Okay friends, bear with me. This is my final cranky/self-pitying post for awhile. But I need the chance to get it all out and then I can go back to cheering and championing and being positive.

It's been a crappy week--since the middle of last week that is. I've been hyper emotional, with my mood swinging between anxiety and apathy (yes, I have PMS, okay??); the heat scraped my very soul of creativity; I've been feeling really sorry for myself and convinced that I will fail at everything I try. And just when things were on the upswing with the lifting of the heat, I woke up in the middle of the night with a lip the size of Florida after one of those little spiders I've been so nonchalant about took a chomp out of me. And for ten minutes, hypochondriac that I am, I was sure it had been the black widow I found in the garage and that my throat was in the process of closing up and my tongue was swelling and that I was going to die.

I am very lucky I have this livelihood, this schedule, because I would never have made it in the corporate world. I could not be a nurse or a teacher, because right now a little heat and a spider bite make me non-functional. I have barely been able to keep up with all that is on my plate, which only I am responsible for creating:

Writing two books of my own, one novel, one non-fiction, and ghostwriting another, and helping an elderly woman get her own novel self-published; editing two large, complicated manuscripts that sew doubt as to whether these people know the first thing about the English language; wrote a handful of feature articles; and read/reviewed a book for radio which I am supposed to record today with a lip that is like a small baby hanging off my face.

Meanwhile, it feels like I'm not doing enough. I picked up an application to volunteer at the library yesterday, because I think you must at least volunteer before you earn credits in the universe toward "free self-pity" days.

I wonder if some of this pressure inside me is coming from the pressure in the world right now. Because every moment I waste on self-pity, I try to remember that someone is clutching their loved one, maimed in a bomb blast, be it Iraq or Lebanon. Someone is on a plane or a bus with only as much as they can carry looking back on their home and wondering where they are going and when they can go back. Many someones, actually.

I sit here this morning feeling, well, I guess you'd call it surrender. But not surrender because I am noble and big of heart and able to lay my ego down. This is "okay, you win, I give up."