Fret (noun)

December 17th, 2003 Posted in 2003

Something about the tail ends of the year…

Is it the financial worries? The ramped-up pace at my job? The fact that I’m moving soon? Hard to say. All I know is that I’ve been a solid ball of stress lately. Walking home from work tonight in a light snow, I was reviewing everything I’d gotten done today and still needed to do.

“Okay, need to clean up the apartment for a showing, should have done that last weekend but you needed to go into work then. Train ticket bought… oh God, where’d I put it? Okay, no, here in my pocket, good. Okay, gifts to buy. Paid the TV bill today… I need to pay hydro too. And I need to tell hydro I’m moving. Need to tell the cable company too. Oh, and I need to check on those insurance requests at work, and I forgot to phone that guy in Ottawa today about sending me the marketing collateral that accidentally got sent to him. And I need to order 400 more sheets of Christmas stationary for those client letters. And…”

At this point my stomach was a seething cauldron of acid from the days of stress and no sleep I’d been putting my body through. So I took a few deep breaths and mentally pep-talked myself, trying to enjoy the gently falling snow.

“Okay, guy, calm it down, callllllllm it down. It’ll all get done, don’t worry about it. You’re going to give yourself an ulcer here. Life’s too short.”

My immediate response to this internal pep-talk, with hand-wringing alarm: “Oh, GOD. You’re right, life IS too short!”

The response, after I’d thought about it for a second, was so ridiculous that it made me chuckle a little to myself at my own pessimism. I even managed to stay in a good mood up until I got home, where a sudden knock at the door revealed my landlord wanting to conduct a showing with a prospective buyer, and my place an uncleaned mess.