Well, I buckled down (during my between-classes break yesterday and also after I got home but before the Youth Group thing) and got the grading I have up to this point done.

More will be generated in my absence (sigh.)

Actually, that's another reason why I could never take a corporate-style personal day: the work moves on whether you're there or not and a day off just means two days' worth of work when you get back.

I did have enough free time yesterday evening to start the shell edging on the crochet scarf. I think I'll have enough wool to take care of all of it. I really like the pattern - it's a lot of fun to do and it's fast enough that it feels like instant gratification. It's sort of too bad it's too lacy and airy to be warm or else I could see making a bunch of these for 'community knitting.'

I forgot how fun crochet is.

*****

I think part of my distress of the past few days is that I'm letting the pressures of work (and volunteer work) overwhelm me. I sometimes take a step back and look at what I have scheduled to get done in a given amount of time and just despair, because it seems like every waking moment is accounted for by something that wouldn't be my first choice to do.

I also think I'm VERY stressed out over this Youth Sunday thing. We've been rehearsing the kids hard, both last week and this week and their Sunday school teacher worked with them last Sunday - and they're still cutting up and behaving in a way that I would consider shows insufficient respect for serving in a church service. I've explained to them (and they are old enough to understand, and I would hope, appreciate this) that their behavior will reflect on them for years to come (like, when people are planning to donate to our scholarship fund) and it also reflects on the youth leaders.

And I so do NOT want to be explaining myself to irate members at the board meeting next week as to why the youth screwed up.

I didn't tell the kids this, but I am keeping what I call the "nuclear option" open - that is, if they (despite all our explainations and warnings) treat this thing as a joke, and people are angry about it, I am going to simply tell people, "All right - they don't respect me and won't listen to me. I'm sorry, but I think I am no longer effective as a leader" and step down. I know, that's an extreme step, but I'm really getting fed up with some of the silliness.

I'm sure a lot of it is attention-seeking behavior ("Trouble's a form of attention!") but, good grief, these kids are like 13 and 14.

So anyway. I won't be totally happy until Sunday is successfully over.

******

And I think part of the problem is that I am focusing on these teeny tiny traumas and blowing them out of proportion - I have a tendency to make things look large and threatening that are generally pretty small in the grander scheme of things. I mean - if one of the kids drops the offering plate on Sunday, where's the harm, aside from some adult who's looking to criticize the youth program laying into me for it? And is it really their right, especially when the ones most prone to criticize are also the ones that tend to help the least with the program.

I think also that kind of over-focusing on things that are comparatively unimportant is hurting my productivity (both at work and at craft) and especially my creativity. I have a lot of ideas but I think about how much effort it would take to implement them, and I think aboout other things I "have" to do, and the idea kind of dies.

I have to get better at really stepping back from things and putting them in proper perspective. If I let myself, I get overwhelmed. It takes some effort for me to say "things will work out and everything will get done" instead of going into freak-out mode, but I think I need to start repeating that phrase as my mantra.

This is also just a bad time of the semester - from now until Thanksgiving. I think what I do need to do is recognize this and be judiciously selfish with my time. It's like they say about the holidays: do the things that are meaningful to you and jettison the rest. I'm not going to volunteer any more for things I won't enjoy and that someone else can do. I'm going to relax a bit on my Rule of an hour of research-work and research-reading per day, because it's gone from being a joy to being a duty, being something that's joylessly fulfilled with one eye on the clock.

I think tiredness is an enemy of creativity but also feeling that your time doesn't belong to you is another. It's more attractive to do 'safe' things in terms of craftwork when you have fifteen minutes a day to craft, and things like the big quilts or the self-designed stuff gets shoved aside because you feel like you don't have time to think.

I need time to think.

******
I think I also get frustrated because I've seen a lot of what I call "aggressively clueless" behavior over the past couple days - people who seem unable to complete fairly basic life-tasks because they always had someone else step in and do it.

And I think my frustration is because I'm pretty much the opposite: I'm so tightly wound that I almost fly into pieces if I forget one little thing that I think I "need" to do.

For example: driving over to work today, I kept obsessively reminding myself, Rain Man-style, that I needed to retrieve the slip of paper on which I had written the confirmation number for my hotel room.

Because: somewhere deep down I believe that if I showed up without that number, they'd disavow any knowledge of me, and I'd wind up sleeping in my car in the hotel parking lot tonight. Of course that isn't what would happen - if there were some screw up and they couldn't find my name in the system and couldn't find my number they'd either give me another room, or if they were full, they'd probably call another hotel and get a room for me. But I still have that fear deep down of...well, basically, being abandoned.

And another one: I am the vice-chair of one of the groups that this meeting concerns. I had received no notification of needing to come up the night before but I knew that traditionally they had a pre-meeting for the executive council. So I e-mailed the president and asked her.

Turns out, I do need to show up. If I hadn't been on the ball and all obsessive, I wouldn't have.

I guess my fundamental lack-of-trust, as much as it causes me heartache sometimes, also serves me well. I'm always hyper-prepared for things. I'm usually the person who shows up with a calculator or a nail file or a phone book when no one else does - because, you know, it's something I might NEED.

****

and that not-having-heard-about-the-meeting brings up another issue: the extreme dependence on e-mail. She emailed me back and said, 'oh, we had been e-mailing you but it bounced...someone wrote down the wrong address for you.'

That also happened with the proofs of a couple of papers.
That has also doubtless happened with other e-mails I was supposed to get.

Do people not have phones? I mean - I know they had my phone number. When the e-mails to me bounced - why didn't they call me? Or look up on my campus page to find my correct e-mail address? If they needed me for something, they could have got in touch with me another way.

I mean- it's not like I could fix the problem - I didn't know it existed.

But see - that's me again. When I run up against a brick wall one way, I try any of the five other different ways I can think of. So I get frustrated by people who aren't so compulsive and who kind of shrug and go "maybe she resigned and left" or whatever.

I just hope there were not things I was supposed to be doing that I did not know about. It will make me very cranky if someone chews me out for not doing things I didn't know I was supposed to do.