Quick Fixes

I've frustrated by a lot of things lately, which isn't like me. Not that I don't usually get frustrated, but I don't usually let frustration pile up until it is overwhelming and tipping into depression. I am frustrated by things in my office, things at my house, artistic things, things with my families, things with my friends. The things that usually buoy me up when I get dragged down, like cute kids and good friends, are not doing their usual trick for me. For a couple days I was trying to pass this all off as the doldrums of menstrual depression, but it's lasted a couple days longer than it should. So I'm faced with having to wonder if maybe something actually is wrong. Is it possible that everything in my life just sucks right now? Or is it more likely that one or two big things really suck and they are affecting everything else?

I am, however, a proactive person and I've identified the following "quick fixes" that can immediately improve my life:

• Taking up a drug habit
• Telling off my boss in front of the whole office
• Having a baby
• Quitting one or more of my jobs
• Buying something really expensive. Like a house.

Things That Make Me Mad

1. People keep changing my plans for me and telling me at the last minute.
2. My cable/internet/phone has been out since Thursday and the crappyass cable company is doing a phenomenally poor job at solving my problem.
3. Some strong-hormoned female in my office is pulling my cycle toward hers and I've been getting a shorter and shorter cycle each month which means MORE FREQUENT MELT DOWNS. Thanks, whoever you are.
4. I don't know. Stuff. I'm just mad.

Don't expect any posts for awhile longer. That would be expecting too much from Time Warner.

Hump Day, Hump Month

I'm nervous about the school I'm starting a residency at this morning. I was there last spring and had three good experiences and one VERY bad experience. This year its the same teachers but new students and I've done very in-depth planning with the teachers, so I have no rational reason to worry, but I keep having flashbacks.

Post-traumatic-residency syndrome.

Also: the office is getting intense. Our managing director has been away for almost a week and it is becoming VERY apparent how much she usual does for us, and how LITTLE some other people do. We are a ship adrift at sea. I have been finding myself taking on a lot of her responsibilities, which has the double-whammy of making me feel like I'm ignoring everything I have to do for my job and not doing a very well at her job. I desperately want her to come back, but not until I have a little more time to get some things done so that she doesn't freak out when she does.

Do Things Really Come in 3's?

I hope not. I know two people who had to rush home this week to far-away places because of an unexpected death in the family, and it makes me very sad to think about it too much. I don't have much to say about this other than that my heart hurts for my friends and I really have been thinking a lot this week about family and distance and what the right equation is between the two of them.

A Good Idea...

Sometimes when Blogger tells me there will be a scheduled outage at 5:00PM, I think they say that there will be Scheduled Outrage. I could use some of that.

Quantitative Assessment

2.6= the number of hours my flight was late on Friday
40= the number of planes ahead of us on the runway
3= the number of adorable children I got to play with on Saturday
>3= the number of hours late my bus was on Tuesday
1= the number of times I planned to take Amtrak
2= the number of times I acutally took Amtrak thanks to a bus never showing up
4= the number of siblings (blood and married) that I visited
infinite= the amount I missed my cats, how many times my uterus ached when I saw a baby, the ways in which I love the NW, the number of fights I avoided with my mother, the ways in which I hate travelling alone, the guilt I feel when things aren't perfect, the amount of happiness I felt when ZPJ picked me up at the airport last night.

Movement

Just when I'm starting to feel a little stagnant at work, I head out on the road.

I'm flying out tomorrow for the great, wide West. I figured there's not time like the present (especially when the present is the low-season for airlines) to go out and meet my brother-to-be. I'm going to spend the long weekend visiting some young children I love (and their parents) and then going North to visit my siblings (and their parents) and do a little early-wedding-planning. I had kind of gotten it in my head that it would be another six months at least before I saw any of my family, so I'm very excited and a little taken aback that I'm going to see them so soon.

Family is always a mixed blessing, though, isn't it? For every joy, there is also some unspoken guilt, and every time I go home I go through a period of wondering why I live so far away and then being reminded why it's not so bad to live far away after all. Things are never simple with family, even in the best of times, and when you only see them a couple times a year all the drama is compacted into a shorter time frame. So. I feel I may have more to say on this matter by the end of my trip. Or maybe all my worry is for naught and I'll just have a wonderful time.

PDs and Planning All Week

Today:

Tomorrow:

Best Lesson Plan Wins!!!!

R&R

Adventures abounded this weekend. Here's my Top 3:

1. GETTING KICKED OUT OF THE MET FOR TRYING TO SNEAK IN BOOZE. Well, I wasn't exactly sneaking...we were headed to a party on the UES and we thought we'd head north early and take advantage of the Met's late-night weekend hours and look at some art for a couple hours before the party. We did, however, have a bottle of wine wrapped up in my bag for the party, and the security guy wouldn't let us come in despite the fact that we were five feet from the bag check room and we obviously weren't going to be popping open the bubbly in the Egyptian temple.
2. CRYING FOR AN HOUR AT DINNER. If we could have gotten into the museum I probably would have been crying about the art, thanks to my hormonal overload this weekend. Instead, though ZPJ and I went to a diner on 2nd Ave. and started talking about what either of us would do if the other one died and I blubbered my way through two margaritas while ZPJ just made fun of my ovaries and we joked about life insurance policies. All of the waitstaff gave our table a wide berth - even though crying might not be totally unusual, crying and laughing probably is, and they didn't know what to do with us.
3. CELL PHONE #6. This wasn't me, but my neighbor came over on Friday and was telling us how she had to go get a new phone because she had dropped hers in the toilet, and she was going to be on her 5th phone of the year due to drops down stairs, toilets, and lost bags. Then tonight I got an email from her saying "I just got mugged and among the items that were stolen was my 6-hour-old cell phone, so can you please send me your phone number...again?" Awesome.