What a day it has been, what a rare mood I'm in!

Funny how some days just to go right downhill.  Like yesterday, for instance, which was fine enough until I got the idea to look myself up on Goodreads.  This was prompted by a news article that spoke of Amazon's purchase of Goodreads. I hadn't thought of Goodreads since my book came out, and I liked almost all the fifteen reviews posted for my book on Amazon;  Well, that was a bad maneuver.  The readers on Goodreads gave the book a relatively low cumulative score, can't remember now--embarrassment and despair has blurred the memory--but it was  something like 2.6, not good for a straight "A" over achiever.  And the comments!  "All he talks about is sex," "narcissist," "boring," "supposedly he's some world class professor, so he could have written something meaningful, but all that sex, who cares"?  No, no, the inner me was sobbing, you don't understand, I was just describing the way I managed a life in the male world when I was young, or I was just describing the efforts I went to for some kind of male sex life in all those years of marriage.  Hey, didn't you read the introduction?  The sex per se didn't matter, I wrote that in the intro!  There was even a comment from someone who I think was my late wife's niece to say that I must have been a teenaged sexual bully! Was she projecting from the book or her familiarity? My insecurities welled up in me, my need to please, to hear applause, caused my heart to pound. 
I shut the computer and turned to the March 11th issue of The New Yorker  for distraction. The first article was on insomnia, perhaps not the best way to begin, since it's been a problem for years. Not long ago my kids hinted--then encouraged by my husband--flat out told me to get Zoloft, but the psychopharmacologist to whom I was sent, after getting me to describe in one hour my life story, opined that I was already so manic that he was afraid that a prescription from him for Zoloft would just put me over the top.  That encounter has given a little spice to the midnight meditations on my sleepless nights! Next, it was the writer of an article on John Kerry's fluent French who happened to mention Bradley Cooper's fluent French.  That gorgeous hunk? fluent French? learned in a college semester at Aix en Provence? I turned to YouTube, and yes, there he was being interviewed on French television speaking in French!  The comments beneath included one from some French person who claimed that Cooper's French was so good no one would know he was a foreigner.  I looked at the sidebar and there was an item featuring Jodi Foster and, damn, if she didn't speak fluent French on television as well.  My insecurities mounted.  I was once a professor of ancient languages, a cultured man of the world, I have studied all the major European languages, but I don't speak fluently, not in French, nor German, nor Spanish, and in Italian, well,  I lived there long enough to speak it easily, and now without practice haltingly, but fluently? go on a television talk show?  Nowadays when English language study is mandatory across much of the continent,  Europeans upon hearing me speak their language immediately switch to flawless English. My ego was collapsing rapidly as  I turned to the article on the jazz pianist Jason Moran which described his considerable talents as they appeared to him in his early youth. Alas, poor Charles, now so vulnerable and in weakened psychic state, could only fasten on the memory of little Charles visibly trembling, sitting at the piano, after maybe six years of lessons, still not able to get it together for his teacher's recital program.  With a deep sigh I moved on to an article on the life of Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as she turns eighty, almost my coeval, having lived a life filled-- no jammed, bursting to the seams--with accomplishment.  By now my sense of failure let me identify with the psychological frailty and damage in the miserable life of Aaron Swartz, the topic of the very next article. 
With relief I put the magazine down; it was time for the evening film.   Netflix had sent us Crumb, the documentary of an extraordinarily weird personality with the focus of course on his equally weird comic book art, both of which were marvels of sanity in comparison with his brothers, who were also interviewed at length. So much madness, anger, and manic highs on display for two hours!  Whew! It was now nine o'clock and I was ready to slit my wrists, but luckily I had noted the name of David Boeddinghaus, the piano player in the sound track of Crumb whose soothing ragtime piano I soon found on YouTube where he was playing with Andy Schumm and his Gang.  The wretched fragments of the day were stitched up, and, as Samuel  Pepys would say, so to bed.