“Up and down and round we sped,
That dizzy pace soon went to my head,
Now you know why I’m dizzy
And do the things I do
I am askew and you’d be too
If the merry-go-round broke down.”
—Daffy Duck
I’m stressed out. The desk top has been performing poorly, and no wonder since Norton found ten viruses, mostly trojans, on it. I still need to figure out why I seem to be losing 15 GB of disk space overnight when nobody’s using the machine. My house is nagging for me to spend money on its upkeep and repair, almost as loudly as my debt is nagging me to eliminate it somehow. I have yet to hit the sweet spot in my children’s educations and with the constant readjustment I can’t seem to settle into a routine that feels like I’ve hit my stride in anything. I have a dozen loose ends capable of waking me from a sound sleep in the middle of the night, just to ask me what I plan to do about them and when.
This insomnia does not help with my health. I’ve had some kind of infection since May. It doesn’t seem to be affecting anyone else in the house so I don’t think it’s contagious. It’s just that some combination of my sinuses, ears and throat has been infected for months, often with pain, occasionally with fever, always with the uncomfortable swollen lymph nodes in my neck. I’m trying to push through the exhaustion to cook, and eat, healthy meals, to exercise regularly, to take care of myself and to become healthy.
It’s much easier for a healthy person to take care of their health. I’m too tired to eat right, to exercise or to sleep. Yes, it is possible to be too tired to sleep. Somedays I spend so much time trying not to fall asleep that when night falls I can’t surrender. I wake in a panic, as if I’d dozed off behind the wheel of a moving vehicle instead of sprawled across my bed. Which reminds me I really do need to fix the problems with the registration on my SUV and maybe a tune-up would fix the MPG problem. Though with the cost of gas, who can afford a tune-up?
That, in a nutshell is the problem, financially, physically, mentally, maybe even emotionally, I’ve run into such a deficit that I seem to only ever pay the interest and never the principal. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel like I was losing ground. I’m stressed out, so my health suffers, so I don’t have the resources left to take care of myself, so my health suffers, so I don’t have the energy to take care of my problems so I’m stressed out…
The spiral seems so devastatingly downward, but it’s moving outward too. Changing and breaking can feel a lot alike and I know this. I have been here before. Things are not really as bleak as they seem, especially midday when the air-conditioning is busted and it’s summer here in the Mojave Desert. I will fix this. Just not today.
Daffy sings The Merry Go Round Broke Down
