Ugh, I made a terrible mistake. I looked at the site’s stat page and saw someone had recently viewed a post from over two years ago. I went back and read it. It was about week 2 when we were doing Body for Life.

Damn, I sure used to be optimistic! I sounded happy, too!

To verify that the oozing optimism was indeed a mistake, I went and read another past blog post. This one was a summary of how I thought the year 2007 went. Holy hell, that post was overly optimistic, too. And filled with big, fluffy, optimistic plans and goals for 2008. For some asinine reason, I thought I was taking a step up by working for the electric company, despite the 12-hour days that started at 3am if I wanted to work out, and left me with a mere 3 waking hours to spend with my husband. Not to mention that one of our dogs killed our cat that year.

Crap.

Now I have to admit that we are depressed, because in comparison to 2009, 2007 was a pretty good year.

Here, let me give a re-cap of how 2009 went.

It started out with suckage because we knew Stefan would probably be losing his job. The suckage continued when he finally did lose his job in April and we got whalloped with a $5,000 tax bill. This completely blew all financial plans out of the water, along with our optimism for the near future. Suckage turned into crappage as the economy plummeted off a cliff and more people lost their jobs. Our house lost value, making it virtually impossible to get out, and then in December after the unemployment ran out, we hit financial Ground Zero. Oh yeah, and we got kicked out of the credit union because our financial life hit the ground in huge, fiery blasts. Sorry, that last one really burns me up. Ten years of outstanding patronage with them, and this is what I get in return for my loyalty.

What have I learned here? I think what made 2007 mildly tolerable, thus triggering my boundless enthusiasm, is that we took some heavy hits, whereas in 2009, we experienced an ongoing, long-standing seepage of sucky-ness. Perhaps, and I say this timidly and humbly, I have an easier time taking some heavy blows that knock me down completely, as opposed to the life-draining, knee-weakening wearing down of optimism over a long period of time.

Hmm, yeah, if I were a WoW boss, I do think I’d prefer a good skull cracking blow to the head to bring me down rather than me bumbling about with a Warlock’s Drain Soul sucking away my power. A couple of good whacks and I’d be out cold. I wouldn’t know what hit me. Literally.

But damn it all if all this still can’t keep my optimism down for long. I’m already thinking about how we’re going to be better off now that we’ve hit Ground Zero. Once you hit the bottom, there’s not a lot further you can go, and I’m not stupid enough to pick up a shovel and start digging a hole to bring us down further. We can do the post-mortem now, and say gee, yeah, we’ve learned a ton from all this. We’ve learned more about ourselves than anything else, and mostly stuff that doesn’t translate well into a blog.

Even though I have no clue what direction to go in now, I am still unwilling to write off 2009 as a loss. If you learn something, it’s not a loss. I’m trying to look at this as a clean slate. And what better time than a brand new decade? I may be down, but I am not out!