Sunday blahs

Sunday night is always a bit of a downer. I am not loving the job just now, so I have that "going back to boarding school" sick-tummy feeling. This is a horribly familiar sensation that was particularly acute for me from 1988 to 1991, when I was actually attending boarding school, and every holiday ended with a nauseous car/plane trip back to school and a sonic-boom fight with my parents. (Let me digress for a moment and describe my reaction to entering boarding school at 13, painfully shy and woefully unprepared for life with a mob of other adolescents, their hormones, their dangerous beauty routines, and their drugs. First, I stopped eating much, and lost about a quarter of my body weight in the first term. Then, I allowed another boarder, who had an interest in hairdressing but no discernible talent, to cut my nearly waist-length hair into a bob. The ends looked like I'd got stuck in a door and had to hack my way out. When my parents turned up for swimming sports, they didn't recognise me in the crowd.)
I had another terrible round of boarding tum when I was working for a certain start-up newspaper (the biggest professional nightmare of my life, and the only time I have consciously walked away from a bad situation instead of standing and fighting), and now I have a mild case which I am attempting to quell through strength of will and renewed physical fitness. After all, this is my birthday week, and I officially hit my mid-thirties, surely a joke. I own hamsters, speak to strange dogs in the street, and still keep track of Paris Hilton. I am not really a proper adult.
To deal to the tummy, I have sucked back a mug of spicy hot chocolate, a big serving of empty carbs, and am now working my way through a glass of Riesling. I made an inspiring list of places we may visit in the next year--Alaska, Colorado, and Montana figure strongly--and I have plans to retreat to bed early with a new book, an autobiography written by a man who grew up in San Francisco high society. It's all about his evil stepmother who sounds like a fabulous character. Horrible but fabulous.
BTW, speaking of horrible, I saw A Mighty Heart, the film about the murder of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was abducted in Pakistan in 2002 and beheaded. It is based on the novel by his wife, Marianne, and it is really good. I was resistant because it stars Angelina Jolie, who makes me feel like biting kittens. But she manages to avoid the pouty, self-satisfied smirk which has been such a mainstay of her career and does a wonderful job of portraying an admirably strong woman in the worst possible situation.
And so to my book.