Crabcake

That’s what I’ve been lately. Unfortunately, I am not a delicious seafood patty for which the mid-Atlantic region prides itself – I’ve just been all-around grumpy. I use the crabcake label to make it sound cuter and more attractive, like I’m not a borderline jerk for no apparent reason.

I realized that I was irate last night. JG mentioned ice makers in refrigerators, and because it was SO not my idea of fun to discuss the pros and cons of appliances, I snapped, “I don’t really want to talk about this right now, so why don’t we just figure it out when we actually need to buy a fridge.” It’s phrased like a question, but I wasn’t exactly asking, and I tend to have a certain, uh, edge when I get like this. Needless to say, that shut JG up pretty quickly, and I felt like a jerk for the rest of the night. And also a raving lunatic. Who else flips out over an ice maker?

When I woke up this morning, I was still slightly nettled at nothing in particular, and I thought that maybe doing yoga might calm me down and knock me out of this funk. I do yoga because I really like stretching, and while the New Age-yness isn’t exactly for me, I usually get something out of it and end up feeling relatively relaxed and ready for the day. I went through my usual 40-minute routine, only to find that I was rusty from being on vacation, and that left me supremely annoyed by all of the meditation talk. I kept wanted to shout at the partially bald but still long-haired instructor, “Will you just shut up about your stupid inner power?! I just want to be TONED!” ... Yeah, there's that raving thing again.

Upon arriving at the office, my calendar dictated that I would get almost nothing done, because I had a total of five meetings scheduled, plus a working lunch. Getting very little accomplished is kind of inconvenient when you have at least five hours of actual work that has to get done in the day, and even more so when not one single appointment started or ended on time or even stayed remotely on task. So after this marathon of meetings, during which I kept thinking about the things I had to do (“Crap, I have to do that!” was the catchphrase of the day), I finally settled down to crank through a whole lot of work that turned out to be suitable for a trained monkey, which was, of course, yours truly. You know it’s been a long day when you affix sticky notes to your monitor and phone so that you can’t see how late you are staying at the office. I even considered leaving and finishing up at home, but I couldn’t bear to pack up my computer, run an errand that involved driving on one of the busiest roads in the area, get home, eat dinner, and still have a couple of hours of work to do. No! I was powering through!

When the work was finally done and I had schlepped my guitar to the music store, I was on my way home at last, a mere 12 hours after I first got to work. Ugh. Along the way, I was lucky to encounter drivers with either excessively bright headlights or the need to take their half of the road out of the middle, and that was FABULOUS.

But there were some of my actual favorite things, too. The roads were gloriously empty, and the woods smelled like pine and grass all mixed up, with flashes of fireflies scattered around. I followed the twilight home, and best of all, as I reached the top of the hill in our neighborhood, I saw a gorgeous hot pink cloud, tinted from what must have been a sweet sunset. By the time I pulled into the driveway, I was basically back to normal, and maybe even happy. To top it all off, JG had turkey sausage ready for dinner, and a cold root beer for me in the (non-ice-making) fridge. I was a crabcake no longer, and I was actually fun to be around tonight.

Thank goodness for a great sunset, a fast drive home, and good company. The fact that tomorrow is Friday doesn’t hurt, either.