It's the weekend

Oh man was this a long week. Just listing the things over and above my normal classes, here is what I did:

Monday: meeting to winnow down the 35 applicants to six, and to discuss what set of questions (we ask the same of all, to be fair to them) for Skype interviews (which are next week). Then in the evening, Bell Choir and CWF. And that was also the day that my lab students were super-squirrely for some reason, which was *exhausting*

Tuesday: I don't even remember Tuesday :( I know I did stuff. I guess part of it was reading the article and writing up questions for today's Senior Seminar. Oh, and I did round 2 of the muffle furnace stuff (I had one person out sick last week, and I had one person who had an emergency, and one person who just forgot to do the initial preparation. There was a fourth person but that person FORGOT A SECOND TIME to do the prep so they are just Sure Out Of Luck on this lab)

Wednesday: Elders' meeting and Board Meeting. Long, because it was discuss-the-budget time. Also that was the day I took a field trip and was out in the wind (pollen) for a long time, and also had to drive a 15 passenger van fighting the wind (however: it was a GOOD lab. The students in that class are pretty good students, and several of them really got into the plant identification. And a good day of lab is about the best teaching there is.)

Yesterday: Collecting the cash for the evening production of the childrens' play. (And an aside: this week seems to re-entered the cycle of people asking me if I am 'seeing anyone' or if I have a 'significant other' which is frankly an annoying question UNLESS you know a guy that you think would be compatible with me and you are looking to introduce us. I've adopted a new tactic - saying "Eh, I got tired of kissing frogs" which, while I did not kiss so very many frogs when I was younger, is still mostly true. I like the fun part of dating - going out and eating food (or seeing a movie, whatever) with another person, but I do not like all the agony of "what does it mean if he hasn't called me in a week" or "what does it mean if he called me the very next day" and "is the "third date rule" still a thing and is there some way I can opt out of that graciously" and ugh. I am too prone to catastrophize and to also over-think what people are doing for that part of dating to be much fun. (Which is another reason why I won't do online dating: I need to know the person on some level first, or at least have him vouched for by someone I know, so I'm sure he's not a sociopath or someone who likes to mess with people's feelings)  But no, the people asking me are just people who are curious, I guess, or are wondering 'why?" and while maybe it's a compliment - could it be a "She's so great, why is she still single?" - still, it is an annoyance and is a bit of a more-personal question than I like. Trust me, if I had a committed boyfriend everyone would know....and if he were the kind of boyfriend I'd want to have? He'd come places with me so people would know him and know of his existence)

So anyway.

One thing I did not get done, which was giving me low-level stress, was re-read Hurlburt's (in)famous paper on pseudoreplication in ecological experiment design, which I had assigned my independent stats student for today, but yesterday, a glimmer of hope appeared....she was not feeling well....and this morning got the message from her that she'll have to make up the meeting Monday, which means I have the weekend to read the thing (and I get my morning back today for other things).

I also have to evaluate a batch of scholarship applications. At this point I am thinking I take that home - along with the Hurlburt paper - and read those tomorrow afternoon. I really don't *want* to, I would rather either go antiquing or knit - but, I have to do them some time. I don't know. (I could maybe put them off to Tuesday though)

These days it seems like every time I go "Yay, I have time off to do what I want!" it's like there's another pile of work that shows up and goes "NOPE"

I think a skill I need to learn is saying "There will be time to do this at THIS future time" and instead of penciling in time for myself - and erasing it later when work comes up - penciling the work in for the future. I'm still thinking about what my colleague the committee chair told me last week about "oh, I'd totally do it Monday morning" when I said I didn't know whether to come on on Saturday to re-evaluate the applicants and....given how successful he is, maybe, yeah, maybe sometimes I don't allow work to expand to fill the time left for it, maybe I try to be more like him.

(Also, next week I do not have ANYTHING in the late evening until Maundy Thursday...not even Bell Choir, we are taking a brief break after playing at Palm Sunday. There are a couple of 5-6pm Skype interviews, but....I guess I just stay up on campus for those.)

I do have that as a bad habit, though: I always put myself and my free time and doing what I want (and sometimes, even, what I kind of need - like laundry or grocery shopping) last. And....maybe I need to stop that. Maybe - and this is one of my trust issues coming in to play - maybe I need to learn to trust that I will have time "next week" to do what needs to be done next week, instead of trying to cram it in to what I'm already doing "this week" (because stuff always comes up that I wasn't expecting). Maybe, even, it's not a Crime for me not to get stuff done that crops up at the last minute that I wasn't expecting? I know I have the reputation as that person who goes to heroic lengths to do EVERYTHING and to do EVERYTHING WELL....and maybe I need to back off a little because it's low-level killing me. (I am sure part of my hypertension is traceable to personality issues, just as some of it is probably traceable to having too fast a resting heart rate (despite being fairly fit) and maybe less-elastic blood vessels than normal.

Part of the problem is that "doing everything, and doing it well" has been my jam for so long that I'm not sure I'm able to find another jam, and also, I've gotten so used to people expecting me to be able to juggle so much....I hate disappointing people and sometimes I feel like if I didn't get all the little junk done as well as the big junk I'd be disappointing people. And a sad thing about me is that I'd rather disappoint myself (because I know how I'll react, and often it's less rancorous than how another person would) than disappoint someone else. (Because I've had a few people in my life in the past who either got Extremely Angry when told "no, I don't have time to do that too" or who would lay on the guilt hard when I demurred on taking on another task). And for me, avoiding conflict is the name of the game.

But.

I'm still thinking about that whole thing I wrote about a couple weeks ago (and it was leukemia, not metastatic breast cancer, the woman in the news story had).

And yeah. How WOULD I live my life differently if I knew it was a lot shorter than I assumed it would be? (I tend to assume, given my mom's side of the family lived up to near 100, and that even 20 years ago, and that I take pretty darn good care of myself and hypertension and allergies are thus far the only chronic things I have, and that hypertension is well-controlled, that I'm gonna make it to 90 at least. My dad's side of the family, harder to tell: his generation is the first non-smoking generation, and my dad has already lived longer than either of his parents did, but they both died of smoking-related illnesses)

One thing I think I'd do would be to drop some of the doing-for-others. Not totally, because we are put here for each other, I think. But sometimes I think I go too far in the direction of pushing what I want to do off to the side in favor of doing something for other people, sometimes even things I don't want to do for people I either know won't appreciate it or that someone else could help.

I dunno. I bring this up because I had something that felt like a very low-level anxiety attack yesterday afternoon. This happens to me when I have too many conflicting things to do, I can't focus on one thing because the other things are "nagging" me in my head and I worry about "what if I don't get them done."

I got home around 3 pm. I had to go back out around 6:40 for the children's play thing. During that time between, I needed to:

1. Eat dinner
2. Finish piano practice for the day

I also really wanted to

3. Get in some kind of a workout (I was enormously sore (knees and leg-muscles) when I got up in the morning - it happens when I have to run over uneven ground these days, and that was pretty much the field lab on Wednesday: running back and forth over maybe a 30 meter span, doing it many, many times, as I helped the students identify unfamiliar plants or remind them of ones they'd already seen).

4. Read the papers for today (which it turned out I didn't need to have done, but I didn't know that for sure then - my student had e-mailed me saying "I don't feel great today and if I'm not better we might have to reschedule" and I proposed Monday but didn't hear back for sure until this morning).

I got 20 minutes of a workout in (better than nothing I guess) and just had to quit because my brain was yammering at me about getting piano done. And the papers. And then I sat down to try to read and worried about doing piano, so couldn't concentrate (and Hurlburt is a wordy writer). And then I tried piano but worried about dinner.

I did eat a decent dinner: I had half a package of shredded cabbage left, enough for another one of those cabbage pancakes I like, and since they are fast, I made one. I also find SOMETIMES if I am effervescing with anxiety over stuff, if I can eat some nutritious food (not sugary, not snacky, but get protein and vitamins and a vegetable in there), sometimes it reduces.

It did, this time. (And I have the other half of the cabbage pancake for later. Maybe dinner tonight after piano lesson).

But yes. I need time off again this weekend. (I....didn't do much last weekend, at least nothing very memorable. Went grocery shopping a couple times - to wal-mart and then to Pruett's - which eats up time.)

But "fun"? Not really. I started - and pushed aside for now - some vintage mystery with an upper-middle-class family and apparently it's another one of those Terrible Father Gets Bumped Off ones, and.....having a father that I care about who has, at times, been in precarious health....those get harder to read. But anyway. One of the characters - I think he was a barrister-type - sniffed "Fun? What's that?" when another character talked about fun, and you know? That annoys me, that mindset. Even if I am not so good these days at seeking out and having fun. The idea that work is all, and that you're supposed to love your work to the exclusion of everything else you do, and that you live to work rather than working to live....I can't do that.

So I don't know. Not sure I have time/energy to run to Sherman, but I do need some "fun." Maybe I pop in a Miyazake movie - or something else nice - this evening or tomorrow afternoon, and just sit and knit and watch. Or maybe I do try to gather up the energy to AT LEAST go to JoAnn's to look at stuff and to the natural-foods store. But I need to make more time for me, for what I want to do.