I am having a day in which everything feels too tightly wound around me. The sheets were too suffocatingly sausaged-wrapped around me this morning. The trash in my car - because I forget to bring the trash receptacle into the vehicle everyday after I Lysoled it on Sunday - is forming its own landfill in the front seat. The car ride was good, I held a private concert with the Dixie Chicks as my accompaniment and sang loudly, with bravado, during the songs "I'll Take Care of You" and "There's Your Trouble." But then I arrived at my destination and I felt as though the concert had been cut short all too soon, as in the event of a wardrobe malfunction. The walls are closing in on me and you would think that would cause me to focus even more on Important Tasks Du Jour, but my thoughts are all paranoia. I am paranoid about encroaching hemorrhoids, whether or not a piece of Laffy Taffy will set me just over the edge that I am a new candidate for gestational diabetes, whether or not my friends today will still be my friends when I have nothing to offer about What's New other than news of baby's hangnails and how I bought a Hooter Hider for cheap on e-bay. If I'm really honest with myself, I have to admit that I'm just maintaining these days. I'm just staying afloat. I'm not sick, I'm just hormo-tional, and am trying to cultivate the most gentle part of myself so that the patch of gentleness will bloom and grow and leave the weeds in the shadows so that they die. The weeds are wrapped too tightly around me now, though, and I have no idea what Virginia Woolf wanted in a room of her own. I want a big expansive beach and a beach chair with an umbrella and I want the big raging ocean that lulls all other sounds, other than those of the cawing seagulls, and I want it all, all to myself.