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The Gift Goes On...

I had a lovely lunch today...in my room...with my best girlfriend...getting some last minute work done...with nothing to eat because I forgot to bring a lunch. It wasn't all that bad because I had just inhaled some Fig Newtons a few hours earlier. So we spent our thirty minutes swapping stories of what crappy moods we were both in yesterday and venting about the injustices of being thirty-ish and either unmarried or childless. (Ironically...or not so ironically...they are evoke similar emotions.)

I hate feeling this way--edgy and irritable. A look...a mishap...a dog drooling on my leg...dropping a washcloth coming out of the dryer...not finding anything decent on t.v....can send me into a tailspin from which I swear I can never recover. The truth is that when my petunias die because I failed to water them, I really want to cry. But I feel silly crying over dead petunias, so instead, I stomp around the house, madly scrub the tub, and say "what?" when I answer the telephone. (My therapist will be thrilled to know that I made this connection.)

And the mood (like the gift) goes on. I keep hoping that eventually I will learn to catch myself before the full-blown slam to the bottom. One day. In the meanwhile, I've issued myself a challenge. I am on a mission to find the bliss in my life...one day at a time. I hope that by changing my focus, I will more in tune with myself and not so grumpy half the time. So here goes...

~ fried sweet plantains for dinner ~ an exuberant greeting from my dogs when I came home to pick up my computer cord ~ a friend who doesn't feel slighted when I flip through papers while listening to her ~ a one-hour Monopoly game with some 6th graders this evening ~ getting paid to play the aforementioned game ~ the smile on a student's face when she announced that she wasn't the last one in class today ~ free credit reports ~ my husband doing all the laundry in the house today ~ laughing with my students about how I tackled my deaf dog yesterday in the neighbor's front yard ~

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