Caterwauling

I got to do something last night I’ve waited all year to do.

And I was surly and miserable and did not make a single attempt to enjoy myself.

In fact, I had my resting bitchy face on all night.

I was just resentful. Normally I am grateful for what I have, happy things aren’t worse and as at-peace as I can be with The Way Things Are.

And last night I was like, well I could be dead at any moment. How has revolving my schedule, my life, my money, my FEELINGS around everyone but myself benefited me?

I had another irritated moment not too long ago during some trip-planning and realized I couldn’t do something that would have been fun. Not for the usual lack of time or money, too.

I realized in a bigger way that my schedule wasn’t exactly my own.

And it never is.

Sure there are ways to reclaim pockets of my schedule. But it’s a dance. And my toes, if they aren’t getting squashed, well I end up stepping on myself just to keep from feeling like I could actually take the lead.

And while I know to be grateful for the time off (which, I just lost eight weeks of vacation. Throw a parade for those two days I’ll be off but on call), and for the money and ability to be able to do it, I know that there’s never a guarantee of a next time.

There is no “I’ll get to do it again” in my world. Then you get a hard job and inherit a dependent and people move away and feelings change and places close and souvenirs break and jobs get lost and people die and you’re so fucked up in the brain you don’t have any memory of who it is you actually were.

So, yeah. My life isn’t my own. And instead of being happy when it mercifully ends, I would rather die being happy with the way it went. And today I don’t know if I could say that.

Every year when I lose all my vacation time, I get exhausted.

It’s been a slow-ish week or two which means that not everything has been on fire.

By others’ standards, my weeks are still plenty busy. And long.

But by mine, they are as close to vacation as I get.

I’ve been spending every waking minute training my person. And untraining. And retraining. And retraining some more.

And even though I got stabby as recently as yesterday, I’m committed to this. I don’t need him to learn everything. I just need him to learn enough at this point. And that goal is coming closer.

I got to spend an hour last night talking to my favorite person. And I realize, THIS is what life is all about. SCHEDULING FEEL-GOOD TIME.

I figure, for all the years of my life I’ve lost to the career tsunami (and all its aftermath) of the last 10 years, I deserve that hour. I deserve to not have my ass on fire all day, every day, both before everyone else gets to the office and then again long after they’ve all left.

I deserve more than that hour. I deserve about two years’ worth of lost days off.

So yeah I’m stressed out about projects people need from me right now. It’s not that I don’t have time to do them. I just don’t have the brain. Or heart.

But at least, with an hour of fun time here and there, I have a shot in hell of growing that heart back.

“That taste, that touch, the fire I miss
Those ‘kiss-me’ eyes, your red wine lips on mine
Like it used to be,
Baby, I want you, and you want me.”

Blake Shelton, “Lonely Tonight”

That weird moment that you know it’s going to end. When, you don’t know. But you know it’s there.

And whether it ends simply in its present form or for good, you really don’t know. Or want to.

I mean, the ending could become something bigger too — it could be the end of a chapter and the beginning of the new one.

But holding your breath isn’t something you’re particularly good at, even though blue is a spectacular color on you.

And you try very hard not to wonder. And even succeed, for the most part.

The one thing I don’t get is, no matter whose choice it is to leave, how anybody can let me walk away.

Whenever anybody asks me about “the hot guy” I dated, I die a little. But now, I’ve finally gotten brave enough to tell the story.

My friend asked me about my love life this past Friday night. Since I couldn’t talk about what’s going on right now — because I embargo information in real-life and not just on the blog — I could talk freely about Hot Guy and his ridiculous love for a married ex-girlfriend.

I don’t get how people — men — wait around and cater to women who don’t want them. And judging by the way I WITNESSED her treating him, I think if he said to her, “You know? This isn’t working,” I honestly believe she would have said, “OH THANK GOD. I agree.”

Somewhat related, I got to thinking about one of my good girlfriends, who simply e-mailed her now-ex that, yeah, it’s time for us to get a divorce.

He wrote back to say, yeah, I’ll move out at the end of the month. Good idea.

There was nobody else waiting in that situation. Which made it so freaking commendable, I just cannot even articulate it.

And even with Hot Boy, I lost interest and wouldn’t date him now even if he said he had gotten his pretty-boy head on straight when it came to her.

Or me.

I hope he found his happiness. Or finds it eventually.

And I will try not to wonder about mine.

“I hope she’s everything you need and dream about
Don’t let what we had hit you on your easy way out
When you lay down with her tonight, we’ll see who loses sleep
What’s it like to love her and to lose me?”

Heidi Newfield, “Love Her And Lose Me”

Between cracking a tooth on the pizza I got for dinner tonight, and getting a call that my long-lost cousin who finally returned to the radar just up and died, I’m going to say this night can feel free to end soon.

I forget which of my boys said I’d be an excellent mother. Probably because I started singing “You Oughta Know” and promptly forgot about it.

In any event, I took the kids to the Veterans Day parade and out for Taco Tuesday. And I didn’t drink. Which I do think makes me deserve some sort of “Mother of the Year” award.

At lunch, my two favoritest people in the industry (both from different states, and both who employed me at different times in my illustrious career) ran up to greet me. The kids are like, is there anyone you DON’T know in this business?

That made me happy. As will the drinks on my calendar for later with my cherished friends …

I got to talking with a fellow Stuppendous Badass about our unique (and perhaps uniquely underappreciated) ninja roles within our respective empires.

Moreover, we got to talking about what we could do if we could ever break the shackles we custom-built so well.

We excelled at becoming the centralized cog in a very big wheel. And they don’t make them like us, you know — my friend has a hard time finding equally hard workers, and I have a perfectly miserable time finding equally smart/capable workers.

How do we get to do what it is we want to do when we have no hope of ever having the opportunity to FIGURE OUT EXACTLY WHAT THAT IS?

Last time I worked in this building, I was out of pubs entirely. And job-wise, I was never happier. The harassment wasn’t a good time, so I left … and fell back into pubs again.

I could excel in that whack-a-mole-hole perhaps if I didn’t have so many pubs and 50 side jobs (and first dates. *cough*) to boot — how do I get back to a role I wish I could have loved for a lot longer?

Funny how anytime you start to feel kind of happy, you get reminded of your place in the universe.

It doesn’t really concern me that I’m not on top of anyone’s or anything’s priority list right now.

But not being able to be at the top of my own because of everyone and everything else will never fail to surprise me.

So it’s near midnight on a Sunday and I’m trying to finish the project I didn’t finish Friday night that HAS to be done like ASAP.

*lovemyjobserenitynowlovemyjob*

So Mom likes a certain peppermint laxative tea from Target. I call it Poopermint.

(I’ll let that sink in for a second.)

So she’s had like a million mini-strokes, right? And she just got out of bed and disturbed my concentration to tell me …

“The next time we go to Poopermint, I need more Target tea.”

She of course has no idea what she just said. But I’m too weak from laughter to keep reading what’s on my screen.

It’s pretty bad when she makes more sense than my paid writers. Which, she really does …

Mom has this cute new habit of, when I walk out of the house and keep walking (or driving), she locks up. Knowing I left the door unlocked and my house key somewhere within said house.

That’ll teach me to think I can escape.

In case you haven’t met me or didn’t, oh, birth me, let me be clear that stifling my freedom (and not in exchange for a paycheck), does not end well.