I’ve been doing my best this weekend to wallow in a sea of self pity. Because impending unemployment and Christmas didn’t suck enough, PMS has decided to come for a visit. This makes for a perfect wallowing situation, right? Wrong.

Wallowing takes a certain sort of focus. To properly wallow one must spend great amounts of time thinking of all the badness to ever happen to them, and all the badness that will certainly happen to them in the future. When you aren’t thinking about the badness, you have to analyze every situation you’ve ever been in and come to the irrational conclusion that life hates you and you suck.

But when your suffering from acute and frequent ADD flare ups, your thoughts can’t seem to settle down long enough to get a good wallow on. I had this brilliant idea about how people blame my singleness on my career and use that as an excuse, but now that I’ll be unemployed what will they blame it on? But before I finished the thought enough to write about it, I decided that I had to give The Best American Short Stories 2007 another try and promptly fell asleep.

And then there are the people who, unbeknownst to them, make it impossible for you to wallow. They send e-mails that remind you that you’re really doing something meaningful even if you think all you do is write about not wearing pants.