A Little Nervous

I could safely say that I spend most of my days like this. Anxiety just sticks to me like toilet paper to the bottom of a slightly wet shoe. It's my thing. Can't shake it off.

Part of it's my fault. I chose to be a freelance writer and that's fraught with all kind of anxiety. I'm lucky that I haven't had to spent a lot of time wondering where my next job is going to come from (knock on birch-paneled Ikea table) but I have spent a fair amount of time stressing over checks that are a few weeks too late, deadlines that loom like large pregnant clouds, and finicky servers that deliver my e-mail when they damn well please, thank you very much.

But today is ultraworryspecial, and I don't feel free to tell you why, but I can give a little history of why January-through-March is the cruelest quarter.

For the past three years, my little corner of the world has celebrated the first 90 days out of the year with a variety of ailments that work the full range of severity: mailbox tipping, mutinous cars, hospital-worthy croup, excessive bleeding from one nose, high fevers, colonoscopies, colpscopies, pneumonia, cancer. (Well, that certainly took the fun out of this paragraph.)

It's enough to make a girl a bit paranoid about launching a new year.

My theory here, rather than jinx myself into another installment of the First Quarter Curse, is to dissuade it from descending--and especially tomorrow--to reduce its powers of evil by painting its nefarious overbrowed face on the cave wall and throwing spears at it. To name it, Rumpelstiltskin, and take away its mystery and sway. To call it out in the street at high night and whomp its bony butt.

Or I could just throw metaphors and literary allusions at it until it gets bored of my highfalutin antics and saunters off to plague another house.

Anyway. That's my plan.