I'm feeling that weirdly-pointlessly-anxious thing a bit lately. The free-floating anxiety keeps finding things to focus on, and they're fairly irrational things. A sample:

• "Oh my god I'm poor!" (As if I don't have a pretty big check coming for my novel sales later this year; thus, it's not a big deal if I have to put some groceries or dental bills or whatnot on a credit card and carry the balance for a few months.)

• "Oh my god the house is dirty!" (Well, that's fairly simple to fix, too. Time-consuming, but easy.)

• "Oh my god my day job is hard!" (I've been there almost five years now, and it has difficult moments, but I think I've learned to cope with them by now.)

• "Oh my god I have to send out Flytrap and Zodiac orders!" (Which is only difficult at all because of our stupid dying printer and its love for destroying labels. But I managed to get it done last night anyway.)

• "Oh my god I don't write enough!" (Probably true, but the story I'm working on now is for an anthology that has a deadline in early September, and I'll probably finish it in a week or two, so it's hardly worth getting worked up about.)

• "Oh my god what if the car breaks down?" (This is a pretty damned irrational one, since the car is running fine. It has developed a weird thing where sometimes the windshield wipers don't work, and that's bugging me, but at least it happened in the summer, when it's not likely to rain for several months. I'll get it checked out when I have some money. Though, hmm, I should get the oil changed before we next go down to Santa Cruz -- "Oh my god I have to get the oil changed!" Sigh.)

• "Oh my god my sundew is dying!" (True, and sad, but it's not like I've never killed plants before. I have a black thumb.)

I could go on, but I'm guessing y'all get the picture. It's entirely an issue of badly bubbling brain chemistry -- these "problems" are all trivial, and under other circumstances they wouldn't make me turn a hair. But for some reason, just lately, I'm having anxiety dreams about, like, whether or not I go to the gym often enough. I'm hoping the long fourth of july weekend, along with liberal consumption of cold wine and margaritas, will effect a readjusment of my attitude. I'm wound up for no good reason. I think it's the heat. I also need to give myself permission to take a day completely off, without guilt, and just play video games, read, wander in the park, hang out with Heather, etc. Maybe this coming Sunday. Which means getting all my housework and weekend writing done Saturday, but that's doable... I just feel like I'm always working, at the day job or on writing or Tropism Press stuff. And any time I'm not working feels like shirking. This is not a stable configuration.

(I'm not asking for sympathy or anything, by the way. But sometimes acknowledging the irrationality of my worries/stress helps banish them.)