The Weirdest Vegetable

Morning Workout
Nothing. Zippo. Zilch. Nada. It's a rest day, baby!! REST day!
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Let's just be honest with myself, I've been angry lately. Well, I take that back. Maybe not so much angry as melancholy. No wait, I take that back too. I've definitely been a bit angry, but I've also absolutely been melancholy. I guess that leads me to angracholy, I s'pose. Hmmm... angracholy. Sounds like a vegetable that I push to the side of my plate to avoid. Steamed angracholy. Boiled angracholy. You know what, that's how I've been feeling lately - like my life is filled with boiled vegetables I just want to push to the side of my plate to avoid. Yeah, that definitely sums up my last few weeks.

This angracholy thing has really seeped into all parts of my life. With my training, I have been practically dragging myself through the workouts; the angracholy sucking up the enthusiasm that usually drives me to feed off that endorphin rush. At work, I've been walking in every morning and quickly focusing on the tasks at hand. Conference call to conference call. Proposal to proposal. I force myself to keep my head down, moving forward, avoiding the overly festive attitude I usually take with the my fellow co-workers. And with Catherine... well, I just haven't been the same. I have backed away and started to put up a wall of angracholy around me.

It's not good. There is nothing about it that is good.

Today I woke up and realized that we are only 10 days away from Christmas. I love this time of year. Between the festive, the joyous and the merry, there should be no space left for angracholy. Yet the festive, joyous and merry have been shunned away from me for the past weeks. So today, I've decided to change. I've opened up my arms and invited the festive, joyous and merry back in. Be gone, angracholy, I say. Be gone.

You see, I flew up to San Jose today for an important client lunch. One of my colleagues flew up for that meeting as well. One thing about this colleague is that he is always so incredibly insightful about me and the ways in which I work. I haven't even talked to him a lot about me personally, but he just gets it, if you know what I mean. He was born 12 hours before I was - I think that has something to do with it. He just understands. So we're coming back from San Jose and my colleague, who, by the way, is a posterboy for ADD, is going on and on about how I internalize stress and how, no matter what I do, I must find a way to manage that stress or it will end up tearing me apart and be my biggest obstacle in completing the Ironman. And as he's going on and on about me, rambling like a broken record about the way I am and the way I work (and he's pretty damn right on), I realiz that this was the same conversation that I had with Catherine just the night before.

Well, you see, it hit me all at once. I've had enough. Work has had me stressed for the past couple of weeks. It has had me wondering where I fit in in life - wondering what I'm supposed to be doing. And I'm not going to let that get me down anymore.

It's the holiday season for godsakes. It's time to be happy.
So suddenly I'm a new man. There is no more angracholy. I've not just pushed it off to the side of my plate, I've tossed the entire lump of angracholy into the disposal and I've flipped the damn switch. And I tell you what - I'm going to rump-a-bum-bum myself until I can't stand it anymore. Festive, merry and joyous. Tis the season.