Does EVERY night have to be a late one?
I have been shoving duties off my plate left and right. Problem is, they boomerang right on back, in one way or another.
Meanwhile I keep remembering OTHER things I have to do.
And now a three-hour meeting at the worst possible time when I was hoping to knock out some of those bonus urgent projects.
You know, in addition to the mornings and nights when I’m sitting around by myself.
Feels like I just can’t ever catch up.
More than a decade ago, I started a job after being not-employed for many months. I was far from being back on my feet financially. That would take hears.
However, in those early days, there was a group lunch for somebody’s baby shower or who knows whatever it was.
I was broke and barely able to afford the cheapest thing on the menu. I drank water and didn’t eat the appetizers or grab a wine glass, just so I wouldn’t have to share in the cost.
At the end of the meal, the head boss decided to split the bill evenly among all 20 people. My $10 meal became $30.
I didn’t have dinner that night. or the next.
My boss at the time looked at me and said, “You should have eaten the appetizers.”
I think of that story often when I get invited places. Now in the age of debit and credit cards, most servers know to give people separate bills.
I thought of that as I said no to an invitation recently. Where I knew I didn’t even have to pay. I just had no appetite for pretending I was in a good mood and that everything was OK.
The thing is, even when someone else is paying, I still eat cheap. I shoot poison arrows at someone like the kid who will order not only the most expensive thing on the menu, but two of them.
I think he follows the idea to just eat the damn appetizers already. You pay for it one way or another.
So I really am just depriving myself, I guess, when I say no to the appetizers … or to a meal I want instead of just a cheap one … or to the meal itself.
I don’t know. I like to think I’m doing the right thing all the time. By by whom am I doing right? Because if it isn’t me, then who?
… Was the one I walked out on after one year.
There, I said it.
I loved being in charge of product development.
I loved being in marketing.
I wasn’t such a fan of handling the e-zine because nobody could hit a deadline and I worked on those at midnight.
But …
If I were just treated with a modicum of respect there, I would have stayed at that job as long as the company was alive. And then I would have been moved over to the company that took it over.
I might not have been happy now had I stayed. But in case anybody cares what I thrived at, that’s what it was.
Funny what you give up just to get a little goddamn peace.
For lack of being able to say what spun me into a dimension of doom I haven’t experienced since the month before I left D.C., I will say that going 12 rounds with the kid did me in the afternoon when I told him I had a “hard out” to go apartment-hunting really pissed me off.
Seriously, between people throwing me under a bus and retracting it privately, being accused of near treason because of it, and someone who doesn’t follow the instructions after being given them seven times in a row … Not to mention hating the apartment and coming home and almost falling at mine because the exterior lights are off for the third night in a row and everything is draped in black plastic so I can’t see … I’m really going to try hard to want to get out of bed tomorrow.
But no promises.
I have a funny feeling that completing my newest, biggest task to date is either going to land me in the unemployment line or the loony bin.
I stand a better chance of controlling a zombie attack than seeing this through to a successful completion.
In any event, I don’t know that loyalty and hard work and sacrificing your time/soul is what gets you ahead. However, it sure does elevate your blood pressure.
My goal in life (at least during 12-ish hours each day) is to produce actionable content. Sometimes the only action it inspires is to make me want to throw myself off a bridge.
I could use some help around here …
Yesterday I envisioned myself as Oprah. But I wasn’t giving out cars.
Nay, on my TV show I was instead yelling and pointing to everyone, “And you eat a bag of dicks! And YOU eat a bag of dicks! Everyone eats a bag of dicks!”
If today weren’t Saturday, I don’t think I’d be at home right now. I’d be in a maximum-security asylum. Or prison.
So many dicks.
Deep into hour 13 of my captivity, my friend texted to say a dozen people were laid off at his job.
I got to thinking how I could use his writing and editing genius. And yet how I have to keep other people employed Just Because.
Because what, exactly? They can’t find their way out of the building?
Just think … I could instead take that salary, add a little to it and boom, get myself some help that I am not contractually obligated by the universe to put into air quotes.
Imagine.
Worked till 1:37 a.m. last night. Granted, I didn’t start till 11 p.m. But, you know, details.
I don’t talk much of my psychic-ness because I haven’t been using it. I’ve kind of been happy (pause and re-read that again. Me. Happy) and I didn’t want to know the exact outcome of whatever was happening in my head, my heart and other highly sensitive areas. Just having feeling in them was enough.
Last night before bed, I asked my spirit guides “what if” — what if one decision was made differently.
I asked because I wanted to prove us right. Maybe we didn’t fuck this one up after all. Maybe we avoided real pain.
In any event, I wish I could say that my spirit guides showed me narrowly averted doom. Instead, they showed me what I never knew I wanted.
They showed me a city loft, something I have always longed for. They showed me a job I was good at.
That wasn’t all. They showed me heated, passionate arguments and vigorous make-up sex. They showed me my mom being healthy (the health care in said city is amazing. And free to those who need it) and my 6-year-old daughter with long red pigtails and blue eyes like her father’s.
She was exquisite. She had my laugh. When I’m happy, you can hear me laughing for miles. She got that from me. Oh those pretty eyes were so big and bright when we picked her up from my mom’s.
There was such a vivid conversation with him in my visit to this mythical place. On the subway ride home (he took charge of her. You could tell he was her favorite person), we talked about our long workdays and how we were giving the world this one amazing kid instead of having more, and put everything we had into protecting her and loving her and making her our world.
And in my (back in the present) mind, it’s almost too late for that. Emphasis on “almost.” Which is probably the wrong word to use because “never ever fucking ever” feels more appropriate. But, you know. miracles and such.
I couldn’t go further into the future than that time mostly because I woke up after two hours and couldn’t quiet my brain. Or my breathing.
Is it possible my dream was just that? Think what you want.
And I know to thank the universe that I’m alive, that I’m as whole as I’ve ever been, that at least he wasn’t the type to push me off a cruise ship or chain me to a bedpost without my permission. That great pain can’t exist without there having been great love in the first place.
But it’s a moment like this when you can see that happiness could have existed, you get pretty goddamned angry that no, instead we’ll just set fire to it all and pretend we were helpless bystanders and oh well it wasn’t meant to be. Bullshit.
“Boy you never told me
True love was going to hurt
True pain I don’t deserve
Truth is that I never learn.”— Ella Henderson, “Ghost”
I’m not mad. Just baffled. And trying very hard to only listen to Melissa Etheridge’s first album 1,000 times and not 10,000.
I’ve decided to channel it all into the books I’ll never write. And to hope that now that I’ve seen a glimpse of how a girl should be treated and should feel, I’ll be able to find it again. Sure beats wondering if you didn’t fight hard enough to keep it when you had it in the first place.
When I got home/sobered up this morning, somewhere around 5 a.m., I drafted two good (I thought) posts about things I was feeling.
I said I was in the “L” word. No, not THAT word. Rather, Lunacy.
“So it’s gonna be forever
Or it’s gonna go down in flames
You can tell me when it’s over
If the high was worth the pain.”— Taylor Swift, “Blank Space”
I’ve decided my next guy, I’m going to torture the shit out of. That’s what they all want.
Love them and give them everything you’ve got and listen to their every word and live out their every fantasy, and that’s nice and all.
Treat them so bad they wish they’d never been born, and you have them for life.
I expect a ring out of the next one if I play it that way. Mark my words.