My mood has been a bit uncertain lately. Just ask my poor husband, who has had to put up with my sudden obsession and random hostility over where the Christmas tree will go. In two months. If there could be a physical manifestation of my mood, it would be a sullen, spiky black cloud with bad hair, bags under its eyes and a scowl on its face. I’m outside of my comfort zone in my new role at work, which is good for me and my career growth in the long term, but stressful. I’m pissed off about my lack of weight loss, and my infertility has really been getting me down. I don’t know why sometimes I care more than others, but that’s the way it goes, and right now caring is on the upswing. On top of that, I had a bizarre bruising incident after getting blood drawn. I am not even exaggerating when I say that about 1/5th of my left arm was covered in bruises and very painful. Every time I rolled over at night (and I roll over a lot) I woke up, so I didn’t get enough sleep for about a week. And I was having anxiety dream after anxiety dream. I’m assuming the pain was causing that. Thankfully the bruises have faded and I’ve actually gotten some rest the last couple of nights.

The needle started swinging in the other direction at some point yesterday. Who knows why, although we did settle the burning Christmas tree issue. I’m sure you’re all very relieved. However, as I headed off to work this morning, already nursing a headache because the weather was changing, I turned on the radio and heard: world markets down, futures down, Fed rate cut, markets and futures up! No wait, markets and futures back down. As soon as they said the FTSE and the CAC had zoomed up and then down over 5% even after the rate cut, I said to myself “oh, it’s going to be one of those days. Fuck it, I’m going to Starbucks.” It is so hard to know what to say to people about the stock market when it changes every 15 minutes.

The drive through at Starbucks was packed, so I pulled in and parked next to an older looking Subaru station wagon. As I got out of my car, I noticed it was packed with stuff. As I walked toward the back, I could see that there was a mattress and pillows and blankets in the far back of the wagon. Someone was living in that car. You know, theoretically, that this is happening. That the numbers in the stock market indices and the foreclosure statistics translate in to real losses for real people. But it hadn’t hit home for me yet.

Suddenly my life started looking pretty good. And today, I worked really, really hard to be grateful for all that I've got.

Posted by Bad Penguin at October 8, 2008 10:30 PM