The fugly, irritable mood continues. I’m getting pretty pissed off at feeling so bitchy for so long. It’s completely unproductive and uncomfortable, and nothing I’ve tried has offered much insight into what’s gotten my knickers into such a prolonged twist, nor how I can get them untwisted so I can feel my normal content self again. Navel-gazing has only offered these lame possibilities:

- the season. Cold weather threatens on the doorstep, taunting, but not stepping up and getting on with it. Winter’s coming but it’s not even started yet, which just means that we still have several months of craptastic drivers and cold white shit ahead of us. The driving aspect especially makes me want to hole up under a warm blankie and order-in until April.

- our eldest son. We’re gas and flame to each other, and I’ve had this imposing sense lately that I should be doing *something*, saying *something* as his mother, but I’m letting my own weariness and self-preservation make me shut up and walk away, for which I’m ashamed.

- the economy. I don’t feel panicked about it like many people I know are, which makes me start to feel scared about not feeling scared. Perfectly sane and logical, right? Sigh.

- still slurring my words and still not being able to chew properly. The Big Day that I thought I’d get months ago might well not happen until next year now. When I first got sick with RCD, I used to have speech problems that made me self-conscious, and I had to relearn, to some extent, how to speak. There’s a growing chance that I’ll have to try to do that all over again now, unless they can figure out a way to fix the slurring that the physical positioning of the prosthetics is causing.

- slugging through projects for work that are frustrating and I don’t much enjoy doing. But that’s mostly a cheap, lazy cop-out.

- maybe my upcoming birthday is affecting me more than I want to consider, even within myself? Doc wants to know if I want to do anything special for it. The truth is, I don’t know. I don’t want it to be an un-special birthday – I’ve had plenty of those and as much as I’m supposed to be a grown-up, they hurt. I want it to be acknowledged and celebrated, but I know what an inconvenience it is to try to do that. It’s on Hallowe’en, so people have other plans, or they don’t want to leave their homes to come for a birthday party, and trick-or-treaters come by and interrupt every five minutes, and our daughter and her boyfriend want to go on a pub crawl… really, there’s lots of good reasons why I can count the number of birthday parties I’ve had in my life on one hand, and why they’ve all been kinda sucky. It’s way easier to just give in to the day and let it be about Halloween, and abandon the birthday part.

NONE of these things should be affecting me this much, and I’m annoyed that I’m letting them, and not getting a handle on it. Dammit, I’m tired of feeling grouchy and unmotivated. I’ve got work to do and fun to have, so I need to shake this off – this is hanging on way too freakin’ long.

I will never, ever, understand how some people can enjoy being in a bad mood. God, it exhausts me.

On a completely separate note, we went to a bar last night for Jan’s boyfriend’s birthday, and I sang karaoke for the very first (and possibly last) time. Apparently hell does, occasionally, freeze over.