I finked out on the photoblogging, primarily because since I said I’d do it, I haven’t had a minute to take a single new photo. I haven’t even had time to edit more of my backlog then 50 photos or so. Mind, I would have finked on writing, too, so either way, no one would have seen or heard much of me.
I’m having a tough time managing my schedule these days, and getting all the work in I need to, which has left me pretty much without any semblance of a personal life. I did know this was probably going to happen, and did what I could to prepare for it, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this tough. Now and then, I forget I’m not 19 anymore. Back in the day, working so much was easier. When I began college, I did work-study several days a week as well as teaching special ed Friday nights, all day Saturday and most of Sunday, and carried 27 credit hours, which at the school I attended — our classes were small and discussion-based, not lecture — meant a huge pile of texts to read on top of showing up for class. I was crazy busy, for sure, but somehow I also had time and energy a few times a week to chill out, get laid, have lunch or dinner with friends, throw parties, take walks, what have you. I remember feeling tired, but both energized and relaxed enough most of the time.
My weekly schedule right now is looking something like this:
Monday/Thursday/sometimes one more day: Up at 5, an hour or so of Scarleteen work/checking, then to the showers, then to the clinic. Out of there anywhere from 4 - 5:30, usually home anywhere from 6 - 7:30, with often at least one leg of the three-bus, two-hour commute tango. When I get home, I’ll tend to the pets, assemble some sort of meal, zone out for an hour or so with a DVD or a book, try to maybe make one call or email to a friend or family member, chat with Mark, but by then — and sometimes before plenty of that — I’m usually face down on some sort of soft surface pretty early. After clinic days, I cannot counsel at Scarleteen: I’m just too wiped to handle more of anyone’s crisis.
Tuesday/Wednesday/sometimes only one of those days: Wake up around 7, an hour or two of Scarleteen work/checking, then a solid hour or two where I sit in the bath or stare at a wall, feeling overwhelmed before trying to fit in some housework then getting back to Scarleteen, email, all the other home-work stuff. These are the days I’ll also do in-person or phone meetings, run errands, squeeze in some kind of exercise, call my Dad (there is no such thing as a phone conversation with him that lasts less than two hours: he’s very socially isolated and often in a bad emotional space), deal with finances, etc. At least one of these nights Mark and I will usually get some time together, even if it’s just snuggling while watching a movie.
Friday/Saturday/Sunday: Solid Scarleteen. The pattern lately has been that I wake up at 7 or 8, start working and just work into the night until I drop. Last weekend I didn’t stop working any of those three nights until 10 or so.
Around twice a month, I can swing most of a real day off, but I usually have to prepare for those days in advance.
I’ve realized one critical difference between now and almost 20 years ago is the amount of sleep I need. Plenty of times, three or four hours a night, even if that went on for weeks, was just fine in college, and somehow I was still pretty darn alert all day. Now, even one night of only three or four hours of sleep fucks me up for a week. On days I have to go into the clinic, anything less than seven hours is just not an option.
Another biggie is that I cannot be halfway-there for any of my gigs. In other words, I can’t just float through days sometimes, present enough to be counted, but not much more than that. That was me often enough in college: I’m one of those folks who had to push a bit to get an A, but I could get a B half-asleep. At the clinic, I have to be seriously on, every minute of that day. Working at home, I am multi-tasking like a spastic chicken: since I started the new gig, I have less time in a week to do the website work, but unfortunately, the amount of work I have to do with Scarleteen has increased. Less time + more work = not good. With either job, when I’m counseling someone, they need my complete attention and investment: how tired or overwhelmed I am isn’t something I can talk about or let them see. And looking at our traffic patterns, while summer is always a bear with Scarleteen, we’ve got higher traffic so far this year at this point than we have for a few years, so chances are good it may be our busiest summer ever, with less help than usual, besides. Can I get an ugh?
Obviously, another big difference is the gravity of what I’m doing, and how in the spotlight I do some of it (and, when not at clinic, how much of it I have to do almost single-handedly). With Scarleteen, I’ll admit that it’s gotten to the point where I deeply resent the expectations people have of me sometimes, because they seem so much higher than anyone having them has for themselves. All my work at this point involves such heavy stuff so much of the time, and so much tending to the toughest parts of people’s lives, and that means that I’m more emotionally wiped from work, more stressed about being sure I’m doing it to the best of my ability. When I have a wee bit of time to myself, most of my energy goes into just refueling my physical and emotional reserves, which tend to be way past empty.
What’s had to be shelved for now? My visual art, as well as any possible photo clients. (Plus, my replacement camera I got a year ago is now currently and inexplicably broken: that leaves me with two broken cameras in need of repair, but with other bills that need to be paid before I can fix either.) Giving up one of those home-work days for photo work at this point means that the next day I work, the workload will be even more unmanageable than it is otherwise. Too, with how my schedule is, I probably couldn’t deliver edited photos to a client for at least six months, if not a year: as it is I have a good ten different sets of photos I need to edit, and thank christ those aren’t paying clients. The All Girl Army, as well as the idea I have had for reprising Scarlet Letters. My bike: I got out once last month, and that is SO not enough. Just ask my ass. Seeing friends. My social circle here is still fairly small, but even with that, months will go by before I’m able to see people I miss; weeks before I can even chat with a long-distance friend on the phone. Often, friends have to come over to see me, and even then, I’ll be doing some work while they hang out, or I’ll feel like such a basket case that I spend the whole time we’re hanging out trying not to endlessly vent. I also used to be that friend you could call in a crisis, or when you needed to cry, and I’m not that friend at all lately. My brain has also been largely MIA when I’m not working: my level of spacing things out lately has been humiliating. I don’t put a lot of pressure on myself when it comes to appearances, nor would I say vanity is ever a big issue for me, but even by my own relaxed standards, I look like shit these days, too. It’s been a bumper-crop of wrinkles and greys over the last few months: I feel like I age in double-time lately.
I’m not sure what the solution is. In all honesty, I think it just has to be like this for a little while, and maybe I’ll adjust. I need/am committed to do both jobs, and truth be told, there still aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the work and not enough payment for it to really get me up to snuff financially. I’m hoping for some sort of miracle this year per funds with Scarleteen like I have been for the last couple years, not only the kind that can pay the basic bills and some reasonable salary for me, but the kind that could result in me being able to hire someone else qualified to take care of it even just ten hours a week or so. Alas, not sure what to do to make that happen that I haven’t tried already: we’re looking at a possible in-person fundraiser in the fall, but that’s a damn long time from now. But once or twice, decent funding has shown up, so it’s not like small miracles haven’t happened before and can’t happen again.
(And yes, I have considered just saying goodbye to it — people keep asking me that, so I’m answering — but via my one grant, I am committed to do it for another couple years, and too, given all the traffic I just can’t accept that there is no way to get it solvent, and make it manageable per my workload. As well, I’m a longtime activist, reared to be one: I know the drill. There are often very long periods of time where the work is a beast, where pay is infrequent to nonexistent, but when you’re making forward movement in terms of the goals of your activism, you do what you can to just keep pushing through. And until there really was something else like Scarleteen when it comes to its inclusivity, particular approach and real one-on-one service, I know that I would not feel okay leaving it. Too, my current option if I did that would be to shift to full-time at the clinic, which is not something I think I could handle at this point emotionally or practically — even that much of a commute every day would total me. Plus, I don’t think they even have that many hours for me available.)
Some of this stuff is nothing new, and also a bit of a family legacy on my Mom’s side. I was telling Mark the other day that I have this copy of a county newspaper clipping about my mother’s grandfather. The small headline simply reads: Man Dies After Stint of Shucking Corn. The story is that my great-grandfather, in his seventies, was at a farm gig that day where the job was to clean a truckful of corn. About halfway through, he had said to a couple people that he wasn’t feeling so well, but so help him gawd, he was going to finish the job at hand. When he finished the very last ear, he dropped dead.
We don’t tend to die gracefully on either side of my family, but going belly-up in a truck of corn and having it be the basis of your eulogy sets records even for us.
I have a love-hate relationship with this workaholic tradition in my family. I hate it because it has more to do with being dirt poor despite working nonstop than anything else. It’s always so irksome that so many of us just can’t seem to be anything but overworked and still barely getting by, though my version of poor at this point is obviously a far cry from my great-grandfathers: I’m typing this on a laptop, after all, I did eat decently last night, and the shirt I’m wearing at the moment has not been repaired 385 times. Too, with all of us, I think — and some of that is just immigrant inheritance — we feel like we are only redeemed or of any use to anyone by working ourselves to death. I love it because part of me is a closet protestant: I do value hard work, especially when it’s about helping your family or helping others through your work. I value dedication, and leisure/slacker culture, and how entitled so many people feel to work so little or do such unchallenging work, does gross me out. I do think work has a spiritual value for me, and I do like being busy and productive. I don’t feel like myself when I’m not working hard.
I know, I’m whining. I have been a bit down lately in the moments I don’t have to be on or taking care of people: the pressures just feel so immense at the moment, and I don’t always feel up to them. I was doing a bit of life-goaling in my head the other day: some of it may seem pathetic or silly to someone who isn’t me. Like, before I turn 40, I want to just once have an actual sofa to sit on, not a futon, and preferably have it only have butt-grooves from my own bottom, and I’d also really like to have health insurance and to be able to get my teeth cleaned twice a year. Before I turn 50, I’d love to have a house or even just a little bit of land of my own. Before I turn 60, I would like just once to only have to work those elusive 40-hour-weeks I keep hearing so much about. Before I die, I want to be able to take a full month off of everything that is everything, either by going somewhere I’ve never been, working in a garden that I know I can keep, finding the last vineyard where I can help make wine by dancing in a vat of grapes, building something with my hands or by being able to paint a wall mural, every day for that month. And I’d really like to be the first person in my mother’s family that gets to die while sitting down in something resembling a relaxed, off-duty, position. I’m almost positive it won’t happen with my mother or her eight siblings — my mother is never off work and one of her brothers, at 55, still moves furniture full-time — so the next person in line (I’m the eldest of a gazillion cousins) for that is probably me.
If I really want to make any of that happen, something has got to give at some point, man. I just, for the life of me, don’t know what.
(I’m closing comments for this one because comments just always feel weird when you’re whining.)
