Snap out of it!

Truth be told, I’ve been feeling a bit out of sorts of late. Thanks to the French, there’s a perfect word for it: malaise (come to think of it, thanks to the French we have some perfect words for almost everything) Some of it is physical, there’s a little low-grade bug that seems to have latched on to both the CE and me. But there’s also something else: my self-starter just isn’t self-starting these days. Do you ever feel like that?  I hate to call it “winter blues”, knowing that many of my readers would not recognize anything wintry about southern California weather, but I’m beginning to wonder if that might be the issue.

A site called energy-treatments.com claims there is such a thing as "Toxicity Malaise" that affects the "energy fields". Who knew?

Whatever it’s called, it has advanced to what I call Stage 2, which is defined by the realization that I’m wearing pretty much the same clothes during the day that I sleep in at night. And if it’s going to continue to rain EVERY DAY as it has for the past week, I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Another Stage 2 symptom is the Accomplish Nothing scenario, by which I mean that Ben Franklin’s advice has been turned on its head on a daily basis. “Anything that could get done today may as well wait until tomorrow” has been the recent mantra. The only thing I’ve completed in the past week is last Sunday’s NYT crossword puzzle, and only because Katherine roped me into it. (Thanks, Katherine – without you, this week would be a complete blank.)

The theme last week was "Chick Lit". It took me two days to complete it!

Given this state of affairs, it might not have be the best frame of mind in which to attend a dinner party, but an invitation arrived from a couple we both like and admire, so I gave the leggings-and-sweatshirt look a night off and spruced up a bit. Even put on mascara, and you can only imagine how much effort THAT took!

I’ve worked pretty hard at justifying all the above as being an acceptable way of life. Until last night. When said dinner party supplied a probably much-needed shock to the system. Here’s how it went:

The appetizer was smoked salmon. Not just ANY smoked salmon, but – and are you ready for this? – the product of a 50-lb salmon hooked and reeled in by none other than our hostess. Oh, and of course, she smoked the salmon herself.

Can you even imagine?

Given the fact that I could not even LIFT a 50-lb salmon, this was a disheartening way to begin the evening. How do you follow something like that? I suppose I could have expounded on life as a chicken wrangler, but somehow it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. And just as well, because when we sat down to dinner and tucked in to the main course, our host modestly shared that what we were eating was not beef, as it appeared, but MOOSE.

Yes, moose. And not just any moose, but a 750-pound moose that he, our host, felled in the Yukon with a bow and arrow.

image from moose learning zone

To be honest, I don’t think I was the only one at the table who was stunned into speechlessness at this point. There was a collective sense of surrender, a realization that none of us would ever, under any circumstances, be able to reciprocate the favor of this evening in an appropriate manner. Unless, of course, the CE decides to go out and lasso a wapiti or something.

Be patient – this gets interesting just past the one-minute mark:

Fortunately, today is a new day, and I have resolved to get out of my sweat pants (at least before noon, that is) and do something important. Okay, maybe just do something at all. For a change.

Wish me luck!