Blur

Working two jobs is simultaneously more and less complicated than I anticipated. I say this, cresting my second full week of high-speed sprinting from bed to metro to car to Virginia and back to bed again. Throw in some fuming over snow detours and chugging of caffeinated beverages and you have a good picture.

I can’t seem to summon the physical energy that used to propel me through long days, so I’m trying to ramp up the mental game. With grocery lists and color-coded Google calendar pages and a whole lot of post-its.  I’m washing dishes in REM sleep. I’m sewing buttons on the metro. I’m eating cereal while jogging. Dr. Gawande, you ain’t got nothing on this.

I miss the boundless vigor of my Daily Athenaeum days–  spending more hours at the college newspaper office than in apartment, ducking out of lectures to conduct interviews on my cell phone, ditching class for deadline and being hungry for more.

Our passionate little faction treated reporting like the kegs of Yuengling we drove to Pennsylvania to buy for staffer parties. We gulped down stories, for fear they would spoil. Or worse, that they’d get scooped. We lived on beer and coffee and Red Bull, spilled burrito innards on our FOIA documents, showed up bedraggled after too few hours of sleep and generally spiraled out of control with anger and passion and the giggles.

We were all in it together. And it’s harder to find my legs in these kinds of relentless hours without Jon’s slushie runs and Tricia’s whimsy and Ry’s…  insistence that we get-back-to-work-goddammit-and-stop-fooling-around. Plus, I’ve been living like a grown-up for too long now to flip the switch back to all that mess.

So, I’m looking for a new way to make it all work. And I think part of it is not getting ahead of myself and staying alert and present in what I’m doing instead of getting swept up in all the frenzy.

After all, that’s how I ended up doing a face-plant onto the dining room floor yesterday on my way up from the basement. My mind was up the stairs and out the door, packing a lunch and shoveling out my car instead of focusing on my feet.

So focus. And coffee. A whole lot of coffee.

I tend to  skip over this particular song because it’s so chaotic and messy, but I think it’s well suited to my current frazzled state of mind… excluding, of course, the part about indolence…

Up with caffeine and down with a shot.
Constantly worried about what I’ve got.
Distracting my work but I can’t make a stop
and my confidence on and my confidence off.
And I sink to the bottom and rise to the top
and I think to myself that I do this a lot.
World outside just goes it goes it goes it goes it goes it goes…

-The Avett Bros.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 at 6:11 pm and is filed under wealth, wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.