Sarah Grace is ______

I'm sort of fascinated with the level of where things have gone to in terms of Facebook updates and Tweets. Fascinated, and just as guilty at times, in terms of feeling the need to share everything from the most mundane thoughts to some that are arguably just too personal. I'm not sure what compels the majority of us to fall into this pattern - maybe everything seems like fair game once you turn on a means of connecting, even if it's digital and subject to judgment.

So I guess you can consider this my status update, one that exceeds 140 characters. It's the eve before my favorite holiday (or "Devil's Night" as we Detroiters call it - i.e. "Light Some Shit on Fire Night"), and I am staring down the tail end of some sort of flu that was just strong enough to be annoying, but not serious enough to push me to Swine concerns. I am also staring down a bag of Halloween candy, still somehow miraculously unopened and so ridiculously out of proportion in terms of my trick-or-treaters ratio: there's got to be at least 90 pieces in this bag, and I'll get maybe 10-15 kids knocking on my door at best. Guess those little suckers are going to get a handful each, because otherwise that means leftovers and that means binge, which would be fine if I had the "purge" part down too, except I don't.

Yes, I just more or less encouraged having an eating disorder as a way of having your candy and eating it too, and this is one of the many reasons I'm not actually allowed to have kids.

I've certainly been way more sick than I am now, but regardless, I don't do "sick" well. I don't know how to relax when I'm feeling well, so you would think that sticking me with a lowered immune system might be just the trick to slow me down, but it actually makes me more nervous, because it sends my mind racing about all the stuff I should be doing. How's that for some twisted logic? I'd like to pin this on the fact that I work from home, and therefore don't really even have sick days, but even when I did report to an office and could call in, I always worried whether or not the powers that be believed me.

That said, I've agreed to a compromise of sorts: though I have been more or less stationed on my couch for the past 48 hours, it's been with my laptop actually ON my lap, working through my various to-do lists for my clients at a reasonable (if not total A-game) pace. I even managed to make final edits to my new book proposal - just waiting on one more sample to come through, then it's all systems go in terms of my agent taking it out.

Mr. SG headed down to DC for the weekend to celebrate a friend's birthday, and at the last minute we decided Awesome-O would join him, freeing me of dog duties in order to help out in the "laying low" department. So here I am, on my second 2-liter of diet ginger ale, determined to get back on the saddle somewhat by tomorrow so I can join my friend Tim for a little Halloween dinner to celebrate as he prepares to run the New York Marathon Sunday morning.

I haven't run to the kitchen let alone several miles in two weeks now - just wasn't feeling up to it, even prior to getting hit with this flu, but to be honest I'm not sure how much I even care about the lag. I sort of just wanted to prove that I could train myself this year to the point of doing at least one 5K, and that mission has been more than accomplished. But I've said out loud that I'm going to do another one on Thanksgiving morning, so again - the pressure to follow through, stick to my word, even though it's a word that was more or less sent into outer space and committed to no one and nothing. But it's out there, and I know it, and that's enough - so it's back to the treadmill come Monday.

By then, my beloved October will have officially come to a close. This year, it was a strange mix of deeply rewarding and incredibly rough, though I suppose that's every month, even the ones I try to protect with proclamations that they are my favorite of all.

But there's a time to be a sad Vader...

...and a time to use the force.

And right now, I'm trying to skip the boo hoo's and just focus on the boo's. Happy Halloween.