I was praying that when I opened the curtains this morning, it would be raining. I was due to play tennis at 8.30, but I just didn't feel up to it, and rain would be a great excuse. But the approaching weather system hadn't arrived yet, and I had to resign myself to a grouchy game of tennis. I usually enjoy playing tennis; just not when I haven't slept well. I was in a foul mood, not for the first time, in recent weeks.

The reason I've been so irritable lately is almost entirely due to constant fatigue - it just wears you down. I think that I've had only a couple of high-energy days in the last six weeks. I don't like to moan and groan in this journal, so I won't explain why I've been so tired, but it certainly has been a very limiting factor of late.

I'm not always the best person to be around, when I'm tired and grouchy. But it's not just people that provoke my irritability, it's inanimate objects, and sometimes even my own bodily behavior. Take peeing, for example. For some unearthly reason, over the last year, I've noticed that it takes me longer to pee. I stand there, sometimes for up to a minute, even in my own bathroom, just waiting for the waterworks to do their stuff. I've even started to shout at my poor little penis - "Come on pee, goddamit!".

What's even funnier, is that I sometimes inadvertently yell "Come on, pee!" when I'm mad at something else. The other day, I was trying to take a shirt off the hanger, and I yelled that exact phrase at the clothes-hanger. At the time, I tried to think what that could tell me about the way the mind works. The other effect it had on myself was to make me laugh, which I suppose is a good thing. However, I hope that I don't get mad at someone in a meeting at work, and blurt out "Come on, pee!"

Something else that gets me when I'm tired and irritable: women in high-heels clicking along the sidewalk behind me. For some reason, I feel my hackles rise, and my blood begin to boil. Do you think maybe I'm headed for a nervous breakdown? :) And don't get me started about women talking and laughing in the elevator; for some reason, American women have particularly piercing voices that strike havoc on the eardrum, particularly in enclosed spaces.

And while I'm on the subject, what about:

• Those curly cords on the phones at work. They get all tangled up. It irritates the heck out of me.
• Partitions in public toilets. They're never, ever hung correctly against the wall, and the doors don't close properly as a result. You'd think someone would have figured this out by now. And why do the partitions have to be so low - the whole world can see my head and shoulders while I zip up my jeans!
• Do fire engines NEED to be so darned loud? In San Francisco, you can hear them half a mile away. By the time they reach you, you have to put your hands over your ears, and they not only have the siren going, but immensely loud horns too!
• Traffic instructions painted on the roads with the order of the words reversed - "Ahead Stop", or "Lane Bike". Stupid, if you ask me.
• When the cashier at a store says, "And the total's going to be a buck sixty five.". I always want to say "When?"

There, I'm so glad I got that off my chest.

Anyway, this morning, I left to go pick John up to play tennis at around 8.15, and at almost the instant I pulled out of the garage, a few very large drops of rain hit the windows. I was so relieved!

Back in my apartment, I began to try to elevate my mood; hopefully by the time I met Cecilia at the gym for my workout, at eleven, I'd be more cheerful. I made myself some more coffee, I played my Carpenters CD ("Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft" seemed particularly appropriate today), and I took some aspirin for a lingering headache.

Nope, it didn't work. By eleven, I was still snappish. And Cecilia was nowhere to be found. My cell phone rang, and it was Cecilia - she sounded even more bad-tempered than I was. She'd just woken up a minute earlier after sleeping through her alarm-clock. Eventually, twenty minutes later, she arrived, and we pulled ourselves together and had a great workout. There's nothing like lifting weights to ease out the tensions, get your system running, and pick up the mood, I find.

Mind, I felt like I looked five years older than I did two months ago. So why was this guy staring at me? I'm talking about this amazing-looking guy who was working out at the next station. I've noticed him before - he has the body of a lion, and a short-haired, youthful masculinity. Yep, he kept making unmistakeable eye-contact. This never happens to me, ever! So why now, when I felt that I looked like an unmade bed? Life is strange. :)

Perhaps I'm just not getting enough sex. Maybe that explains everything. I haven't seen Jed in two weeks. Before you leap to the conclusion that there's trouble in Paradise, let me explain that Jed is at the must crucial point of his PhD. On Monday he has to make a presentation which will determine whether or not he's likely to be hired next Summer as a professor. So this is quite possibly the most important time of his life so far; certainly the most stressful.

If he does well on Monday, he'll start the job-hunting process. This really catapults our relationship into the big unknown. Since he's in a specialized field, the chances that he'll be offered a tenure-track position at a good university in the Bay Area are next to none. He has no idea where he'll end up, and neither of us are quite sure what this means for our relationship. Fortunately, we won't have to deal with it until the Summer, when he'd start working for whichever university hires him. Perhaps by then I'll know what this means for us.