Let us speak of all the things I have not done. Come, children, gather 'round. We have electricity and running water, at least. Come.
Let us speak of the Three Days of Vacation that I applied for some weeks ago. Let us speak of the plans I had for them: the meals I would eat, the scenes I would write, the sleep I would get. There would be cooking, and cleaning, and video games! It was to be a wonder, those Three Days of Vacation.
Let us speak of the Time of Cold that came during those days. Let us speak of the snow and ice, and the closing of the schools. Let us speak of my children, with whom I spent the last four days indoors, and let us speak of how they grow very excited at Snow Days and do not sleep. Let us speak of how it falls that when they do not sleep, I do not sleep.
Let us speak of the dishwasher as well. Let us speak of its honorable service as a household appliance, and the many dishes it has cleaned for us. Let us speak of its demise, and our mourning, and The Great Hand Washing of the Dishes. Let us speak of the horror movies that carried me through that task, and give thanks once again that we had electricity and clean water.
Let us speak of the stories I did not write, of the resume I did not clean up, of the cover letter I have yet to produce. Tomorrow, I tell myself, knowing full well that tomorrow I will face The Inbox of Bottomless Email, and another troubleshooting call, and fasting for the bloodwork for my annual physical exam. Let us speak of the Coming of the Plumber and the Repair of the Shower, much anticipated for all that it will occupy Tuesday afternoon. Let us speak of how the promise of Tomorrow is rash and unreliable.
Let us speak of finally returning the children to a school schedule. Let us speak of the difficulties this will entail, and the relief we hope it will bring. Let us speak of the overdue Math Homework, now all filled out and paper-clipped together as it rests in a young man's school folder. Let us speak of our hopes for the return of a regular sleep schedule.
Let us speak of the things that have passed, and the things that we hope are yet to come.
I had a moment yesterday morning when, shortly after waking up, I opened up Twitter, read a bit, and then thought, Naw, this is too depressing, and closed it again.
And then I sat there and thought a bit longer, and realized that Twitter really isn't the issue here. It's me, and the fact that it's Sunday and I have to go back to work tomorrow. I don't want to. I am fed up with my job on an existential level.
I'm also about four years away from retirement, and I'd be lying if I said that wasn't part of the problem. So... I applied for something else within my organization. And I'm very, very curious to see how this plays out, especially since it's technically within the same department and I strongly suspect that they'd need to hire at least two people to take over what I'm currently doing. And honestly, I'm also fucking furious because I shouldn't need to be doing this at all.
But here we all are.
The next step after this one -- assuming that shifting over within the department isn't, um, "viable" -- is to start applying for jobs at organizations that feed into the same retirement plan (or compatible ones). Or, y'know, we could avoid the whole thing by performing a years-overdue reclassification of my current job, and start paying me for the number of responsibilities I've taken on... but honestly at this point I don't believe that management has the basic competence and/or decency to do that. If they did, it would have been done already.
So no, fuck that. I'm sick of waiting, and I've been sick of waiting for fucking years now. I've got medical bills coming in for Beautiful Wife's cancer surgery, Firstborn is heading off to college in another couple of years, Secondborn isn't far behind him, and I am not being paid for the additional responsibilities that I was given years ago. I am done.
Which is not to say that situation couldn't be salvaged. It could. But that would require some sort of positive action on my employer's part, and I don't have any reason to believe that will happen. Why would I?
And yes, I'm well aware that some of the people who read this blog are current or former co-workers. I am also well past giving a shit about that sort of concern. If our mutual employer doesn't like me trash-talking them, that's on them for letting this situation fester in the first place.
So last week's blog posts were a lot of music and not much else, and honestly this week looks likely to be the same. I'm working a bit on the Magic School for Monsters project (and I have an outline! Yay!) and another short story that's based on, um, me not remembering something in a book that someone else wrote, and then picturing how a similar incident might have turned out differently. Which is A) not going to appear here on the blog, I think, and B) trying to be much longer than I originally had in mind. I think it actually wants to become the first chapter of something, and I'm desperately trying to rein it in because I do not have time for that and will not finish it.
And yeah, I have a bunch of things that I could be working on for the Blog o' Doom here if I could get my shit together, but work is piling projects on top of projects and that's sucking up a lot of my energy, plus the boys are out of school for today and tomorrow, and those two non-blog writing projects are currently occupying whatever's left of my Writing Brain.
So the odds of my getting more writing done here on the blog are poor, with the exception that I should be able to attend the D&D game this week. (I didn't make it last week; there were other things in the way, and by the time they were out of the way I was just too tired. Like, "didn't trust myself to drive" tired.) And I might be able to do the blogging challenge; we'll see how that looks. I might not, too.
For now, I'm going to go to sleep, secure in the knowledge that at least I don't have to get anyone else up in the morning.
I've been reflecting recently that for all the time I spend complaining about the holiday season and how stressful October-November-December can be, it's actually May -- and particularly the second half of May -- when things actually fall apart.
It's not that I never noticed it before, it's just that I finally started looking back and thinking, Wow, that really has been a years-long pattern, hasn't it? ...Probably because this year it's been particularly acute. We've had a death in the family; my allergies are acting up and my sinuses are freaking out; the boys had their STAAR tests -- in person, at their schools, which completely threw off our usual morning pattern for a week; we've had so much rain that it's causing problems with our house; then we had the funeral, with all the attendant logistics of family in town; and now the boys are finally out of school.
Not all of that is wholly unpleasant, obviously, but taken together it's been a lot. We're exhausted -- Beautiful Wife, me, and the boys alike.
But now we've finished Memorial Day Weekend and reached the month of June. Personally, I've bottomed out. I stopped reading a book right in the middle of it, not because it wasn't good -- it was excellent -- but because I just didn't have the energy to process it. I turned back to an old favorite and started re-reading that instead, and even then it's been slow going. I'd been working my way through the new collection of Wolfenstein games, but stopped about a third of the way through New Colossus and tried something simpler... and then dropped that and went back and replayed one that I know so well I could practically play it in my sleep.
Writing progress? Well... not completely hopeless. I signed up for a writing class in the hopes of keeping my brain focused on the Shadow Academy project, and I've been dropping little character sketches here on the Blog o' Doom to much the same purpose, and it actually seems to have worked: I haven't made any real progress since the beginning of May, but I don't feel like I've lost my way with the thing completely, either. I have done a fair amount of fiction about my D&D characters here on the blog, but I blame my DM for that.
Work is in a similar condition: I have, at this point, only the vaguest idea of what I've been working on and what I need to be working on. Fortunately, I keep a checklist of work projects (on paper, for the sheer visceral joy of crossing them off when I get something done) and looking over it I see that I've actually finished some things that I hadn't marked off yet; that's a nice feeling. Also, I've spent the last several months alternating between working from home (Monday - Wednesday) and coming into the office (Thursday & Friday), which has been absolute hell on my sense of routine; with the boys out of school, I can go back to working in my tiny little corner of the morgue server room and maybe reestablish some patterns.
So today's going to be a day to stop and regroup: clear out my email, look over my projects, clean up my desk, and just generally try to get myself grounded again so that I'm ready to move ahead with all the things I need to do.
But not until after I finish my tea.
Also, and apropos of absolutely nothing, I have this song stuck in my head:
Then we had two weeks of school and trying to get everybody back on schedule. Then we had Spring Break, in the week immediately before Daylight Savings Time starts and we lose an hour of sleep, because that's how you know your children are going to bright and alert and back on their school schedule.
This, as Beautiful Wife reminds me, after the boys came home for Spring Break last year and never went back. Now we've come full circle.
And just as the boys are going back to school -- online, but still -- we have their aunt and cousins in town to visit the family. The cousins are really excited to see each other, and would love to spend all their time together... but of course the boys are in school this week, which I'm sure means that the family visiting time is going to take place in the evenings, which I'm equally sure is going to mean that sensible, regular bedtimes are rapidly on their way to the place of long-lost myths and pipe-dream aspirations.*
And meanwhile, Beautiful Wife is starting into her Spring Break, and I of course am still on my regular work hours with several major projects that require my full attention, ha-ha-ha.
So I need things to stop happening. I don't mean I need everything to come to a stop. I just need several weeks -- or preferably months -- during which we can get everybody onto a regular schedule and get back into the sort of rhythm that lets us catch up and keep up with things. I need to get back to where we're managing the day-to-day things... or else I need to be able to drop the day-to-day things completely, and concentrate on steering through the chaos instead.
Instead, we're stuck trying to do both. And as happy as I am to have the boys on Spring Break or family in town, I really wish it wasn't all happening right now. I wish this wasn't my circus, and these weren't my monkeys. But some days -- some weeks, some months, some goddam years -- are like that, and the only way out is through.
There are good things happening too. Indeed, much of this is, in various ways, a collection of Good Things. It's just taken all together, it's a lot.
* Since we are still in the middle of a goddam global pandemic, I feel compelled to note that this is not a thoughtless bit of selfish social whimsy. There are compelling reasons to have the girls and their mother visit right now, even though it means flying them in. While I haven't discussed it here on the Blog o' Doom, those reasons are yet another situation that's keeping everything chaotic for the foreseeable future. That said, it will be darkly fucking hilarious if this effort manages to get us all infected with COVID.
So, I received an email from Secondborn's art teacher yesterday. It said, roughly:
I wanted to touch
base with you about Secondborn’s art today. We are learning about coral reefs
and underwater life. Today, the class was instructed to sketch different
underwater scenes, animals, and fish in their sketchbooks. I messaged with Secondborn a little during the asynchronous time, as I saw that he was not in the Art
Google classroom. He said he knew what to do. This is the sketch
that he turned in. I have returned it to him and told him that I need to see a
hand drawn sketch. Can you please check in with him to make sure that he
understands the assignment?
I opened the attachment, not without some trepidation, but I was clearly unprepared for... well... this:
My friends, I want you to know that despite such a powerful provocation I did not panic. I merely called Secondborn over to me and asked him what this was that he had turned in for the morning's art project.
I am... {{chokes}} I am... {{coughs}} I am... {{wheezes}} I am pleased to report that Secondborn intended that to be a picture of a whale.
So, I explained that after he was finished with his final class, he would need to read the actual instructions for the assignment and submit a drawing with sea creatures and a coral reef. I mentioned that this would actually have been quicker and easier if he'd taken the time to read the instructions first. I recommended that he perhaps should not try to do art using only the Google Shapes app on his school laptop.
Then he went back into his room to sign on for his last class, and I went off to have a cup of tea and a mild nervous breakdown.
Epilogue: He did in fact do a proper sketch, his art teacher is pleased, and if the gods are merciful we shall never speak of this episode again.
Well, it's here again. Happens every month. It's just an email to notify me that the Online Account Statement is ready. Which means it's time to pay for the service for all the pagers that this company supplies to us.
Yes, you read that right: "pagers".
Pagers.
Do you know how many pagers we have active right now?
None. Zero. Zip. Nada. Not even one.
Haven't used 'em in years.
And yet, every month, I get an email explaining that my bill statement is now available for online viewing. There's a link for it and everything.
For the pagers. Of which we have none.
It's a working link. I mean, it takes me to a webpage, and there's a login and everything.
Of course, we don't have an account anymore, so I can't log in. I can't even reset my password, because the login page doesn't recognize my email address.
That would be the same email address at which, every month, I get an email explaining that my bill statement is now available for online viewing.
For the pagers. Of which we have none.
I could, of course, have myself removed from their Electronic Invoicing Program. All I have to do is log into Account Manager.
Account Manager: that thing for which I have no credentials. That thing that doesn't recognize my email address. The same email address it keeps sending alerts to.
For our bills for our pagers, of which we have none.
I have called the company.
They tell me they cannot remove me from the mailing list, because I'm not in their system. I don't have an account, you see. We haven't had an account with them in years.
They can't even find my email. The one which receives the notices from them.
And yet, every month...
Well.
You know.
Pagers.
Seventeen years ago, when I switched from being the Helpdesk to doing something else, I asked if I should get myself taken off the account.
My former boss told me not to. She wanted me to be able to get into the account, just in case.
And in the seventeen years since then, I have never once needed to log into that account.
But every month, I receive a notice that our billing statement is ready.
Okay, we all survived Christmas. Presents have been opened, food has been eaten, games have been played. The new dog has pulled a Full Gojira on the gingerbread house, but I got the gingerbread back from him and cleaned up the mess. So now it's The Day After Christmas and I'm back at work.
Having said that, I have no idea what day this actually is. Is it Monday? It kind of feels like a Monday, except almost nobody is here. Thursday? I think that's what the calendar says. I'm not lucky enough to have it be a Friday, I'm fairly sure of that. Not entirely, but fairly.
Screw it. If you have to be at work on the day after Christmas, it gets its own day of the week and that day is Blahsday.
Hope Y'all're having a really great Blahsday this week.
So, let's see, how to recap this... Right, well, for starters Beautiful Wife came down with something horrible... I don't know, last weekend? A day or three earlier? Fever, chills, all-over body aches, coughing... dark gods, the coughing... Anyway: horrible. Probably not flu, since A) she got her flu shot sometime back, and B) it seems to be the same thing that Firstborn had two weeks earlier, which came back as "something viral, but negative for flu".
This, of course, came just before she was due to leave town for a conference -- and not just a conference, but one she was actually presenting at. And by Monday morning, the fever had stopped and the worst of the symptoms were getting better.
So... on Wednesday morning, Beautiful Wife's parents took her to the airport for an early morning flight, while I settled in for a few days of being a single parent. Despite a little bit of chaos (on my end, "Oh my GOD wait I haven't packed the lunches!" and on my wife's end, well... apparently a steady diet of sugar-free cough drops causes ongoing explosive diarrhea. Who knew?) we got everybody where they were supposed to go.
However -- say it with me, children -- "better" is not "well".
So we navigate the day as best we can, with the boys in school, me tired but reasonably productive, and Beautiful Wife miserable and half-dead and drinking a lot of water and orange juice. And at the end of the day I leave work, and I'm off to pick up Secondborn (Firstborn goes home on his own when school lets out, but we're not quite there yet with Secondborn.) And I'm within minutes of the school when my cell phone rings.
It's Firstborn.
He's calling from the house.
He's tried to do his practice on the upright bass. The head of the instrument has come off.
Apparently there was a crack (that he had noticed and we hadn't) that finally gave up. So he unzipped the case and the head of the instrument fell out, followed by the strings, followed by the ramp-thing that hooks to the base of the instrument and lies under the lower third of the strings. And now it's all tumbled out and is sort of lying in a pile on the kitchen floor beside the body of his practice instrument. So, y'know, he thought he'd call and let me know that this was a thing.
So I did what any self-respecting parent would do under those circumstances: I picked up Secondborn from school, went through a drive-through for some food, and went home to try and figure out where the hell we were renting the instrument from.
Thursday:
I finally found the rental information and called Brook Mays Music, who were absolutely lovely about the whole thing. We'd been paying to have the instrument insured essentially since we first started renting it, so at the end of the day on Thursday I left work, raced home, parked my sedan, packed Firstborn and the broken bass into the van, picked up Secondborn from school, headed over to the music store, and swapped the 1/8 bass out for a 1/4 bass, which seems like a pretty good size given that Firstborn has grown a bit over the last few years. Then we grabbed more food and headed back home. We arrive to discover that the bridge of the instrument is still lying on the floor in Firstborn's room, where he had attempted to scoop everything into the instrument case, so we drop that on my passenger seat to return later.
Beautiful Wife, meanwhile, has apparently kept her roommates up all night with her coughing, and they're also very concerned that they're going to catch Captain Trips from her. (I don't believe there's any way she could still be contagious at this point, but I understand their concern.) So she's gotten a separate room and is basically just staying indoors and sleeping any time she feels so inclined. Conference? Yeah, no. I advise not doing anything except the presentations that she's giving, and sleeping as much as possible, and also soup.
Friday:
On Friday I don't hear much from Beautiful Wife, until finally in the evening I call her and confirm that she is, at least, still alive. She had apparently turned off the ringer on her phone and was sleeping as much as possible, which seems like good sense to me. I, meanwhile, have called Brook Mays again and discovered that while they don't much care about the bridge of the 1/8 bass they do want me to return the bow that they issued with it. That sounds fine; I add the bow to the passenger seat of my car, and make a note to myself to do something about this on Saturday, because it's been rainy and cold for the last two days and the traffic has been terrible and I'm not making any more extra trips after picking Secondborn up from school if I can help it. Work is blessedly quiet, allowing me to work on something that I've had to put off for a couple of weeks now, and if I weren't so bloody exhausted it actually would have been a good day. I give up on drive-through food and have a pizza delivered instead, because I may suck as a parent but at least I'm putting food in my children. Then I get everybody into bed and collapse.
However, somewhere in here -- Friday morning, I think -- I get an email from Firstborn's science teacher. Despite some efforts from Beautiful Wife several weeks back to help him put together a reasonable, workable Science Fair project that will neither bankrupt us nor end with us committed to an asylum, Firstborn has apparently not entered any of his information into the approval site and is now weeks behind. So when I get home Friday night, I inform him that he's not allowed to do anything -- video games, YouTube videos, reading books, smiling -- until he's caught up on this thing.
He takes this in fairly good spirits, finds the site, and starts in on it.
Saturday:
On Saturday morning I claw my way out from under the blankets like a zombie who's just smelled teenagers having sex in his cemetery, and shake the boys awake because by the gods we are going to stay on schedule. Also because I need to run a truly nightmarish amount of laundry and dishes if the house is going to be even vaguely presentable, and if I have to get up for that then everybody else does too.
So I make food, hand out morning meds, and set to work: laundry, then dishes, then garbage and recycling, then more laundry, then... Secondborn has put himself in the bathtub, and I step in there to say something to him and realize that what I'd previously taken for some sort of bruise or scrape on his cheek is actually some kind of rash, and it's on his nose and running down the line of his hip towards his crotch as well.
Fortunately, we have the best pediatrician in the world (I May Be Biased) and at 9:30 in the morning I'm able to schedule an appointment for 10:10. This gives me just enough time to shower, a blessing which takes me from Affront To Human Decency back to Modestly Presentable Father-type Human.
Meanwhile, Firstborn has continued his work on the Science Fair documentation, and Beautiful Wife has texted me to let me know that she showed up, gave her presentation, and ghosted back to her room; she's getting ready to head to the airport. Oh, and also: her parents would like to have dinner with us, and can I arrange that?
I DM my DM[1] that I'm not only going to be late to the Saturday Night Game, I'm very likely not going to make it at all. Then I grab Secondborn, inform Firstborn that he's on his own until I get back, and head out the door.
So, the pediatrician's office is quite busy this time of year, but honestly I was expecting that and we're prepared with devices and books. We do a quick swab and then wait some more, and for once in our entire history of pediatric visits it isn't Strep. It looks like just a skin-surface allergic reaction, probably something Secondborn got into outdoors, possibly poison ivy. (Secondborn, for some reason, is very invested in explaining all the reasons why it might something besides poison ivy, but I absolutely do not have the energy to unpack that or even pay attention to it.) So: a quick run by the pharmacy, more medications, a stop by the house to grab Firstborn, then a nice lunch and a quick grocery run, and finally we're back at the house. Naturally I have forgotten to buy Capri-Suns for Firstborn's lunches, so I'll probably be sending him off with airline-sized liquor bottles instead, but that's what you do when you're a parent and anyway I digress. I run more laundry and more dishes, and then grab a forty-minute break before loading everybody into the van and heading off to collect my in-laws and go retrieve Beautiful Wife from the airport.
Finally -- FINALLY -- we get Beautiful Wife back. She is weary and still coughing, but upright and looking at least a little better than she did when she left. We bundle her into the van and drive off to one of our favorite pub-food stops... which is blocked off because apparently there's a festival that none of us knew about. We head for Mexican food instead. It is delicious but not quick, and everybody eats way too many chips.
Then, at last, we drop my in-laws off at their house and return to our own home, where we put Beautiful Wife into the bath and I start working on getting the boys down to bed. This is quite possibly the only thing that really goes right in the entire past week: Beautiful Wife is at last clean and relaxed (and goes to bed shortly afterwards at like 9:00); the boys get ready for bed with no fuss and no complaints and not even much noise; and I am finally able to sit down, though by now -- as expected -- it's far too late to try to catch up on the DnD game. Firstborn has received feedback on the corrections he needs to make for his Science Fair documentation, but I tell him to leave those for first thing in the morning.
So now it's Sunday. Firstborn has submitted his corrections, I'm running blasphemous amounts of laundry, and Beautiful Wife has slept from about nine o'clock last night until roughly eleven-thirty this morning. I've provided breakfast and lunch and medications (on schedule, yet) and have been generally Taking Care Of Things. The thought of going to work tomorrow morning fills me with a sort of soul-devouring existential dread, but that's middle-class life in 2019 America so at least I won't be the only one.
And by all the dark and forgotten gods, I'm going to take a nap.
How has your week been?
[1] ...send a Direct Message to my Dungeon Master...
So we made it back from the trip to DC with a couple of days to clean up and recover. Except, well... the cousins are in town. Now, this is generally a good thing and a cause for joyous celebration. It is also, however, a huge flurry of additional activities at a time when I was honestly looking forward to just relaxing for a couple of days.
On Monday, Firstborn started a week of summer camp (running half a day for one week), which means that I'm dropping him off on the way to work and Secondborn will be hanging out with Beautiful Wife. Next week it will be the other way around, with Secondborn in camp and Firstborn at home. (Firstborn, fortunately, is old enough to be left at home by himself.)
Unfortunately, given work schedules and some work-related politics (at Beautiful Wife's job, not so much my own) I think that after that we really need to get both boys into summer camps for most of the rest of the summer... but I digress.
I've been looking back at the last few weeks, which were not only the trip to DC but also the end of the school year and the peak of my busy season, and realizing just how much stuff we've had to get through, without really having time to analyze or process any of it. Like, I still haven't properly mourned Astrophe the cat -- and that was weeks ago. And I need to take a closer look at what all I'm actually doing for my job, because I keep being given new responsibilities with no change in title or pay, and nobody to back me up. And while we are finally getting some new people on board, we're still painfully short-staffed and I'm not going to be a bit surprised if we lose another two or three people in the next season.
Realistically, all this could be a whole lot worse. But it still feels like we're leaping from event to event and crisis to crisis like ice floes in a flooded river. Sooner or later I'd like to get to shore and just collapse for a couple of days. And I think there are some long-term considerations that I need to seriously look over -- but just like everything else I've been handed lately, that's a research project and I've got to find time and energy to really look into it.
So I'm trying to get the boys (and the family in general) back on schedule before they start school again next week. Firstborn did fine; he got up and exercised, then wandered off to watch videos. Meanwhile I had to carry Secondborn out to the couch, and he has yet to open his eyes despite lights, prodding, and Pokemon going on the TV. He's just out. And frankly, I am too - I'm still suffering from a bit of sore throat/cough/low energy that I'm pretty sure came into town with the extended family. (It's not as bad as it was for them, but it looks and feels like a milder version of the same stuff, and I don't seem to be shaking it off.) So... sick day for me today, and early bedtimes for everybody until further notice. Ugh.
I'd make some snarky comment about how this is a grand way to enter 2019, but honestly I'm still just pleased that I didn't spend most of the 2018 holiday season this way.
Okay, seriously: what the hell is wrong with me? I've gotten everybody in motion, dropped the boys off at school, and made it to work... and I'm exhausted. And I have a headache. And I'm exhausted. (Oh, and I'm thoroughly disgusted by essentially everything to do with Kavanaugh's likely appointment to the Supreme Court and what that says about our society and the future of our justice system.) And did I mention that I'm exhausted?
I got home last night, nibbled a little dinner, and immediately passed out on the couch. Admittedly, it's a bit different when I do it. When Beautiful Wife passes out on the couch like that, I keep everybody quiet, curse the very existence of the phone when it inevitably rings, and try to put the boys to bed without waking her. When I do it, I get woken up to see if I have any cash for the lawn guys, the boys rampage loudly across the house, my wife talks and full-volume Phone Voice in the kitchen, and I still end up putting the boys to bed. I ask you: where's the justice in that?
It's not just me, either. Firstborn seems to be doing okay, but Secondborn hit this morning looking exactly like I feel: tired, cranky, and unready to accomplish anything. Including pulling on a shirt.
I don't think it's allergies. I think we're actually sick. And I think this weekend should be devoted to resting, cleaning, and disinfecting.
I just don't know if that's actually going to happen.
So, since sometime around Sunday evening, the entire family has been sick. No fevers, so we're still sending the boys off to school, but I took Monday and Tuesday off (and I really need to be at work when this posts, regardless of how I might be feeling). But headaches, stuffiness, touches of nausea, that sort of thing. Lots and lots of that sort of thing.
It might just be allergies. Mold and fungus counts are apparently insanely high right now. But... well... I'm still feeling pretty ooky even after spending all day at home, and my immune system is acting like it's taken a serious hit, so... I don't know.
It's not just that I hate feeling like this. What I really hate is the fact that I can't tell. Am I wildly contagious with something horrible, and morally obligated to avoid human contact until it's gone? Would I be okay with maybe some Motrin and Benadryl and a crapload of caffeine to balance against the drowsiness? Who can tell?
This was composed entirely by Firstborn, entirely on his own. I have not edited it. Apparently the incident in question happened last year, though this is the first I've heard of it. He was writing about it for his English/Language Arts class this year.
So one time during the second day of sixth grade I went to fifth period during fourth period time, and as such I had to do fifth period multiple times, due to the fact that my fourth period class is math honors, and since directly after math honors is math rocks, and since I don’t go to math rocks, I had nowhere to go after fourth period, so The Teachers decided that I had to do fifth period again.
Let me explain. At that point, I had had effectively two days- One from the previous school day, one half from that day, and the last part from the before school tour- to know my schedule. Due to this, I was only about eight times out of ten sure where to go. However, that last fifth caught me that day, although there weren’t too many negative effects of this.
In my I eyes, nothing was really that wrong. After all, this was one of my periods, and it happened at around this time, right? Eh, it was probably fine, no need to worry about that messed up sense of time in the back of your head, am I right?
In that kind of spirit, I went through this class all the way to lunch, where my friend asked why I was not in class, ghosts didn’t show up, and I found out that I had my schedule messed up. So my actually kind of so-cunning-you-could-brush-your-teeth-with-it plan was to just do my math afterwards, so I went back to class, finished class, and then tried to go do math. However, as I mentioned earlier, I would have had to go to math rocks, and since I don’t go to math rocks, I had to do fifth period- history, by the way –a second time over.
In all honesty, I’m just glad that history doesn’t change either…
A few weeks back, another author challenged me to actually write a story idea I've been kicking around for years - something related to a Twitter observation that she'd made. I figured, with my schedule, that would take maybe three weeks, depending on how long the story decided to be. That was, I don't know, at least six weeks ago.
I actually got (what I think is) a really good opening, then got bogged down on the next section, and then the world fell on my head with work, family issues, and general exhaustion. I have tried to keep going on it; I have tried cleaning up the troublesome section; I have tried setting aside the troublesome section and rewriting from the end of What I Think Is A Really Good Opening. But I think I'm back to the same problem that I have with pretty much all my writing projects:
I let myself get too tired.
I let myself get too tired, and then I try to keep pushing, and then I'm even more tired, and eventually I hit a point where at the end of the day I'm completely useless but I can't seem to let go and just Get Some Rest like a sensible person who realizes that they're tired. Like, I know it's a problem, I know exactly how to solve it, but I just can't seem to get myself to do it.
Did some work in the back yard yesterday, basically just making a hole in the ground so that next weekend we can cement a basketball goal in place. It wasn't a terribly long or difficult job, I took a break in the middle of it, I drank plenty of water...
It was still hugely enervating. Like, this was mid-afternoon, and by the time we hit dinner I was wiped out. Some of that's the heat, some of that's the direct sunlight, a little of it is the physical effort. But overall? Doesn't matter why, it kicked my ass. Half an hour of manual labor in the direct sunlight kicked my ass. And it was only about 90 degrees out there - nowhere near as hot as Texas sometimes get.
So I did the smart thing. I went to bed early. I'm hoping it helps.
But next weekend, when everything's had a chance to dry out and we brace the pole and pour the concrete? I'm gonna try to do it in the early, early morning.
We were talking about something at lunch a few hours ago, and I remember thinking "Hey, that would make a neat little short story, kind of a reversal of the usual layout," and then we finished lunch and now I can't remember what it was.
But no, I'm not ridiculously frustrated with myself at all. Why do you ask?
I realized last night that I'm actually completely stressed out about my dad having his second stroke in six months. I mean, it's a couple of other things, too -- the boys making the adjustment to their summer vacation and how we're handling that this year, a dental issue that's pretty mild but is still One More Thing I Have To Deal With, and the usual house cleanup and maintenance. But mainly, it's this thing with Dad.
And I've been doing that thing where I'm completely freaked out but pretending even to myself that everything's okay, or at least that it isn't that bad and we can just keep going through it, and... yeah, that's not so much what's happening. And, of course, I've been telling myself that we really just need to wait and see how this plays out, because there isn't really all that much we can do about it -- which is true, but apparently does nothing to settle the underlying sense of panic. Which means that I'm weirdly unfocused and not making the best choices, when I really need to be working on the things that I can work on.
I think I need some time off, but I need to get some stuff back under control at work, first. (Oh, yeah - there's yet another reason why I'd be, um, unaccountably stressed...) I think I'll see if I can put in for a couple of days around the July 4th holiday - that would combine for a nice extended weekend. And while I'm at it, I should put in now for the first couple of days of school in the fall. I've been meaning to take those off for a couple of years, now.
No new tale to tell, really. Just feeling unproductive, out of control, and really ready to just take a moment for myself.
