it must have been the 60 second cold shower

It was really the perfect way to start off an awesome day.

I'm not going to lie. The last couple of days have been really tough. The physical stress that comes with having the worst case of Poison Sumac (it's like poison oak) I've ever had in my life (and I've had it bad before), combined with the emotional strain of being 1000 miles away from most of my friends and family, has made it pretty hard to actually get stuff done at work. Under this kind of stress, I find it pretty easy to acquire a sort of defeatist attitude. But today, it was different.

It was extra cold this morning, and the shower had to be cold because a hot shower would irritate severe rashes that are covering large portions of my body. It was hard enough to get in, and it was definitely hard to stay in long enough for me to get clean, but it was shockingly also hard to turn the water off and get out. Usually, it's understandable that in a warm shower, getting out means getting colder, but today I discovered that it works the same even with cold showers. There must be some strange property of physics, kinda like the wind chill factor except when there's no wind but you're sopping wet and fresh out of the water, like the sop-chill-factor or something. Anyway, by the time I was dried off and back in my clothes, I had come to the conclusion that nothing in the rest of my day could possibly be any harder than what I had already done.

Some days are just like that. There's this feeling that any challenge that comes at you is insignificant, like all your challenges are little goblins, but you have this huge broadsword strapped onto your back and there's nothing that you can't take down. Sometimes I feel like I could just reach back there and pull it out and start hacking away, not at living people or things, of course, but metaphorically at my challenges.

That's what today felt like.