Mood Swings/Archive of the Day

I'm highly averse to heat and humidity, so I'm not looking forward to another New York summer. My sister has graciously and enthusiastically suggested that I join her and hubby for the two months of their annual trip to Iowa City for the Shakespeare Festival (they’re actors in the production, they don’t go for two months just to hang around it), but this invitation is untenable; my apartment and job and worrying can’t be abandoned for eight weeks. Oh, but if they could... (in gravelly voice) what a wonderful world this would be.

The city always wears on you in some way, but during times of high stress it can seem especially vice-like. This is cyclical, of course, and I’ve recovered from similar funks in my relationship with Gotham in the past. It remains truest to say two things: that I'm prone to mood swings (though I've been told I hide them well), and that this place exacerbates both the good and bad times. And with that in mind, today's archive comes from The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace. In the novel, the following passage does not refer to New York:

I was always either so unreasonably and pointlessly happy that no one place could seem to contain me, or so melancholy, so sick and silly with sadness that there was no place I could stomach the thought of entering. I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.