Monday Morning Blues...

What is it about Monday mornings that make it so hard to get going? For example, today it's a grey and snow-dusted Monday, the temperature gauge read 17 degrees and the minute I uncurled myself from my warm and comfortable down comforter, I realized that I'd like nothing more than to get back into my bed.

It never matters how much sleep I get the night before. I could go to bed at 10 p.m. on a Sunday night and wake up at 6:45 a.m. and still not feel like I had enough sleep. Any other night, I'd be fine but Sundays lead to Mondays and that makes them different.

Now it's a Monday morning and I have a strange feeling of uncertainty in the pit of my stomach. I remember having those when I was in school and I had a large test the next day or I'd had a fight with a friend and was nervous to face them in school or, the very worst, a bully had targeted me and wouldn't stop calling me names. As far as the bullies went, that old theory of "they'll leave you alone if you stand up to them," is crap. I tried that. They'd just get meaner. No, the best strategy was to not acknowledge them, to laugh at them and look slightly down your nose at them as they mocked you. They got tired of that quickly and moved on to another vulnerable target. These bullies were rarely violent but they used words to hurt instead, somehow finding the most fragile area of your self-esteem and then attacking. No matter how much you tried to laugh it off and ignore it, the words still did their job, making you doubt, second guess yourself and secretly accept that they were true.

I'm older now and the bullies are much easier to handle. They're usually at work in the form of a coworker or boss who try to use you to get ahead. My strategy with those is to let them; chances are they'll end up shooting themselves in the foot eventually.

On the plus side, we're supposed to have a major snowstorm tonight. If I were going to be a Pootle, I'd worry about the bad roads, of my family having to drive in it. I refuse to be a Pootle though and thus, I'm going to allow myself to get excited about it. We're supposed to get up to 6 inches. I can't wait to see the cascading flakes fall from the clouds and cover the world.

I can feel my mother cringing and curling herself into a ball as she reads this. As I've mentioned, she hates snow. I tried to get her to tell me why and all she says is that "it's cold." I don't get it. Then again, she thinks I'm mental because I love it. I think she should go out and build a snowman and take time to appreciate the uniqueness of a world that's covered with freshly fallen snow. The world is so much more silent like that. Sounds are muffled by the ground covering and the echo of life is much more apparent.

Yet I'm going to choose to be happy about the snow. I was going to write a miserable little blog about how cruddy I feel because I got rejected again, I was going to talk about loss and grief because I lost a friend a year ago.

I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to enable Monday to throw its shadow of simply being over me. Instead, I'm going to wait for the promised snow. I shall enjoy the fact that "24" is on tonight and though poor Jack Bauer's already had six really bad days, he's having another one and I can't help but watch.

So just because it's Monday and I'd much rather be in bed reading, I'm not going to think on that. I'm going to remind myself that I just had two days off already and they were good. I'm going to remind myself that there's another weekend in less than five days.

Now, if only that would work.

Happy Monday.