As we head into the final stretch of the pre-Christmas holiday season, I have to admit: I’m very, very tired.
The last week or so has been extraordinarily busy, as if the holiday gods looked down and thought that, if I was to enjoy some time off around Christmas Day proper, I should pay for it ahead of time. And so, it became a marathon of work and crash-relaxation, each evening seeing me trying desperately to unwind even though my brain was quietly spinning, thinking you still have all these stories to write and all these presents to buy and don’t you need to read these things for work and it’s the holiday season shouldn’t you be doing holiday stuff more?
Well, the evenings I wasn’t at the movies, that is; I did that twice in the past week. (Once was for work; there was a Star Wars, after all.)
At the heart of it all was an impressively Herculean workload, which saw a confluence of different elements come together to deliver a collection of deadlines that was utterly overwhelming. To give a sense of just how overwhelming, think of it this way: on average, I traditionally have one and a half stories I file to Wired each week; on a particularly heavy week, it’s gone to three. This last week, I filed five.
THR, too, saw an uptick in workload — there was a new Star Wars, after all, and it’s heading to the end of the year, so Best Of lists and the like need to be done — so I found myself doing things like getting up at 5am to start work and just… keep working until either I was done or, more likely, I couldn’t work anymore for whatever reason: Something else needed to be done (Mailing Christmas cards, going to the movie theater), or I simply couldn’t concentrate enough to get it done.
Suffice to say, it’s been a time. Thankfully, a time that’s more or less over as I write — I’m wrapping up final commitments now, soon to be followed by wrapping presents and then allowing myself to try and get in a holiday mood, or at least a mood that doesn’t see me chasing my own tail so much. The weather outside is frightful, they say; I’m looking forward to the chance to be able to look outside the window and see for myself.