No stress on Monday
I'm trying to recall the comic. The paper was already yellowed with age the last time I saw it back in the mid-seventies; a caricature of a stressed-out office worker with the caption, "There is no stress on Monday". It was on the corkboard in my Mom's office, as it had been for all eternity (eternity being limited to the 15 years I was old enough to have come to see it). It was in my father's style, and I don't doubt it was the product of some humorous discussion my parents had before my father's alcoholism had driven him away from his family. I never really knew what it meant until now.
The stress of my previous job is becoming more obvious in its absence. My headaches are starting to recede. The cats are getting downright cuddly and (or because) I've been far less angry with their occasional breeches of litterbox etiquette. I've been sleeping more and get a better quality of sleep.
Except for Mondays.
Toward the last few weeks of my employ, I had an especially hard time on Monday nights. I would toss and turn, take antacids in the futile hope that they would penetrate the knot in my stomach, take warm baths in lavender bath salts, and finally resort to high doses of benedryl to try get some sleep. Nothing much helped. The very idea of having to rise the next day and face going to a job I hated created a host of stress symptoms. I know I didn't function well at work when this happened. There were things I could have done better.
Now I find myself wide awake at 0400. My mind is racing. My body got into the habit of dreading Mondays, and it hasn't realized there is no longer anything to dread.
It occurs to me that this is why I haven't turned off my alarm. It still wakes me at 0630, as if there were someplace to go. It also occurs to me that many folks in this country wake to the news with a certain amount of dread because of an event that took place almost eleven years ago.
We on the West Coast were groggily waking to the alarm when the radio news was describing the plane hitting the first tower. I had just enough time to turn the TV on to see the second plane. What followed was more bad news: the war drum prelude and invasion of Iraq (a country that had no part at all in the 9/11 attack), the squandering of the global goodwill that was generated by the attacks in squabbles about who lead the coalition, the cynical passage of the PATRIOT Act (virtual cookies to the one who can translate the acronym from memory) and other vestiges of that brutal era. I picked up the habit of checking the news several times a day just to make sure nothing else had happened. And I find myself doing so today.
Save that nothing is happening. Why is it that Republicans have been able to dominate the news with their war on women, of all things? Up until mid-March, the voter turnout in primaries and caucuses was dismally low. The only reason it picked up in comparison to 2008 is that opposition candidates had left the race by this time. With the stated primary goal of making Obama a single-term President, you'd think that voters would swamp the polls. Major news sources are ignoring Republican debates, and, when debates and speeches are covered, cameras are carefully guided away from filming the empty seats.
The fact is, nothing is happening. The economy is slowly turning, like the lumbering QEII making a course correction. Troops are coming home, even from Afghanistan. None of the predicted terrorist attacks have occurred and gun rights have actually expanded during the Obama Administration (though the NRA, with raging paranoia, continues to describe it as a clever ploy to somehow further restrict gun ownership). The public is suffering from political ennui.
Do you remember what used to happen during the Dubya Administration when Democrats were doing better than Republicans? We'd go on alert, and some ridiculously far-fetched terror plot was dredged up to account for it. Former HSA chief Tom Ridge admitted that he was pressured to issue fake alerts before the 2004 election. The fact that no such tactics have been used by Obama flies in the face of other paranoids that want to lump both parties together as equally evil.
I just reached over and turned off my alarm. I'm going to try using a half-hour of news time to actually go out and walk with the current rains, I may have to go to the Mall). In the coming days, I'll get to the local Democratic HQ and see what I can do to help get out the vote. And I will strive to have "No stress on Monday".
ETA: too tired for HTML.
The stress of my previous job is becoming more obvious in its absence. My headaches are starting to recede. The cats are getting downright cuddly and (or because) I've been far less angry with their occasional breeches of litterbox etiquette. I've been sleeping more and get a better quality of sleep.
Except for Mondays.
Toward the last few weeks of my employ, I had an especially hard time on Monday nights. I would toss and turn, take antacids in the futile hope that they would penetrate the knot in my stomach, take warm baths in lavender bath salts, and finally resort to high doses of benedryl to try get some sleep. Nothing much helped. The very idea of having to rise the next day and face going to a job I hated created a host of stress symptoms. I know I didn't function well at work when this happened. There were things I could have done better.
Now I find myself wide awake at 0400. My mind is racing. My body got into the habit of dreading Mondays, and it hasn't realized there is no longer anything to dread.
It occurs to me that this is why I haven't turned off my alarm. It still wakes me at 0630, as if there were someplace to go. It also occurs to me that many folks in this country wake to the news with a certain amount of dread because of an event that took place almost eleven years ago.
We on the West Coast were groggily waking to the alarm when the radio news was describing the plane hitting the first tower. I had just enough time to turn the TV on to see the second plane. What followed was more bad news: the war drum prelude and invasion of Iraq (a country that had no part at all in the 9/11 attack), the squandering of the global goodwill that was generated by the attacks in squabbles about who lead the coalition, the cynical passage of the PATRIOT Act (virtual cookies to the one who can translate the acronym from memory) and other vestiges of that brutal era. I picked up the habit of checking the news several times a day just to make sure nothing else had happened. And I find myself doing so today.
Save that nothing is happening. Why is it that Republicans have been able to dominate the news with their war on women, of all things? Up until mid-March, the voter turnout in primaries and caucuses was dismally low. The only reason it picked up in comparison to 2008 is that opposition candidates had left the race by this time. With the stated primary goal of making Obama a single-term President, you'd think that voters would swamp the polls. Major news sources are ignoring Republican debates, and, when debates and speeches are covered, cameras are carefully guided away from filming the empty seats.
The fact is, nothing is happening. The economy is slowly turning, like the lumbering QEII making a course correction. Troops are coming home, even from Afghanistan. None of the predicted terrorist attacks have occurred and gun rights have actually expanded during the Obama Administration (though the NRA, with raging paranoia, continues to describe it as a clever ploy to somehow further restrict gun ownership). The public is suffering from political ennui.
Do you remember what used to happen during the Dubya Administration when Democrats were doing better than Republicans? We'd go on alert, and some ridiculously far-fetched terror plot was dredged up to account for it. Former HSA chief Tom Ridge admitted that he was pressured to issue fake alerts before the 2004 election. The fact that no such tactics have been used by Obama flies in the face of other paranoids that want to lump both parties together as equally evil.
I just reached over and turned off my alarm. I'm going to try using a half-hour of news time to actually go out and walk with the current rains, I may have to go to the Mall). In the coming days, I'll get to the local Democratic HQ and see what I can do to help get out the vote. And I will strive to have "No stress on Monday".
ETA: too tired for HTML.