Weekends have, over the last few months, increasingly become one of two things to me: refuges from the almost-certain insanity of work, or alternate flavors of insanity, with socializing taking the place of relaxing and the hope being that a change really is as good as a rest, like they say. This weekend is one of the latter, and I find myself feeling old in a way that I am surprised by, and grumpy about. I feel I should be less set in my ways and inwardly demanding early nights and time to unwind beside a fire with a good book, silently fearing the work week ahead (Oh, it’s such a week ahead, oh god), and yet all I want to do is crawl away from the world and be selfish for awhile. Next weekend, I guess.
January 24
Upon seeing an old college friend post an image of himself in full suit on social media yesterday, I’ve been pondering my lack of sartorial smartness. Back in the day, I tried harder than I do now, I confess; in large part, that was because of my age, and the world I moved in back then — and the fact that I was, in many ways, trying to keep up with said college friend, who was always impeccably stylish, even when he tried to do slovenly — but there’s no escaping the fact that I’ve left myself go, so to speak.
What I find myself struggling with is the idea of whether or not I care that I’ve let myself go. I mean, it’s not like I’ve entirely given up, and I still have my moments. More importantly, I work at home, and have far less reason to dress up than I once did. Maybe more to the point, I feel more comfortable now, and not just because I’m not wearing suit jackets that might’ve been a bit small for me but the price was right and I really wanted it, goddammit. I think of the line from the poem about growing old, growing old, and wearing tops of trousers rolled, and I wonder to myself, was that always about fashion and I didn’t realize it?
January 23
To the probable surprise of no-one, I keep a written list of deadlines on my (computer) desktop at all times, to ensure that I don’t forget about something that I really, really should be working on at this very minute. It’s not a complicated list — it literally goes DATE — OUTLET STORY, so you have things like “1/23 — WIRED Internet Week,” telling me that I have to finish the Internet Week column (which runs under the “While You Were Offline” name on the site) for WIRED today. That kind of thing.
The thing is, of course, there are times when I should be working on something that’s due, but my brain just does not want to. Not even slightly; those, my friends, can be the best days. Take yesterday, for example, when I was facing a day with six deadlines and knew that today, I’d have seven. One of those deadlines was a long piece that my brain was just staying away from wanting to do, so instead it did what it always does in that circumstance: tell me what to do for everything else, instead. The end result was, I did five of the deadlines due yesterday, and three due today, as well.
Of course, now I have to do the remaining deadline from yesterday right now, before anyone else on the West Coast is up, but still. Somehow, that still feels like a good thing. Ask me if I still feel that way an hour from now, mind you…
January 22
I make deals with myself when I can’t sleep.
The problem isn’t that I can’t fall asleep; I have no trouble with that at all, for some reason. If I’m in bed and it’s anywhere after 11pm, it’s really only a matter of time before my eyes start closing no matter how much I’m trying to stay awake. No, the problem is that I wake up very, very early. I think it’s a stress thing; if I fall asleep thinking anything along the lines of “I have a lot of work to do tomorrow,” then I’m almost certainly guaranteed to wake up around 5am. That’s when the deal-making comes in.
I make deals with myself like you can’t get up until 5:30, so you might as well fall back asleep until then, or if I count backwards from 100 to 1 in threes, then I’ll go back to sleep. They almost definitely don’t work, but I find that doing that distracts me from realizing just how early in the morning it is and feeling as if I’m stuck in some kind of early morning insomniac hell. (I woke up today at 4:34, promised myself that I wouldn’t get up until 5:30, and then realized at 5:30 or so that I actually wanted to stay in bed until 6.)