the good, the bad, and the ugly

So evidently I'm having a rough day ...or three. And I may as well dispel any possible preconceived notion that I'm anything but human and as such, have my good and not-as-good days -though unless you live with me, I defy you to be able to tell if or when I'm having a less than stellar day. I just don't believe in sharing any bad mood I may be having with anyone else. Not your problem, y'know? There's plenty of that going around out there already, thank you very much.

But I digress.

Aside from the social aspect that comes built into my job whether I'm in the mood for it or not, I haven't participated in a single social thing in two weeks now, and yet I have so much on my proverbial plate at any given time that it makes my head spin. That said, I don't know how those of you who have kids do it.

Allow me to clarify here just for future reference that when I refer to "social", I'm most likely not referring to going to a nightclub or anything of that nature. I outgrew that eons ago now, thank God. Rather, as a case in point, the "social" thing I did two weeks ago was that I met up with a friend and her kids to spend the day at a mall.

But back to the point: I wonder, quite regularly in fact, just when and how the world got to be quite this frenetic. Or is it the world? Is it the U.S.? Or maybe L.A.? Or maybe it's just ...me.

Nah.

What might just be me though, is the degree of palpability with which I feel maybe a sense of collective anxiety that seems to be permeating the world -or maybe my world- that seems to be virtually inescapable ...short of moving. To somewhere remote.

Maybe it's just me (yet again), but I'm painfully aware of the "have to"s and "should"s on my to-do list endlessly crowding out the "want to"s we all have.
--Or worse yet, all too many "want to"s getting relegated to "ya, right"s --you know, filed either under "unrealistic" or that awful category of "someday" that all too often doesn't come. Too much stick and not enough carrot will cause even the best of dogs to bite ...eventually. But this is simple Psychology 101 that much of Europe evidently figured out long ago.

So, is it just me, or did we lose considerable quality of life over the fairly recent past? And if so, what the hell happened?!

I've always been interested in and open to other perspectives, so I welcome your's.

So...
is it just me?
Or is it you, too?