‘Bummed out,’ she wrote

One of my sweet young students, who dropped out of sight during our 10-session writing course, finally reacted to her classmates’ text and e-mailed to explain that she stopped coming to class because "I just sort of got bummed out. Not by the class or the teacher or the course, but you know how it is when something happens or someone arrives and poof, you’re bummed? Well, that happened to me. It’s really nothing serious and no, I am not depressed. Haha!"

Bummed out. I hadn’t heard that since my daughters grew up. I regularly bummed out one daughter just by being me. I would hear her telling a friend on the phone, "My Mom is such a bummer..." whereupon I would tell her I wanted to use the phone and that would bum her out even more. This before cell phones and Walkmans calmed the ruffled waters between parent and adolescent. Now everyone can have her own phone and listen to his own music.

Bummed out. So that’s how you spell it. I thought it was bombed out because my daughter behaved like I had set off a bomb beside her and blasted her dreams to kingdom come. But no, contextually, which is the way we determine the meaning of new words, I think bummed out describes the way you feel when someone spoils things for you, gets in your way, rains on your parade. You get demotivated. You feel doused like someone did something to scintillating effervescent you and all your bubbles died. Now you don’t want to do anything constructive or fizzy. You could do something destructive but that would not be nice so you do nothing, which is what bums do well, so you’re bummed. Me, I stay in my pajamas and drag myself around like a balloon losing helium. I know the feeling well. It’s a bummer.

What causes bummers? Sometimes nothing, just the position of the planets. You wake up and feel ble-e-e-a-a-a-h. That’s just an escapist notion, not true. Something causes these bummers, usually a person or event that reminds us of a situation we know we need to sort out but we don’t want to just yet so we avoid it until this person shows up or this event happens and – boom – we have to face it before we’re ready. Those are the nuances of bummers.

My student says, "When I get bummed I become pragmatic and stupid at the same time." I, 300 years older, say, "When I get bummed, I get paralyzed. Body and mind freeze. Body won’t do, mind won’t process anything, so I become stupid." When some frogs sense danger, they don’t move believing the enemy will mistake them for stones. Thus they become invisible, they think. Frogs believe that if you are unseen and undetected, you are safe.

"It’s weird," my student says, "I get sharper but less creative at the same time." When I’m bummed out, I freeze but my self-protective instincts get very sharp, anticipate every possible move the person who bummed me out might make. If it’s a situation, then I invent every possible twist and turn of the thickening plot. In this sense my creativity works overtime, is focused on the situation or person but I too would have no creative energy left over for writing class.

What to do then? My philosophy is if you wait long enough and do nothing, little dwarves who live inside you turn the wheels and make your motor work. One day, just like that, as if your Prozac or lithium kicked in, you wake up and there you are ticking like new. This does not work over the holidays because all the little dwarves in the universe are helping Santa so you may have to fix yourself. When you have no help from your little friends, holidays will make you wallow in bummerland. Don’t despair, the dwarves will be back when the holidays are over.

Like my sweet young student, I just sort of got bummed out so I missed my column last week. It’s really nothing serious and no, I am not depressed. Haha! You can say that again: haha!

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