Finding the silly

I think that's the best I can do at this point. If I can find some.

Yes, I'm up kind of early; I don't have to be in until 8 and as I was awake until about 11 last night, I tried setting my alarm for 6:30 instead of 5, as I normally do. But my stupid body woke me up at 4:30.

The good news is that I have but one class today. So I'm going to go in, do a bit of research work before my 11 am class, grab some more journal articles, then just come home for lunch and spend the afternoon before piano lesson alternately reading articles and practicing piano.

I dunno. Yesterday afternoon I was driving home and had to deal with our typical "wonderful" drivers (had someone cut me off at a four-way stop again. Um, people? You do know that the first person to arrive at a four-way stop is the person with the right of way, and it proceeds from there in the order that people arrived? It's not the person who WANTS to go first the most who gets to go first...) And then I got behind someone driving very slowly in a minivan. Slowly because they were using their cell phone. And they'd sit once a light had turned green for just until I had my hand on the horn and was ready to press. And I try not to be all judgey but this was like a 30-year-old woman with a Twilight-themed license plate holder.

And I just hit that wall I hit occasionally, where I feel like I'm wasting my life, and nothing I really do makes any difference. And I got home and called my mom because she used to be a professor and told her all the problems and wound up really crying and my voice getting all high and squeaky and inaudible like it used to when I would really cry hard (but hadn't, for at least 10 years). And someone somewhere else commented about how I seemed to look to my job for fulfillment, and I thought of the horrible thing a Smug Married once said to me (And this, people, is how words, even lightly-tossed-out words, perhaps intended to be funny at the time, can become like shrapnel, to continue to cause problems for the recipient even years later), "Oh, so you have a career. Does your career ever tell you it loves you?" Dammit.

Well, yeah. I DO look to my job for fulfillment. I don't have a whole lot else, or it feels like that some days.

So, whatever. Just, whatever. I want to throw up my hands, give the world the stink-eye, and say, "All y'alls are CRAZY" and go into my sewing room and shut and lock the door. But I can't. So I think of the dang boats beating against the current at the end of The Great Gatsby (even though Gatsby died and everyone else in that book was really kind of depressing to read about). Or about stupid spoiled Scarlett O'Hara making a dress out of the drapes because there was no other cloth to be had. So I pick myself up and go in to work and start working all over again. Fall down seven times (or rather, I think, sometimes: be knocked down seven times); get up eight.