Tag Archives: rest

On the mend…

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The first day back to work after a proper vacation is traumatic enough. The first day back after the better part of a week out sick is something altogether different. It’s the combination of having a ridiculous backlog of work to go through, still feeling vaguely like ass, and having experienced none of the restorative effects of sitting somewhere sunny enjoying run drinks I guess.

At any rate after a week of guzzling Gatorade, more meals of soup than I want to think about, and generally feeling like so much warm death, my shoulder is back to the wheel. It’s good to be off the couch and all, but as it turns out I’m not all that opposed to staying home and dividing my time between binge watching Netflix, reading through two or three titles on my Kindle, and napping periodically with one or both dogs. Maybe that’s a good sign that I won’t be bored in retirement.

All things considered, it’s good to be on the mend… but as it turns out there are definitely worse things than periodic self-enforcing periods of general rest. Even knowing that, after a day back I’m ready to crawl into bed and sleep for a week.

The best weekends…

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You can say what you will about raucous benders, trips through Amish Country, and adventures on the high seas, but as for me, the best weekends tend to be the ones where I don’t have much to say on Sunday night. It means they went more or less according to plan, weren’t jam packed with the yammering of strangers, and essentially allowed me to deal with the least amount of stupid possible. Those weekends don’t tend to make for great blogging, but they do tend to leave me feeling rested. That’s saying something especially coming hard on the heels of a dog that insisted on barking through every roll of thunder and gust of wind all the previous night.

Like all good things this too must end. Daylight tomorrow will break on a computer that may or may not be networked, a gaggle of senior personnel who have decided over the weekend that months of planning need to be changed overnight, remembering we’re in the midst of an election with no good choices, and the general asshattery that comes along with your average Monday. That makes these good weekends, the best of them, among the most rare of gems. And you can’t beat that with a stick.

Dreams and wishes…

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With all respect to Dr. Freud who argued that dreams are and exercise in wish fulfillment, I’m afraid I have to go out on a limb and beg to differ. I woke up in a cold sweat this morning near enough to 3AM in the aftermath of a dream in which I (for some unknown reason) was sitting on the back porch watching the back yard wash out all the way down to the bottom of the foundation. I can assure the good doctor that I in no way have any wish to do that kind of excavation work. Ever.

Maybe the most entertaining part is that Dream Jeff was completely uninterested by the every growing chasm that was appearing where his dream yard was supposed to be. I can only assume that the entire thing was just a bad reaction to too-late-in-the-evening meatloaf sandwiches and spending too much time obsessing about a dry basement.

I’d like to think the couple of hours I allocate to sleep are supposed to be a restful time. Fortunately last night is largely an exception to that rule. Even so, it’s yet another of the many reminders that sometimes inside my own head is a very strange place to pass the time.

A minute to breathe…

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The hardest days aren’t necessarily the longest ones. They’re not necessarily the ones where the most important decisions are made. There not even the one where there is a crisis around every turn.

The days that cause me the most trouble are the ones where you never manage to come up for air. Nothing I’m doing is especially hard – I’m not unlocking the secrets of the atom. Nothing I touch on a daily basis could even remotely be considered a matter of life or death. Even so, that doesn’t mean that it’s not without its pitfalls.

The pitfall today was a simple matter of volume – of too many people wanting too much information compounded by the fact that it’s utterly impossible to really concentrate while sitting in a cube farm. The layout simply isn’t designed for that. In fact, they’re designed precisely to encourage “collaboration” (read, idle chatter). As wonderful as a team may be, there’s no greater killer of focused concentration, in my considered opinion, than cramming as many people as possible into a given area and telling them then to go forth and do great work.

Today was mentally exhausting even though I have precious little to show for it. Tomorrow will be mentally exhausting too. So will the day after that. It’s possible that every time you see me my brain is just a little more exhausted than it was the day before.

Even on the mundane days, I think all I need is a couple of minutes to breathe between the endless rounds of pointless questions and unstoppable conversation. It’s the kind of wish only a fairy godmother could grant, because there isn’t a chance of it happening in the real world.

(Temporarily) Embracing my inner slacker…

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This is one of those days where I’m reminded just how limited a scope of interest I currently seem to have. I could regale you with another in the latest round of stories about why the office is a shitshow. I could rant about any number of celebrities, political figures, policy decisions, or current events. In a pinch I could even bang out another about the alleged joy of home ownership. What I can’t do at the moment is give you a fresh and interesting take on any of those things. They seem to have become the background hum of every day.

I’m not an escapist by nature, but I find myself spending more and more evenings cramming my nose into a book and trying hard to ignore all the other noise. I don’t want to think about work. I’ve already had it up to my eyeballs with politics. I don’t have it in me to further ponder the expensive mud pit I’m about to have commissioned in the back yard. So for the moment, maybe I’m being a little more escapist than usual. Even so, spending the evening with a decent drink and a good story doesn’t sound particularly awful.

Conveniently I don’t have an inner adrenalin junky to satisfy or I’d probably be off signing up for sky diving lessons, so that seems like what it’s going to be for the time being – or at least until the other bits and pieces settled down a bit and are, on the whole, a little less exhausting. I’m usually inclined to try doing it all at once, but this one time I think it best to let my inner slacker lead the way for a while.

Pooped…

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Usually writing is my pressure release valve. Tonight it’s feeling a bit too much like real work to be particularly enjoyable. I’ve got plenty of ideas – and even a “by request” still in the queue, but the fact is I just don’t feel like stringing together a little slice of life story this evening. It’s not so much that I’m physically tired as it is my brain just feeling a bit pooped. With eight days (assuming everything goes to plan) between now and closing, the volume and velocity of things that need done are picking up dramatically.

Then I remember that the pace only increases after closing – with the first round of household goods making the move the following day and then the vast majority of my gear making the three mile trip two days after that. I’m doing my level best to stage everything to make it all happen as seamlessly as possible… the down side of that being it all requires a pretty precise level of attention to detail to make sure all the gears mesh. They way everything is set as of this evening the plan gives me seven days to tear down, move, reset, and establish some semblance of order at the new place before jumping back into my version of a normal routine. Of course it it happens to be raining on any one of those days the whole schedule gets shot to hell and the process gets to start over from scratch. No pressure.

For now I’m going to throw down another few cups of coffee and push back the whole pooped feeling and get a few more things checked off the list tonight. At least when I hit the sheets tonight I’ll feel like I’ve earned it.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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Priorities come, priorities go. My attention gets swept away to other things that feel important at the time. The one thing you can count on is that by Thursday at least there things will have throughly annoyed me. It’s comforting, like the steady ticking of a metronome. Every week. There it is.

1. Typhoid Mary. In the early part of the last century Mary Mallon was arrested and isolated as a known carrier of typhoid responsible for infecting at least 51 people with the then considered deadly disease. I introduce Mary as a reminder that if you’re sick enough to be hacking up a lung and generally sound and look like warm death, you’re sick enough to keep your ass at home. “I don’t think I’m contagious” or “I’m feeling better” aren’t good enough cover when you want to get all up in everyone’s personal space coughing out whatever version of plague you happen to be carrying. It may surprise you to discover that none of us are as indispensable as we might think we are. The world will most assuredly go on turning if we spend a few extra days on the couch, so don’t be shy about using a little time to feel better. If you won’t do it for our own sake, how about doing it for the people that get to share your recirculated air?

2. The internet. Despite that it provides the venue for any number of things that I enjoy doing, I’m currently finding the internet more of a giant time suck than usual. I need it not to be. There are things I really would like to get done – aside from being driven to distraction by pictures of cats and being tempted to read every scrap of information ever imagined by the human mind.

3. Sleep. Actually lack of sleep. The last two nights have been post-midnight bed times due to the issues discussed in Weekly Annoyance #2. As much as it pains me to admit it I need a good, solid night of going to bed early and staying there for about 12 hours. Likelihood of that happening any time soon: 0.00%.

Sad to report…

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It is with great sadness I report that I did not win Powerball, Mega Million, or discover a long lost and incredibly wealthy relative over the last 12 days. Unfortunately the only conclusion I can draw from state of affairs is that there’s no alternative besides rising before dawn tomorrow to reacquaint myself with Uncle’s salt mines. I have a vague recollection of what it is I do for a living, but to be perfectly honest I haven’t given it more than a passing though (if that) since the day before the day before Christmas. It feels like finding the parking lot in the morning will be an accomplishment in and of itself. All I know for sure at this point is that whatever the restive effects of a nice long break are, I can already feel them ebbing away. That’s unfortunate on any number of levels.

Disregarded…

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I’m fairly sure that somewhere we are enjoined to maintain Sunday as a day of rest. And while I’m sure that’s a fine theory, it adds up to 1/7 of the week where I’m not getting a damned thing done and that plan just isn’t going to hold water. So yes, as we speak I’m blatantly disregarding the command of having a “day of rest.” There’s laundry to do, floors to scrub, a bathroom in desperate need of cleaning, shrubbery that needs cutting back, a dog in need of a bath, and at least two more meals that are going to have to be cooked. That’s just the top few items on the list.

As great as a day of rest every week sounds, it’s just not going to happen. If I’m lucky, I’ll carve out a few days for that a couple of times a year, but getting there once a week is a pipe dream if I’ve ever heard one. There’s no way around my Sundays being filled with ticking things off the long list of shit I didn’t get to in the previous six days. For some reason, I don’t think that breaking a sweat on the sabbath is going to be the sin that pushes me over the edge. Just between you and me, it’s probably not even in the list of top ten sins I’ve committed this week so I’ve got that going for me.

So if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to quit pecking at the keyboard and get a few more things done this morning.

Another lost weekend…

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After three days of sitting here relatively quietly and trying to give my back the time it needs to unkink, I can say with authority that I’m absolutely over the part of this process where I sit around and don’t do much. As much as I like reading or watching entire seasons of television in one sitting, the fact is if I don’t get out of this house tomorrow and go to work I might just go stir crazy. Strictly speaking that’s not violating doctor’s orders, since he told me to “take it easy”. It’s not like I’m in a warehouse tossing around boxes or working out in the oil shale fields somewhere. I know, I know, it’s a sad state of affairs that I’m ready to get back to work. Rest assured, it’s mostly a function of wanting to be somewhere other than in my own living room than having a burning desire to get back to PowerPointing and endless meetings. If I’m going to be groggy and uncomfortable, I can do it there just as easily as I can from here.

This has basically been a lost weekend – just another one added to the list that’s already gotten to be too long. With spring coming on and weeds popping up all over, it’s looking more and more likely like I’m just going to have to start playing hurt. And don’t get me started on the cleaning that’s getting put off because of bending problems. At some point in the not too distant future, this damned traitorous back is going to have to learn that it works for me. Either it can cripple me right and proper or it can get with the program and start cooperating. Either way, I’ve had it with just nursing it along. It’s reign of terror is coming to an end. If the pills and the chiro can’t get it right, I’ll default to my usual approach and trudge through it by virtue of sheer force of will.