pressure on my chest

I claim not to make New Year’s Resolutions, but that doesn’t stop me from taking on a slew of new projects every January and getting crushed under their collective weight.

They’re not resolutions, I reason, they’re fresh starts. Lots of projects, blogging, and singing in store for the new year that simply didn’t make sense to start in the bustle of December due to all the holiday downtime. It’s a wishlist of personal creativity, every successive idea mounting like a weight against my heart and mind, lest I let it slip away.

Not coincidentally, I have a similar streak of getting sick every January for the past few years, which leads directly into my debilitating, house-bound February Funk. It doesn’t matter if I get a flu shot, take my vitamins, eat well, get good sleep, and slam down OJ all day. Somehow, some way, a tickle of sickness finds its way into my throat until it becomes tightness in my chest.

I hate it.

First, because I am not that person. I don’t get sick. Or, I didn’t, but now I do with great predictable accuracy, and I hate it.

Even more, I hate that it completely derails my ambition for the year – playing gigs, recording projects, and new songs all go by the wayside while I’m hoarse and scratchy for half a month.

This week I started feeling that familiar, dreaded tickle and fought back hard.  More vitamins, more food, more sleep, and more OJ. I seem to have staved off the actual illness, but I’m still feeling the after-effects – the pressure on my chest.

I hate it, and it made learning vocals to our new Filmstar song hard, it’s going to make my rehearsal of our Garbage tribute set suck, and it transformed the advertising tour of the airport I just walked through into a special kind of marathon.

That’s all fine. It is not getting into the way of my plans for 2011. There will be no February Funk.