Friday, November 21, 2003

“Sick” Day

Things that I have been putting off and need to get done before I can even think about getting on with my life:

    Get oil changed done! Hopefully I can get it changed again before I drive another nine thousand miles.

    Get hair cut done! And it looks real cute, too; I accidentally found this really nice lady, Kathleen at the Lakeshore Beauty Center, and she did a beautiful job.

    Get nails fixed done! Tried a new place, also on Lakeshore (where I also got my oil changed... one-stop shopping), and got a lovely fill-and-file for five bucks less than usual.

    Get some laundry done Three loads done! Three to go. Nowhere to put the clean laundry, but hey! Progress, not perfection.

    Buy birthday present for Dalton done! But I can't tell you what I got because he reads this blog. (You're gonna love it, honey!)
And all because I decided today that I was taking a sick day. I have so much sick leave saved up (about three full weeks) that I can afford to be sick one day a week for the rest of the fiscal year. And I figured I wasn't going to get anything done at the office today, with all these little maintenance chores on my mind; and the chores needed to get done more than I needed to go sit in the office doing nothing.



Actually, there's more to it than that. To tell the absolute truth, when I got home from the office yesterday, I started crying and couldn't stop. I cried — and by "crying" I mean hysterical full-on pillow-biting racked-with-sobbing ululating, with snot and tears pouring out of every orifice — for a full twenty-five minutes, so long that I started wondering if I was actually having a nervous breakdown. And after that, I was dreading going back to the office and inviting another episode of that sort.



The thing is, as behind as I am on my personal life, I'm twice as far behind at the office... and completely overwhelmed. I mean, I haven't updated the membership database in months, I haven't checked off the incorrectly-placed deductions from the payroll registers all semester, and I haven't sent on any new members to the national affiliate in over a year; then there's the stationery and the files and the other maintenance work, on top of all the things that come up day to day, and then there's work I do that isn't even my job, and work that I'd like to do but haven't got time.



And then at the board meeting yesterday afternoon people kept making veiled comments about work I haven't been doing (“We usually get mailers to remind us about these meetings, don't we?”) and then making “suggestions” of additional work I “ought” to be doing. I ought to switch our email account so I could get more emails out at once without tripping AOL's fascist and completely useless anti-spamming measures, I ought to nag the members to keep us updated of new addresses and phone numbers in every newsletter we send out, and we ought to be sending more newsletters out, and of course updating the website more often, and so on and so forth ad infinitum. I felt like a toad under a harrow, I felt like I was being unfairly criticized, I felt like I was being attacked.



Of course, I wasn't really being attacked, most of the board never remembers anything they say from one minute to the next, they just like thinking out loud. But being overwhelmed and having people try to add more to the pile, it was more than I could bear.



Hopefully after a nice restful weekend, and getting some of my personal chores off my mind, I'll have a little more strength to deal with things at the office. Also telling people that they're simply going to have to wait for their new projects to be addressed but feel free to do it yourself if you want it done so damned bad. And I have to simply take everything one-thing-at-a-time until I get caught up. It's all a matter of not getting flustered. And of taking care of myself. And not taking things so damned seriously. And maybe crying more often so that when it happens I don't start wondering if it's time for me to start taking antidepressants (maybe it is, but I can't afford them right now and that's all there is to it).



So today I got a lot of chores done, but I took them slowly and rested in between episodes. And now I'm going to read a book or else watch a movie, or maybe play The Sims Superstar for a little while. I hope you're having a nice time with whatever you're doing today!



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