It just occurred to me, on this second Friday the 13th of 2009, that there is only one week left in winter. A week from day is the spring equinox, signaling with its equal amounts of daylight and night that winter has finally packed its toys and gone home. Of course, you wouldn’t know it from the weather here – it’s cold and raining and generally S.A.D. weather. It always helps me to keep in the front of my mind that my feeling of hopelessness is a chemical thing, molecules in my brain doing their thing in the lack of sunlight and warmth. That means that my intuition isn’t telling me it’s the end of the world, that the economy might not be on the brink of collapse and that I shouldn’t, in fact, buy a gun and double my tomato crop.

Last night after work I went home to let Sam out before going to the gym. When I called him he went under the dining room table, through the legs of a chair he really couldn’t fit through. This was the same chair on which I’d stacked a bunch of dress shirts I need to iron. The chair went over on the floor, and Sam, confused, proceeded to walk all over them.

"Oh, Sam, god dammit!" I cried. My poor, submissive dog got scared at my tone and wouldn’t go outside, retreating instead into the office. I called him again and he held his ground on the couch in the office. I told him about three times to go out, getting more and more frustrated as I’d hoped this stop at home would only last a couple minutes. Sam hopped down from the couch and stood, defensively, in the middle of my office and peed ALL OVER THE FLOOR.

…and I completely lost my shit all over the place.

I started crying, shouting sort of to no one in particular that that office was supposed to be the place where I was going to make my dreams of becoming a writer come true, and what is it now? A pee-soaked indoor doghouse with a desk covered in dust and bills and where no writing has taken place in months, as I’ve been doing my daily writing during the lunch hour and after hours at work. It doesn’t help that these winter blues mean that I’m losing faith in my creative abilities, such as they are, and that the novel I’m writing seems like utter crap to me every time I open it up but I can’t give up now, dammit, because I’m almost 50,000 words in and the story is nowhere near over.

So I cleaned up the pee, petted Sam for awhile and finally got him to go outside and finish the business he’d started on the hardwood, and called Brian, who was at that moment driving back from Austin, only about 45 minutes from home, and lost my shit again to him over the phone. It had been a terrible day, wherein I’d argued loudly with an Oklahoma City police officer and didn’t feel well to begin with and thought WAY TOO MUCH about the economy, and I felt more defeated than I have in a long, long time.

I felt terrible about going to the gym when Brian was so close to getting home, but I needed to move, to work out some of this aggressive energy that had been building up. I did, and I felt better almost the moment I sat down at the chest press. I came home and watched television with my husband and generally felt better.

This morning I was feeling nervous and anxious once more, however, and so I decided to put on my coat and scarf and take a quick jaunt around the building, my hands in my pockets to keep them warm. I was walking past a group of undergraduates when all of a sudden – I’m not sure at all what happened – the zipper on my jeans just popped right open, right there in front of them. There was a moment of embarassed silence and fear. In spite of it all I had to work to suppress a laugh while I hitched my zipper back up, then, laughing at myself, I turned and walked back to the office.

Is everything okay? No, not at all. But it’s all mostly brain chemistry stuff and winter stuff and the only way I know to get through those kinds of things is the way I’m choosing to: laughing at myself, getting enough exercise, eating well and trying to remember that this, too, shall pass.