A Bitching Session

This is going to sound incredibly...vain...but I'm at the point where I don't care. It seems as though whenever I get any free time in some other corner, somebody else swoops in to claim it.

I work two jobs and I'm finishing grad school. I'm fucking busy. I've done it to myself by overscheduling, but when I got this job and then got accepted in grad school one month later, I just couldn't say no to either thing. It was like someone said, "Would you like Dream 1 or Dream 2? Or, you could bargain your soul and have both!" I chose the soul option, since I don't have one. My sense of timing is just warped. I grade papers, I do lesson plans, I run class, I have office hours, I read hundreds of pages a week for my own schoolwork, I write constantly for my own schoolwork. I write grants, I report on grants, I meet with and get tutors started (this takes about an hour per person, and I go through around 200 people a year), I go to a shitload of agency related meetings, I manage fundraisers, I do everything from taking out the trash to buying ink at Office Depot and then come back to put our finances in the computer. I track 400 people. Do you know how much paper they accumulate? It's a lot. I can hardly even squeeze in proper friend time. You have to basically be having an emergency (like JP and the Health Center, LOL) or rescuing me from one (like JP buying me a few beers after the recent crisis).

I'm suppposed to be on Spring Break right now. At least I don't have to teach or go to classes myself. But this is how my day went yesterday. I started my day at 8:00 doing the nonprofit thing and related things. I left at 3:00 because I had to accomodate someone else's schedule--but I'm only supposed to work 25 hours a week (because that's all they pay me for), so that works out OK anyway. Got home around 3:30, and until 7:30 I worked on a 4 page response for one class and read my ecocritical economics stuff. I have a presentation on that next week. At 7:30 we left for dinner. I had some awesome Thai food and got back to the house around 9:00. I went braindead for about 30-45 minutes. Then I graded 10 essays (I have 30 left). I got done at 11:45 p.m. I got in the bed after midnight, after having wandered around the house for about 20 minutes going "Wha?" Today will be more of the same and so will Friday. That is actually a typical day, in spite of this being a break week. I get started earlier when Dante is here and has to go to school. The details change, but the time frame does not.

That part is my fault. I signed up for everything, and if you want to do everything, it takes time. Shitloads of it.

What juices me is all the emotional crap flying around right now. Not on my part, for once. My therapist (yes, I'm in therapy to figure out why I like piling it on so thick and so high) was actually amazed at my lack of panic when all this personnel and work shit hit the fan and there was a very real possibility that I would have to run both programs by myself in addition to the above schedule. I think I was just shell shocked, actually. Dazed. I just know how to keep working through shell shock, that's the only difference. It looks like competence. It's really just survival. I can't even remember half of what I did to get through it once it's over. But back to them and away from me!

I swear, it's as though people smell free time and want to suck it out of me. I love D/B (not in a mobile library driver stalking way). But she's absolutely bleeding me dry right now. She's a wreck. The other two employees are a wreck. When I'm alone with them, they all want to dump it on me. So they do, and all the while, guess who's still tap-tap-tapping on the computer trying to get shit done? I don't have time to negotiate people's personalities for them. And I don't need the emotional stress of knowing things I have to somehow navigate around like a minefield. For example, I found out that the other employee--the one who batmobiled Stinky away--left not because of Stinky, but because D/B reminds her of her abusive dead ex-husband, and she just lost it. I don't blame her. But how the fuck do I help both D/B figure that out without having her own breakdown (she's had abusive relationships, it would kill her to think she was repeating the cycle) and how do I help Batwoman get some skirt and say "shut the fuck up", which would've probably stopped the abuse? That is one of hundreds of little emotional pairings flying around this office.

I should've had this whole week to work my little 25 hours and then work like hell on my major papers and grading. It's how I normally spend Spring Break--getting ahead, because I have so much to do once school starts back up. Yesterday was the first day I actually got to do any of my own work because of all this other crap at their work; I'm almost done with my 25 hours now, and it's the middle of the week. Monday and Tuesday I just came home braindead. I hate having to be the one who sits in on everything because I'm the only one not running around with straw in my hair whooping like a monkey.

When do I get my turn? I hate people sometimes. I'm tired. Leave me the hell alone to get my stuff done. Or at least recognize that I'm doing a lot right now and accomodate me for once. Don't always ask me to accomodate everybody else just because I'm better at it than you. That pisses me off. I haven't even raised my voice about this whole thing. They stick to me like magnets because I'm the only one who hasn't yelled or thrown a hissy. But I'm about to have a bigger fit than any of them have up to this point.

-- Virgil