I missed the first annual town picnic on Sunday for an afternoon flight arriving in DC at about midnight. The hotel didn’t have a kitchen/room service so I set out for food. Everything was closed. I settled for a bag of popcorn from a nearby CVS and a few bottles of water. I woke up at about 10 am, packed up my shit and headed out to the nearest coffee shop for a latte. Spent way too much time battling security to get onto the campus and missed the opportunity to get to the cafeteria before the meeting began at 1 pm, ended at 5 pm and the taxi met me at the entrance to the building at 5:15, which was perfect – it dropped me at the airport a few minutes after 6 and I was through security and to the gate before 6:30, which was awesome because all I’d had to eat for two days was a bag of popcorn and the airport is filled with such fine culinary fare. Next thing I know I’m calling Ed from my cell phone, on the airport shuttle, as we’re crossing the Golden Gate Bridge, begging him to meet me in Larkspur with a chicken sandwich and a sweater. Eureka!
I arrive home to snuzzle with the dog on the sofa a shy bit after midnight on Monday and ready myself for a 7 am on Tuesday – some five or six hours away from it I drift off and wake up drooling on one of the sofa pillows but/and there’s no coffee in the house. I rouse Ed outta bed to fetch me coffee as I dial in. I not only have to be on the call, which is difficult enough, but I also have to chair the call. Coffee come my way, please come my way.
On the one hand it’s busy, there’s a gazillion deadlines I’ve fallen behind on, at any given moment there are at least three urgent things I should have attended to by COB yesterday and part of that is due to the fact that I reduced my schedule but there’s never been an adequate acknowledgment of how that needed to correspond with a decrease in certain kinds of responsibilities. So things fall through the cracks because there are cracks (gaping canyons even.) But part of it really is due to the fact that I have days that are not perfectly efficient.
Yesterday was a great example. I was just exhausted and I slept through another 7 a.m. call and while I had outlined a day to accomplish some of these gazillion tasks, I maybe only got to three or four of them. It wasn’t for lack of trying, per se, but yeah, maybe it was for lack of trying… Maybe that is the difference between now and what I was willing to do then.
The good news is that I got a call from a consultant who sometimes has my back and she’s been garnering support for a severance package for me. At least yesterday it looked promising – that maybe as early as the first of the year I could roll on that transition. Well, it’s not really a transition, is it? That’s just as it says, a severance, cutting it off, get a tourniquet and stop the bleed, etc. I remind myself not to jump on this roller coaster ride of getting my hopes up. Other pieces have to fall into place, there are other factors to account for.
What will I do with myself if or when I wake up and there’s nothing to do but battle through the thoughts of the day, be alone with myself and my ambition, fears, strengths and thoughts? Partly it’s easy to keep the madness up as a way to hold other kinds of madness at bay. Without the excuses of work, how ever will I busy myself in order to flee my destinies? Ah.. something new to figure out (or maybe something old.)
But all that distraction is a ways off yet. Today I have today – a murder of crows savaging the walnut tree in the adjacent yard – dive bombing my roof with their potential fodder, trying to crack something open (the walnut, you know, or my sanity.) When there’s not an onslaught of thumping walnuts above (the sky is falling?) they are screeching into the crisp pale blue cloudless sky of a later summer morning. Secret is curled up in a sunbeam on her blanket - a festive pink ball perches beside her, pregnant with potential. She’s grown immune to the ruckus too.
I have a feeling that things will not go either how I expect, hope or plan (God laughs?)
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