January Is A Stressful Month For Me!

So I have a few days left to submit the MBA application I know will be rejected because I can't find anyone to write a letter of recommendation to me.  That highlights a lot of bad things that seem to rear their ugly heads after the New Year.

For one thing, my credit card bills are always high.  Of course the culprit is Christmas gift-buying.  But even after Christmas there are usually a ton of things I regularly charge on my credit cards -- my Franklin Quest/Covey day planner and storage cover, gifts for myself I don't permit myself to buy until Boxing Day, my AAA membership, my subscription to ESPN The Magazine, the expensive dinner I have with my friend every December, etc.  The bill is so big I often split up the payments over two or more months.  I'll suffer the interest payments, but I'm reminded of the after-effects of my splurging through my birthday.

Another big part of it is kind of ineffable, but I'll give it a shot.  As much as I sometimes bitch about how misnomerically "busy" I am at a time when we are all supposed to slow down and enjoy our time with family and friends, January is the month where things ramp back up to normal.  The twin, week-apart holidays of Christmas and New Year's Day (and BTW, whoever thought to put those two holidays exactly one day apart is a damn genius and I would love to kiss that person, man or woman, in the mouth) is the longest legal and sustained period of "rest" America has.  But now that's over; once we get past this four-day week (I had Monday off because our company had to celebrate New Year's Day by having Monday off), we're back to our usual workweek, exchanging gifts and singing "Auld Lang Syne" racing way back into the rearview mirror.

Also, it's cold now.  It really is cold right now, as I type this, but January is usually Minnesota's coldest month.  Typically we would be in our third month of our interminable winter this time of the year, and with two more months of cold temperatures and chances of snow to dread, cabin fever is starting to set in now.  On top of that, I'm going to add another thing that's sort of related which I may have touched upon in Wailing And Failing before.  I don't think we mind the snow and the cold for the holidays because that is the image of Christmas we have seared into our minds and emotions; Christmastime is supposed to be cold and snowy.  But that's gone, and the cold and the snow remain.  There is no sentimental imagery that justifies this shitty weather.  We are now just dealing with it.  And that also causes a lot of day-to-day stress.  I tell ya, waking up every morning knowing I have to dress warmly just so I can scrape ice off my windshield and then wait ten minutes for my car to warm up gets very tiresome very quickly.

So yeah, there's all of that, and this year I have this damn application I have to serve my failures up in.  But otherwise, hey, things are A-OK!