A backwards day is what you make of it

I’ve never been one to wake up on a Monday morning and lament that it is indeed Monday. I never figured there was much point in that. I suppose it’s my “glass half-full” mentality. 

I also would rather be caught eating a whole chocolate cake by myself than actually look for reasons why I should anticipate being crabby about the day—Monday or not.

My positivity was challenged one recent Monday morning while hopping around trying to get my other foot into my underwear. 

“Get ready,” the voice on the Internet radio station warned. “The most depressing day of 2014 is just around the corner, folks.”

“On January 20^th you are going to have a really bad day,” said the radioman.

“It’s true,” he said. “A math guy worked six factors into the mix and came up with a formula for “Blue Monday.”

“You’ll wake up and realize you’re in debt doo-doo, the sun won’t be shining enough, your holiday spirit will be deflated, you’ll have failed to keep your New Year’s resolutions AND,” the radio voice emphasized, “you won’t have a lick of motivation left to dig yourself out—not to mention there won’t be anymore holidays for three and a half months.”

I stood there in my bedroom with one leg poised to go into the leg hole of my underpants, frozen aghast by the grim brick wall of hopelessness I’d just been handed by the radioman who clearly needed to quit his day job or get a hug from his mother, or maybe both. 

“Prepare for rock bottom, we’ll be cold, miserable, in debt, out of shape, and losers because we’ve flushed our willpower about our New Year’s resolutions down the loo,” he stressed, and then burst into a fit of laughter that made me think the cheese had just slid off his cracker. 

Suddenly I was thrown into a turbine of mixed emotions. This news was supposed to help me? This was what I had to look forward to—before the sun had even risen on that far off January day?

“A formula?” I said with an out loud disgust as I fought with my underwear.

“So that’s it? On Monday, January 20^th I’ll be a Vitamin D-deprived, miserable, dead-broke loser? “What’s up with that?" I squealed.

The only credible formula I was aware of in that moment contained six fundamental forces of the Universe and Blue Monday hadn’t made the list.

They were magnetism, gravity, duct tape, whining, the television remote control, and the force that pulls dogs toward the groins of strangers. American writer and humorist Dave Barry had said so.

Yet suddenly my fine little Monday morning was all shook up with discontented seeds of thought rot.

I was crabby and the crow’s feet around my eyes tightened and sharp flashes shot from my corneas across the room—missing the laptop screen by a hair.

And because I’d been too busy listening to the predictions of how my day would go in 30-some more sleeps I’d ended up with my panties on backwards.

“Attitude is everything,” I told myself as I rushed through the rest of my morning routine, feigning a smile while slamming my pinkie finger in the sock drawer and choking back a few choice words when I realized 10 minutes after leaving home that I’d left my coffee mug on the counter.

By the time I got to work—late—the misery level was rising until when in the loo later that morning I realized I also had my underwear on inside out.

I smiled a winner’s smile. 

Henry Ford said, “If you think you can do a thing or think you can't do a thing, you're right.”

I’m right. I can wear my underwear backwards and inside out and, still, I can have a good day. As for Blue Monday, I think I’ll eat chocolate cake that day and celebrate.