Or possibly, it could just be cloudy outside

My DailyOM horoscope today informed me that, You may feel disheartened and gloomy today, and want to be alone with your thoughts. These feelings could be the result of frustration with challenges you’re facing or a loss of motivation about your goals.

Yeah…that…or, it could simply be dark and cloudy and getting ready to rain a little more. At 7:00 this morning, it was dark like 5:00 – and right now, at noon, I’ve got the lights on in my bedroom even though the blinds are up all over the Den.

Still, the horoscope was a good read for me today. Truth is, I am feeling a bit gloomy and overwhelmed lately. Partly it is the usual New Years thing – I always get a little gloomy around New Years, because I make these impossible goals for myself every single year. Shoot, I do it every day, write down to-do lists that a team of 40 well-trained professionals could not possibly get done in one measly day…but see, on the daily list, I know that it’s actually more of an ongoing daily list. What I didn’t do today just stays on the list for tomorrow. Eventually, I’ll get it done.

The yearly list, even though I do the same thing, put down more than any human could do in a single year while saying, “It’s more of a lifetime achievement goal…”, somehow does not have the same “eh, whatever” factor when I get to the end of the year.

I get a little bummed that I didn’t do “better”. Especially since the Chaos, Holiday Edition™ around here is still in full force and won’t be receding even a little bit until Sunday evening. Geez. Normal people get to New Years and that’s it. But ooooh no, not me. I’ve still got guests and presents to buy and things that aren’t wrapped and oh yeah, I need to remember to pick up eleventy mazillion pounds of Spam for that party on Sunday…

And then I get defeatist about the whole concept of goals, and I say, “Why even bother? It isn’t like next year is going to be better! {…doom, gloom, despair, anger, resentment…}”

It’s just one of those things. I can say to myself, “Look, just don’t be that way!”, but that is exactly like telling someone suffering from clinical depression to just “be happier”.

It doesn’t work. There is a deeper psychological thing, there. For whatever reason, I’m OK with not finishing an impossible daily task, but feel that somehow I should be able to do an impossible yearly task.

Whatever.

Of course, “just don’t be that way” is probably the only real treatment I have for the condition at this point. “Just don’t be that way” is better than “let’s try drinking heavily!” or “perhaps I could throw myself off a bridge! And then I totally won’t have to carve that Spam!”

And next year, I could try not making up a Herculean list of things I’d like to accomplish. Maybe I could invent some kind of system, that does time management? Hmm, how hard could it be.

I’ll add it to the list. Between ‘go to culinary academy’ and ‘take up bio-chemistry’.