I should be perfectly happy.

I have a good job, I have a nice house. I have enough food to eat and more than enough clothes to wear. I have people around me who care about me. I'm in fairly decent health. I should be grateful for all those things and really, I am, but I just can't feel as enthusiastic about them as I normally am.

But I feel lousy today. I've felt lousy for the past week or so, with a few moments of brightening here and there. I don't know if it's just the end-of-winter blues (and this year it seems we've had more of those days where it's 40 degrees and horizontal rain than past years) or if it's something else.

Edited to de-whine:

I think I'm going through one of those times - I used to have a little cartoon I cut out of a magazine that showed a man walking around a circle. Half of the circle was labeled "Passionate engagement" and the other half was labeled "Existential despair."

Now, I don't cycle THAT severely - if I did, I'd be at the doctor's being checked out for bipolar disorder. But I do have times where I just feel like I'm on a treadmill, like nothing's getting accomplished, like I'm in "Groundhog Day" and have passed the point of realizing "hey, I can drink 37 chocolate milkshakes if I want and it won't affect me" but not yet to the point of redemption. (I will have to talk about that movie someday; I saw it for the first time this past weekend, and you know, if you look at it from a certain perspective, it's a very beautiful movie and says something quite profound about the human condition.). But anyway. I'm kind of down and tired and headachy. Everyone around me is sick. I'm worried about my father's health again. I don't see any tangible progress on any of my four (four is too many for me) research projects. And I'm staring down a birthday at the end of this month and although I'm nothing but thankful to be done with the stupidity and shallowness of junior high school, my teenaged years, or my twenties, still, it's with a bit of nostalgia and sadness that I realize I will be closer to 40 than I am to 30.

And I'm a bit concerned because I went to give blood yesterday, and my blood pressure was higher than it's ever been - 150 over 90 or so. I don't know whether to chalk it up to a bad day, or whether to make a doctor's appointment NOW, or whether to sometime toddle in to the school nurse and have her check it at a time when I'm more composed, just to be sure. I do know I don't want to go on meds, if I can avoid it - my brother did for a year or two when his b.p. went up (sedentary job, job he hated, bad diet) and he said it seriously screwed with his energy levels (and, dear God, one thing I cannot deal with now is lower energy than I already have). Still, I don't want to risk blowing a vein somewhere, or the long term horrible damage to kidneys and eyes and brain. I don't know. It makes me sad - I exercise most every day, I try to watch what I eat. I try to limit stress as much as I realistically can. (It's like the whole weightloss thing - I won't go into detail with how sick it makes me to scrimp on my meals and sweat through exercise for months and find I've lost 1.8 pounds.). I guess it's just the whole lack of results that troubles me, really. In everything - research and my health-life and all. Like I said. Treadmill days.