The Scales of Judgement

Last night I felt really depressed.  It was one of those days when all the little things piled up.

The holiday season is well over and I still haven't put away all of the decorations.  Ghosts of Christmas Past, anyone?  Plus, during the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas I ate too much and too much of the wrong stuff, so my pants are getting tight.  I knew I should have taken those goodies to work a little earlier...  I went a month without stepping on the scale because I knew the news would be bad.  As if avoidance solves anything.

On the job front: Lately the automatic scheduling software at the school I teach for has been doing odd things.  Part-timers like me are supposed to be limited to 4 classes at a time, but I was up to 5 for a while.  Now it wants me to teach grammar classes (which I don't enjoy) instead of web design (which I do).  Boo, hiss.  And speaking of web design classes, two sections of mine ended on Sunday so I have all their gigantic final projects to correct this week plus the usual weekly assignments from the other classes still in progress.

Relationship issues: Bear-y (I'm using that spelling on purpose) has been very grouchy for the past few days.  He fell and bruised his tailbone on the tile in our bathroom.  Now he's acting as if the sky has fallen because he didn't feel fine the next day.  Even though he admits it only hurts when he sits for a while, he's outraged that he still feels any pain at all and is using this as an excuse to avoid most of his usual chores and be waited on hand and foot.  I was horrified when he fell and I sympathize with his pain, but nobody cut me any slack after I cracked my tailbone in a skiing accident; I borrowed a rubber doughnut to sit on for six weeks and sucked it up.  This snarly attitude on his part may be partly responsible for the next incident in my litany of complaints.

Normally Barry and I take group dance lessons on Monday.  We've been taking them for several years from the same teacher, so we're repeating some of the sessions.  Because I follow well, the teacher usually uses me as her partner to demonstrate steps for the others.  Yesterday a new student told me that I dance beautifully.  Before I could even open my mouth to say "Thank you," Barry said, "We've had the class before."  Thanks for the support, cupcake; would "Yes, she does" have been too much of a stretch?  Okay, this is probably just one of those Asperger things, but that doesn't make it feel any better.

And, of course, this is the anniversary of my husband Tom's death.

The responsible adult way to have coped last night would have been to cook an excellent low-calorie meal, jolly Barry out of his bad mood, post something on my blog and then settle down to correcting that mountain of homework.  Instead I spent the evening ignoring Barry, playing mindless video games, and inhaling an entire bag of chips.  Can you spell "self-destructive?"  (At least it was a small bag of PopChips instead of a giant bag of Doritos with extra cheese, and I did the laundry in between games.)

So today, in a fit of remorse, I stepped on the scale (up, of course), ate a Spartan breakfast, and started grading final projects.  I'm a fourth of the way through them and taking a break to decide what kind of a salad to make for lunch.  This afternoon, if I'm feeling really masochistic, I may balance my checkbook.

I'm feeling a little better after venting, but venting won't make those extra pounds go away.  I'm hoping at least part of the weight is water retention due to the salt in the chips.  Back to the daily weigh-ins, at least for a while, I guess.  Maybe it's time to re-read Pollyanna, too.

"Concern should drive us into action and not into a depression. No man is free who cannot control himself. " ~Pythagoras  [Just like a man to offer unwelcome advice!]