attitude failure

Holly is not in a good mood today.

My Facebook status summed it up and while 250 friends read it and probably chuckled to themselves, the eight people in the house with me were not laughing.

As a matter of fact, it was suggested to me at one point that I "go far away."

I'll take a moment and defend myself.

My brother hit me in the face with a ball on purpose while I was looking at the TV. Later, the same brother was propelling me to go to Wal-Mart and I rebelled against his time table. He kept nagging. I don't like being nagged.

By 5 p.m. the angst I'd felt all day had dissipated and I apologized to everyone in my path.

There's really no excuse, but there might be a reason.

When I left work Friday night, I didn't have time to do all the editing I needed to do so I emailed stories to myself and told the news editor I would read them Saturday morning and get them back to her.

What should have been an hour's worth of work turned into three and the longer I read and the more severe my edits had to be, the more frustrated, then angry I became.

The list of all the things I shouldn't have to be correcting and the editorial decisions that had to be made in the 11th hour stacked up to push me to a new height of stress.

And that stress (combined with weariness) leaked out to the people around me.

Sometimes, that's the part I'm not good at - learning how to separate myself from my job, my work, my baby, which exists in the form of a 7-day-a-week newspaper.

It's not work that I can leave at the office. It comes home with me, it's in the car with me while I'm driving to meet friends, it's at the bar where I'm grabbing a drink, it lays in the bed next to me, it's always in my vehicle, in my email, on my phone, in folders throughout the house, and most pervasively, it's always on my mind.

So yesterday I failed, and let it spoil the emissions of my heart to the people around me.

I don't hate it for that. It just needs a boundary.