Waaah

It's hot out. My head hurts, my knee is bugging me again, and everywhere I turn bad stuff is happening to people I care about. Utterly arbitrary, unmitigatedly bad crap, that I can't prevent or help with or really do much of anything about. I want to hide under the covers, but I might suffocate in this heat. It's too sticky and icky out to take a bubble bath, and the headache is getting in the way of my attempts to read anything more complex than my Page-A-Day calendar.

I keep trying to focus on work, and think of anything I might be forgetting schedule and prep-wise, but my mind just keeps going to everything happening around me.

If something good is going on in your world, please let me know? Because I've been hearing far too much bad news lately, and I could really use some vicarious happiness.....

At The Other End Of The Day

Finally, the air has cooled down and I'm starting to feel more like a human being. You'd think after thirty years I'd learn that being physically miserable makes everything else seem more immediate and dramatic and impossible to cope with, but it's still hard to see that while I'm in the middle of it.

But now it's approaching cool outside, and I have a fan moving the air around, and space to stretch out my legs, and time to breathe, and everything feels a heck of a lot better. I also have a new book from the library that I've been waiting for, an excuse to bake for friends this weekend, and a shiny new silver belly-button ring.

I surprise myself sometimes with how much I've turned to retail therapy over the past year or so - it's the biggest marker of my change in financial status, more than any particular lifestyle alterations. I don't eat differently, I don't live in a shinier place, or drive a fancier car, or wear designer clothes, or change purses every week, but if I want something, I can buy it. If I see a new paperback novel by my favorite author, I don't have to decide between that and lunch. I can have both. I can buy a new pair of earrings just because I like them. I don't have to feel guilty and spendthrifty when I get yarn for a new crochet project. I can't ever remember being in this situation before - I went from growing up with food stamps and free school lunch tickets to being a scholarship and financial aid student in college and grad school, to struggling to pay my loans as a new grad, and I'm not quite sure when the change occurred. Now I just have to be careful not to swing too far in the other direction - I may be financially stable, but I'm certainly not wealthy, and I need to remember that.

Right now, though, I refuse to worry. It's late, and I've managed to relax enough that I can feel my shoulders again, and it's almost the weekend. Time for me to turn in for the night....