'Tis the Season to Be Sickly...

Ugh. Did anyone get the number of that truck? And could someone get it to come back and finish the job? Apparently running me over and then backing up and running me over again didn't quite do me in completely.

I do not have time for this. I'm supposed to be packing and moving things. I was supposed to have my entire kitchen moved by this point, and be halfway through sorting my clothes into "keep" and "send to Goodwill" piles. Instead, I'm laying on the couch playing the Hot/Cold game. I'm hot, so I open the balcony doors. I'm cold, so I close them and grab a blanket. Repeat ad infinitum. And my head's all stuffed up. I feel like that little kid on the cold commercial that tells his mom that only one side of his nose is working.

I know it's not the flu, since I got a flu shot this year. It's not the same bug that Zappagirl is currently battling. I'm not coughing, and I don't seem to have any chest congestion. I just can't breathe, am sneezing frequently, and have no energy whatsoever. Standing up makes me dizzy. And while this is a cheap high, it's not the optimal condition to be in when packing wine glasses.

So, as much as I hated to do it, I called in sick today. Now I know that's what sick days are for, but I have been guilting myself about this all day. (Well, the few hours that I was conscious - I slept a lot today.) Somewhere in my head, I decided that calling in sick for a cold was a complete cop-out, and sick days should be for major illnesses (that last for a day or two). According to my screwed up moral code, I should have just stopped at Walgreens on the way to work and spent the day at my desk in a Dayquil-induced daze. Instead I was a whiny little baby and called in over a case of the sniffles and a fever.

(And yes, I do have a fever. I just checked - I'm currently simmering at 99.6, and I'm usually closer to 98 degrees even. By the way, glass thermometers are evil. I had a digital one at some point, but it seems to have wandered off. I have a new respect for my mother at the moment, because trying to hold the stupid thing under my tongue for the required five minutes was a complete pain in the butt. Trying to convince a child to do this constitutes a small miracle.)

And to make matters worse, I wasted the entire day by sleeping. Yes, I know this is my body trying to tell me to slow down and stop stressing, but this loss of valuable time when I need it the most just makes me more stressed. Stress is compounded by more stress, and it just makes me angry and depressed.

The time of the year isn't helping matters much. I have really come to dislike the winter holiday season, and I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the commercialism and residual retail syndrome. All of the stores have had their decorations up for at least a month, all of the advertisements on television have been telling me that spending a lot of money is the best way to celebrate, and Best Buy keeps telling me what a valuable customer I am and keeps sending me invitations to preferred customer weekends that have neither the time nor funds to visit. And while I don't blindly buy into the "spend money and buy the love of your friends and family" thing (no pun intended), it makes me feel bad that I declared my monetary problems more important than everyone else's and postponed the exchanging of gifts until February. I'm not even going to make cookies this year, and this is another Catch 22 for me. See, I make a pretty good batch of holiday cookies, and it's become a pride thing that's ballooned out of control. It's now gotten to the point that I end up making something like 12 dozen sugar cookies and 16 dozen Russian tea cakes, and it ceases to be a fun way to spend an evening and more of a twelve hour ordeal that I can't even do in my own kitchen since I don't have enough counter space for the cooling racks, let alone the numerous cookie tins to be distributed. (Mom usually volunteers her kitchen, and after about six dozen or so cookies, we're getting on each other nerves.) But as ridiculous as the whole production number is, the thought of not making cookies is almost as bad. At this point, the cookies are like the presents: delayed until a later date.

I don't know. I've noticed I have a tendency to get depressed and discouraged during this time of the year. (You know, more than I usually am.) The weather starts to change, the temperature starts to drop, and my spirits follow suit. The majority of crappy times in my life tend to happen at the end of the year, and I've never quite figured out if this is just a random thing. Maybe it's the subconscious looking back over the last twelve months and not being entirely happy with the way things went, wondering why I couldn't have handled things differently here and there. Like I said earlier, I hold myself to a rather strange moral code, and I'm rather self-critical and self-abusive towards myself. Adding in the stress of no time, no money, and a change in residence makes matters worse. Some days I'm better than others, but with the compromised health and resulting day of slack, today hasn't been a good one. And that just makes things worse.

(This is usually the point where I diagnose myself with Seasonal Affective Disorder, simply because it has a better ring to it than dysthymia. Of course, that doesn't make sense, since I avoid daylight in the non-winter months. I'm not a licensed mental health professional, but I play one on TV.)

Ick. I almost don't want to post this because it's so depressing, but I want to feel like I accomplished something. Sleeping and making tomato soup doesn't count as productive.