My brain is stuck on spin cycle and it’s Not Great Bob. 

I have been eating my feelings, and my feelings taste like vanilla ice cream speckled with rainbow Nerds. 

Vanilla ice cream not pictured, as it is already in my belly.

All the things that are stressing me are Champagne problems, so it’s a little frustrating to be feeling so riled. 

• We are having some landscaping work done. It’s been postponed twice, for no clear reason, which is its own mildly stressful thing. Finally, it’s happening this week and I am so jittery. Will the changes look good, or at least better than before? Will the updates reduce maintenance costs, as planned? Will the new plants survive? Will the transplanted plants survive? Will the project be worth the cost? 

• A bunch of phone calls I have been delaying continue to require resolution. Just make the phone calls! But I don’t want to, because this will be the second or third round of calls to each of the three places and those calls are either going to result in a) another round of phone tag or b) additional questions / appointments / decision points. I don’t wanna.

• My husband and I have completely stalled on our furniture-buying plans. Which is fine-ish, but also I still have an old, torn, ugly couch in my front room and plus we pretty much already CHOSE some of the furniture, we just haven’t chosen everything, and now I am afraid the costs of everything are continuing to climb and/or we will end up delaying the purchases until the holidays when we will already be spending a bunch of money. 

• My cat is afraid of our Halloween décor. Carla put up all the Halloween decorations yesterday, including the many many wall bats I’ve accumulated over the years (they are my favorite), and poor Leo spent the rest of the evening under my bed, which is where he goes when a Very Loud Noise frightens the fluff out of him. He was super jumpy and weird last night after I dragged him out from under the bed, and then this morning he was super jumpy and weird during our morning routine – only half-heartedly chasing things during play time and then doing that thing where he stands and stares intently into the nothingness as though he is seeing something otherworldly. Do I take the Halloween decorations down? Will ALL decorations freak him out? What is going to happen when we have a Christmas tree in our living room? 

• We cannot decide what to do for an upcoming vacation. Originally, my husband and Carla wanted to go to either England or Japan, and I was opposed to an overseas trip following so close on the heels of our Paris trip. My alternative was to go skiing out west or to go to Canada, land of so many beautiful sites and home to so many amazing bloggers. My husband would prefer someplace warm and suggested Los Angeles, Santa Fe, or Las Vegas. (Why do they all have two-part names? Do you think he included that in his criteria?) Carla wants to go to Japan, which would be amazing, but also the very idea of flying such a long distance to a country where I speak no more than a single word of the language gives me the vapors. THE VAPORS. I can’t drum up any enthusiasm whatsoever for the US options my husband has come up with, to the point that I have come around about going to England… but my husband thinks we may not have enough time to plan an overseas trip at this point. So we keep going in circles and not deciding and our designated time off is getting closer and closer. (Where would YOU go?)

• I have a dumb post in my drafts that I am probably going to publish and then I’ll feel extra dumb about putting it out in the world, but I keep thinking about it and maybe that’s part of why I feel Stuck lately? Just as you are kind and tolerant of not only my whining about non-problems, but doing said whining when the world at large is facing so many real, hard, life-altering things, and when so many of YOU are enduring real, hard, life-altering things, I am guessing you will be kind and tolerant of my forthcoming dumb post, but I am still feeling dumb about it. And feeling dumb about THIS post, too. 

• An ongoing unbloggable but also Not Actually Bad situation continues to assert itself despite Taking Measures. I have been venting to friends and sending emails and ordering books and trying to collect my thoughts and trying to figure out if there is someone in authority I can talk to who might have the power to address things. This makes it sound worse than it is; it’s nothing serious, it’s just one of those things that you want to FIX if you CAN.

• I have a Social Event to attend and I don’t want to. It’s not like social anxiety is anything new to me, and honestly, now that I’m taking an anti-anxiety medication, the symptoms I typically suffer (sweating, blushing, pounding heart, feeling like I’m going to vom, tangled tongue) affect me a lot less. But I still HATE going to events where I’m expected to socialize with a bunch of people. Hate. HATE.

Again, nothing is really wrong. And yet I am so edgy and hand-wringy about everything. I think what the stress comes from is a) decision-making without a clear winner and/or b) my lack of control over a situation or its outcome. 

I was texting with a friend the other day about a similar issue making a tough decision, and I tried to reframe it for her by reminding her that no matter what she decides, the outcome will be positive. That’s true for me, too. So what if the decision-making doesn’t have a clear winner? That means it doesn’t have a clear loser, either! Even if there isn’t a genuinely positive outcome, at the very worst, these decisions won’t be irreversibly damaging if we choose wrong. Like if the new landscaping sucks, well. It will be a waste of money and we’ll be annoyed, but no one is going to die (except possibly some transplanted hydrangeas). And if we hate it enough, in a few years we can hire someone else to do something different.

And look. Leo seems to be coming around on his feelings about the bats.