"'Tis the season to be jolly!"
[from my Tumblr blog]
When I worked as a data-entry drone in a call center cubicle honeycomb years ago, one of my fellow disgruntled workers trying to live off of $10 an hour in MetroWest Massachusetts started making a habit of uttering that line when the absurdity of our task bothered her. Over time, she found herself working three jobs that took their physical and mental toll, so she expressed feelings of “jolliness” more and more frequently.
Today is Tuesday, the day of fourteen straight hours on campus plus commute time and plain awake time. Tuesdays end with the worst part of the day, which is a four-hour chemistry lab that I have come to really resent. Every week I spend this day just trying to live from hour to hour, mitigating the pain with espresso, and getting irritated by whatever people or topics happen to rub me the wrong way. Even the giddy and silly thoughts and mental soundtrack that carried me through the weekend and Monday are shelved-I want nothing to do with them, even though they’d lighten my mood. But once I finally, finally arrive at home around 10:15 at night, the need to decompress leads me to stay up until about midnight, rather than rushing to bed right away. My stubborn night-owl tendencies always defend this kind of limit-pushing, but I admit that it could compound my “jolliness”. That’s not yet enough to try to sleep on cue, though. I resent being told to sleep when I don’t want to. Like a child, I hate going to bed, even though I love sleep. Getting up to see the sun rise is kind of nifty and makes for enviable productivity, I’m just not willing to prepare for it the night before. Going to bed before 11:30 might as well be going to bed while the sun is still up. Yes, I know that concessions have to be made for certain situations and I’m willing to do so when necessary, but until then, you can’t make me!
Well, I really just posted today because I felt myself becoming unreasonably prickly with my exhaustion and had to vent. I haven’t gotten it out of my system but I won’t until I’m back in the safe confines of the woman-cave. I can’t believe I spent last week running on five to six hours of sleep each night and feeling quite the opposite for it, save for one brief period of time on Wednesday morning. Then again, I wasn’t stuck sitting in classes and was ignoring chemistry lab all week. For now, it’s back to the hour-to-hour struggle. Next task: read for my seminar coming up in an hour.