Maybe it's that time of year...

I am cranky today.

It's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, tomorrow we finally, finally get rid of W the Incompetent, we start a new administration, there are all these parallels to historic civil rights and great changes and so forth... and I'm cranky.

Partly, I find myself just itching to write some kind of gigantic "I told you so" letter to the general public, referencing the last eight years; the man mismanaged, plowed under, and failed every single business venture he ever undertook, and only family money enabled him to have the chances to start over again. We knew this, and yet, voters hired him anyway? And yes, I know, it's more complicated than that.... but we have a whole generation of aging hippies who could have pushed a lot harder on the vote recount and so on.

Partly I'm looking at the civil rights movement in general - very general, as in, my expertise lives somewhere around the level of "I can solve all the world's problems in twenty minutes". I'm seeing that MLK's original vision has been largely fulfilled... but the struggle for equality in this country is not magically vanishing tomorrow at noon. Racial inequality still exists, gender inequality still exists (can you say, women earn 70 cents for every dollar that men earn in equivalent jobs?), and do NOT get me started on the idiocy of the whole gay marriage "issue".

Hell, for that matter, slavery - actual, you-are-not-free slavery - exists in this country. Most people use the term "wage slave" to refer to a boring dead-end job; there are cases of (usually) migrant workers earning a paycheck and then being intimidated into handing it back over to their bosses; or earning a paycheck and then being expected to pay for most on-the-job expenses, such that they end up in debt (illegally) to their employers and having to work harder to try and dig themselves out of that hole. That is wage slavery, and it exists.

I am cranky, today.

My kid didn't do tantrums when she was two; at least, not for the most part. Now she's three, and distracting her with a cookie doesn't work. She has a huge head cold and is waking up in the night, only instead of wanting to cuddle, she's pissed that something has woken her up, and intends to inflict her bad mood on whoever goes in to try and comfort her - with full volume and, as of last night, orders and kicking: "you don't belong in my room I'm going to kick you get! out! of! my! room!" All said in a hoarse, stuffy-nosed, high-pitched, three-year-old girly girl voice, which could be comical except that she's not kidding around.

Gah. Usually I try to tell these stories with a little bit of humor, but I'm just plain cranky today. I have been invited to fill out little "interview" questionnaires by a couple of my friends now, just in the past couple of days; and I discovered myself getting more and more cynical with each harmless little question on the list. I mean, I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure the preferred answer to "what's your favorite color?" is not "none of your damn business". But that seems to be where I'm at right now.

I'm not depressed and I don't need a hug; or rather, the things that usually depress me are just leaving me annoyed and... well... cranky. Life isn't any different this week than it has been; if anything, I'm on a slight upward curve, in that I'm making money, getting along with the Husband, got two pieces of happy mail this weekend, and I'm making progress on the embroidery thing.

I'm just - crabby. Pissy. Irritated. Annoyed. Bitchy.

You know... Cranky.

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Happy mail: one was a check for data entry I did in December; the other was a callout announcement for the coming Farmer's Market season. Yay!

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Every time I get in the mood to rant, I find myself trying very hard to hold back so as to at least pretend this blog is still a marketing tool for the henna. At some point I'm either going to have to give up and let loose, or build a second blog just for the rants and bitching. But not tonight. It's past my bedtime, and I'm still kinda cranky.