life, but that's a cliche, and it was intellectual laziness on my part to use it. If I were to stick with flowers as an example, I prefer orchids. They're even a better metaphor, seeing as orchids are more fragile than roses. So, clean up the shitty mess, and see the beautiful orchids it was covering up. They're precious and rare and delicate, but they're wonderful and make the work of cleaning up the shit worth it.

So, motivational speakers bother me, and I was disappointed to hear my psychiatrist recommend them. Someone who sees the awful side of human existence all day, every day, and who knows the hard work one has to put into life sometimes, should respect those struggling enough to NOT suggest they listen to some meaningless drivel full of cliches worse than roses about how all you have to do is THINK happy, and you'll BE happy.

Still, she writes the prescriptions for the Pills that keep the demons away, she has a lot of valuable common sense, and she has a sweet and pleasant accent (oddly, my therapist has a DIFFERENT sweet and pleasant accent. I guess the US is really becoming the melting-pot it always claimed to be, or at least the US mental-healthcare field is), so I guess I'll let her make one mistake.

Ciao for now, boys and girls!