Bruise

This is going to be one of those days. It started that way: my daughter sitting in the upstairs hallway whining that she wants to go downstairs. That’s what I woke to. I brought her into the bathroom to use the potty and she didn’t want to go because there was already pee in the toilet (we don’t flush overnight unless necessary to avoid waking the baby). There’s still a lot of sinus pressure in my head, and I have to call the dentist to schedule an appointment, and I have a meeting at work plus tons of stuff that needs doing. And here I am, whining. I’m not a fan of whining in others or myself. So this means today is the kind of day to keep my head low, to try to keep interaction with others to a minimum. It’s the best way to ensure my bad mood doesn’t do damage. In the back of my head, I keep repeating, “Tomorrow won’t be this way. Tomorrow won’t be this way.” Just get through today, do what you have to do but take your time doing it. Because I tend to move pretty quickly. I put a lot on my agenda and knock the tasks down one by one, and if I have to slow for some reason, I get frustrated. But today is a day to go slow. The toughest thing about a bad mood is the way it makes me short-sighted like this. The struggle to see past it. Yet, I know it will end. And I have to keep that in mind. That I’ll feel good again. That I’ll go back to being productive (I can actually still be productive feeling like this, just not as productive as usual). It makes the commute tough too, because in a bad mood, with a short temper, the kind of stupidity and selfishness one sees on a commute tests my patience.

Part of it, of course, is that the weekend feels as though it passed too quickly. The other part is that though I went to bed at 9:45, I don’t feel like I rested. I had dreams all night, a long sequence of dreams and though they weren’t weird, I feel like the dreams drained me at a time I otherwise should have been resting. Aside from knowing I won’t always feel this crappy, that it’s likely this will pass by tomorrow, or maybe if I’m lucky, this afternoon, I have to keep my composure. One of those things I think and believe to be true (though it’s really just an opinion) is that the true measure of a person can be taken at times when they’re out of sorts, moody, lacking rest, when they’re not feeling great. How do they treat other people? Do they snap and take their bad mood out on others? Do they hold it in and make the best of the situation? I tend to fall in between, though I do strive to try not taking it out on others. I think most of all what perturbs me when I get like this is I can’t write. I had aimed to finish my novel edit by the end of May, and I’m very close to the end. I’ve got two chapters left on my read-through, but it’s been difficult to summon the strength at the end of the day after we’ve put our kids to bed to do the recordings. So I wanted to try to bring the computer today and do some recording during my lunch break but my wife needs it at home. And even I’d brought it, it would be a struggle to do the recording feeling like this. Most of all, I’m not really giving myself a break based on being sick. Obviously, you don’t get a break from parenting when you’re ill, but I’m not cutting myself any slack for the rest of it either, and I probably should.