Annnnnnd let the week of a thousand papercuts continue!

You know what really frosts me? Being told something is totally urgent and that I must drop what I am doing to attend it At. That. Very. Moment. and then finding out later that in fact there was no real urgency, that what I did was not needed at that very moment, and in fact, I could have had a week to attend to the "urgent" issue.

I'm also moderately irritated at students who make jokes about "oh, you could just cancel class." No, I couldn't. I'm contracted to do this. I am taking money and not giving anything in return if I "just" cancel class. And when people say that, it makes me think that what I am doing is so unimportant and so uninteresting that they believe they'd be as well off, at home, reading (or not) the textbook. Sigh.

I've got an exam to write, a paper to rewrite, seeds to plant sometime for a research project (after preparing the area where I'm going to plant them). I've got to plan out when to do field sampling two different places, including sampling soils in a way I never have before, which involves chloroform and immediate refrigeration and the sort of anal-retentive-analytical-chemist stuff that I do not do well at all. And I have to get out and check on my milkweeds sometime. And I signed up for the prayer vigil tomorrow. And there's a Good Friday service I want to attend. And the children's egg hunt Saturday.

I'm exhausted and my tolerance is low. I went to church last night and found that "special" (a/k/a "we don't care if they get messy or broken 'cos they're old already) tables had been set aside for the kids to eat at, and the "nice" tables were off limits to them. I stood there for about five minutes, my mouth hanging open - what, do they WANT me to quit? Do they want the youth program to die? Can't they see what an insult this is, to "ghettoize" the kids? before I got over myself, and then realized that there weren't enough seats at the "special" tables, so I had to wrangle tables and chairs all by myself. And then the person scheduled to cook didn't show up (I'm really not angry or anything about that; she's had hell on wheels at work this month and I totally understand her forgetting) so I had to make an emergency run ten minutes before dinnertime to obtain some kind of foodlike substance. But it worked, to my amazement - no one went home grumpy or angry and we managed to fit in lesson and game time too.

One of the spiritual dangers I face, I've found, is developing the idea that the world will fall apart if I am not actively involved in holding it together. I suspect some other people with high levels or senses of responsibility are also susceptible to this danger.