lack of sunshine/rainbows
Nov. 10th, 2010 01:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Whiiiiiiiine. Earlier, yesterday or something I forget, I was thinking about how great my life is and how upbeat everything seems to be. And then this week happened.
I got called into work early on Monday, to cover for a sick coworker. I was there 10 hours. Didn't really get any kind of break. Coworker came in for the last 4 hours, took a nice lunch break. Needless to say, I was not pleased. (Upside: I sat and wrote for a good 20 minutes at the end of the night while it was slow. The only reason I didn't go nuts, I think. No, I didn't get to eat, but I got to sit, finally, after I'd done all the rest of the work.)
I couldn't stop coughing, had a dizzy spell for no reason, had breathing troubles (I've no idea why), and on top of it all, had a pulled muscle in my thigh that wouldn't stop hurting, but was too busy to sit down and rest it. Sucky. Painful. Made me cranky.
Today I got to work and another coworker had called in. I know how to do his job, which is highly picky and time-consuming and detail-oriented and hard to do. So I was busy all day, and wound up staying an extra 45 minutes to finish his job. Fortunately his job involved sitting, so the thigh muscle worked itself out, but instead the pinched nerve in my neck started giving me shit. Really? Didn't need that.
So I made it through, and came home and really wanted to just veg out and fuck around on the Internets all night. (I wanted to want to write but usually I psych myself up for that on the car ride home, and i was too worked-up from work stress to think about it. Bummer. I've written maybe 100 words today. Not conducive to NaNo. My total should be like 10,000 by now and it's under 5,000. I think it's just cracked 4,000.)
But I made myself go to practice. It's good for me. It's cathartic. It's, it's healthy. So I did.
And it was awful. The warmup was half an hour of skating in circles as fast as you can, in one direction. (Usually we'll change directions at least once, to help fight RSI. None of that tonight.) Then the next drill was 20 minutes of skating as fast as you could in the same direction, this time in a line. I complained to the girl next to me, a teammate I've known a long time, that I just wasn't going to get much out of tonight. She agreed. I know that every practice, you have to make your own. You've got to figure out how to get the most out of a drill, even if it's something dumb. You've got to find a skill you can work on, or focus on some detail you can perfect. You can make anything your own.
I'm not in the fucking mood for that tonight. Really?
So then there was some downtime, while everyone was getting a drink of water. I wasn't that tired, I didn't need water, I really needed to skate the other direction, because it's so horribly bad for you to just go one way all the time, and I've gotten used to working both legs so I can stretch properly. So I went out, and was the only person on the track, and skated the opposite direction. Another person came onto the track, one of the people running practice I suppose (it wasn't clear who was in charge), and skated the regular direction. Fine; I swerved to the outside to avoid her, since her trajectory seemed pretty clear. She swerved with me, so that she hit me directly in the chest with her shoulder, going the opposite direction. We both fell, hard. She got up and skated away, without saying anything to me. I was shocked-- she's one of the best skaters in the league, how could she have so thoroughly failed to avoid--- Oh. Oh, she did it on purpose, because she'd heard me talking to my teammate about how we weren't getting anything out of this. She did it to get revenge or intimidate me or both.
Fucking really?
I mean, fucking really?
Are we fucking two? No, I've seen toddlers with better conflict-handling skills. Fucking really.
Well, now I can't take my skates off and go home. Or I'm rewarding this incredible specimen of maturity for her innovative interpersonal skills. No fucking thank you. I'll tough this one out.
The next drill was an agility drill that only the person demonstrating it (my incredibly mature friend) was actually able to do as intended; the cones were too closely spaced for anyone else to succeed unless they picked one element of the drill to discard. One skater was successful by going far, far slower than intended; another by omitting a third of the footwork. I simply fucked it up every time; I wasn't about to impress anyone with any of myself, all week. So I might as well just fail. I didn't stand out, though; the other 40 or so people there all fucked it up too, to varying degrees. Stunning success, there.
Then we did some other drills. The last one involved skating really fast in a circle. Welcome to the 2009 Knockouts. Just Outskate 'Em, was our motto, and it gave us fantastic results, if by 'fantastic' you didn't actually want a whole lot of bouts won. (It also, incidentally, gave a whole bunch of us repetitive-motion injuries. Including me!)
And then we sat around and talked about shit for half an hour, but we didn't know there were no more drills, so we didn't stretch out, but just sat and got cold. So my tweaked thing in my thigh is back, and I'm so happy.
I cried in the car. I just felt so shitty. It was such a shitty day. 19 hours of work in 2 days, and none of it anything I'm proud of. (They will manage not to pay me overtime, don't worry.) I can't write for shit and will never finish this novel, and won't even manage to win NaNo, which is pretty fucking pathetic. I am not much of a skater and can't even keep my mouth shut and my head up and make the most of a practice. I couldn't even eat today-- I brought in a cake and didn't even want any of it. I'm shitty at everything. So I stopped by a fast food restaurant on the way home. I never go home that way because I got pulled over and given bullshit traffic tickets by overzealous cops there twice in a month about four years ago. But the fast food restaurant is on this street, so I went over. On the way out of the parking lot I sat at a light for about eight years, so i texted Z that I'd bought food and he should be ready to get the door for me.
And a cop saw the light of the phone on my face as the traffic light turned green and i put the phone away, so he followed me and pulled me over and gave me a ticket for it.
So i got home finally, with cold food. I ate three bites of it, started crying, and gave the rest to Z. I wanted to vent about my shitty week but he was doing the stony-faced when-will-she-stop-talking look. He hates when I vent, and seems to think that if I raise my voice at any point while recounting things that annoy me, that I am yelling personally at him. So I had to stop telling him about it, and just sat there and cried, like a fucking loser.
I melodramatically wailed "And it's only Tuesday," because it's only fucking Tuesday. How much fucking worse can the week get? There are so many more days of it left until it's over. I can't handle this. Z sat there until I shut my mouth, and then went to bed.
So now it's almost 1am. I'm not feeling any better than I was. Writing this hasn't really helped. But on the off-chance that posting it will, I'm not deleting it, because then I'll feel even more fucking useless than I have been. It's all right, I wasn't trying to impress anybody. I'm 31 years old, I work a retail job, and my career aspiration is to have nights and/or weekends off. I also think it would be totally keen to have a paid sick day, and maybe a vacation day or two. Getting paid for holidays would be pretty keen-- we're supposed to be, but so far it's just worked out that they say I wouldn't have been scheduled on the holiday anyway, so it counts as my day off that week, and isn't paid.
I'm not much of a skater, and they already made it clear that not much that I can do will impress them-- the criteria for being on the travel team seem pretty cut-and-dried, and I don't make them. (They're not all about skating, that's pretty fucking obvious; I can skate till I puke for years and still be form-lettered that what I lack is "experience", so why fucking bother making assholes like me?)
And I'm no more ever going to be paid to publish anything I've written than I'm going to learn to fly using my invisible intrinsic wings that I haven't discovered yet, so I don't know why I bother taking it seriously. Writing is a hobby even more selfish than any of the other hobbies I enjoy but don't make time for; regarding it as a compulsion is charitable. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do since I was about 8 years old, but since there are about 3 people in the world who make their living from writing, there's no reason I should ever have hoped to do so.
Also, there are many people who are both more articulate and more amusing than me, even whilst complaining (succinctly, which I can't manage to do) about how terrible their lives are, so anyone who's made it through this round of sludge is probably masochistic, and I only hope they've enjoyed it. Anyone else, sorry; did you want a real entry? I'd have to have a real life, for that to happen.
I got called into work early on Monday, to cover for a sick coworker. I was there 10 hours. Didn't really get any kind of break. Coworker came in for the last 4 hours, took a nice lunch break. Needless to say, I was not pleased. (Upside: I sat and wrote for a good 20 minutes at the end of the night while it was slow. The only reason I didn't go nuts, I think. No, I didn't get to eat, but I got to sit, finally, after I'd done all the rest of the work.)
I couldn't stop coughing, had a dizzy spell for no reason, had breathing troubles (I've no idea why), and on top of it all, had a pulled muscle in my thigh that wouldn't stop hurting, but was too busy to sit down and rest it. Sucky. Painful. Made me cranky.
Today I got to work and another coworker had called in. I know how to do his job, which is highly picky and time-consuming and detail-oriented and hard to do. So I was busy all day, and wound up staying an extra 45 minutes to finish his job. Fortunately his job involved sitting, so the thigh muscle worked itself out, but instead the pinched nerve in my neck started giving me shit. Really? Didn't need that.
So I made it through, and came home and really wanted to just veg out and fuck around on the Internets all night. (I wanted to want to write but usually I psych myself up for that on the car ride home, and i was too worked-up from work stress to think about it. Bummer. I've written maybe 100 words today. Not conducive to NaNo. My total should be like 10,000 by now and it's under 5,000. I think it's just cracked 4,000.)
But I made myself go to practice. It's good for me. It's cathartic. It's, it's healthy. So I did.
And it was awful. The warmup was half an hour of skating in circles as fast as you can, in one direction. (Usually we'll change directions at least once, to help fight RSI. None of that tonight.) Then the next drill was 20 minutes of skating as fast as you could in the same direction, this time in a line. I complained to the girl next to me, a teammate I've known a long time, that I just wasn't going to get much out of tonight. She agreed. I know that every practice, you have to make your own. You've got to figure out how to get the most out of a drill, even if it's something dumb. You've got to find a skill you can work on, or focus on some detail you can perfect. You can make anything your own.
I'm not in the fucking mood for that tonight. Really?
So then there was some downtime, while everyone was getting a drink of water. I wasn't that tired, I didn't need water, I really needed to skate the other direction, because it's so horribly bad for you to just go one way all the time, and I've gotten used to working both legs so I can stretch properly. So I went out, and was the only person on the track, and skated the opposite direction. Another person came onto the track, one of the people running practice I suppose (it wasn't clear who was in charge), and skated the regular direction. Fine; I swerved to the outside to avoid her, since her trajectory seemed pretty clear. She swerved with me, so that she hit me directly in the chest with her shoulder, going the opposite direction. We both fell, hard. She got up and skated away, without saying anything to me. I was shocked-- she's one of the best skaters in the league, how could she have so thoroughly failed to avoid--- Oh. Oh, she did it on purpose, because she'd heard me talking to my teammate about how we weren't getting anything out of this. She did it to get revenge or intimidate me or both.
Fucking really?
I mean, fucking really?
Are we fucking two? No, I've seen toddlers with better conflict-handling skills. Fucking really.
Well, now I can't take my skates off and go home. Or I'm rewarding this incredible specimen of maturity for her innovative interpersonal skills. No fucking thank you. I'll tough this one out.
The next drill was an agility drill that only the person demonstrating it (my incredibly mature friend) was actually able to do as intended; the cones were too closely spaced for anyone else to succeed unless they picked one element of the drill to discard. One skater was successful by going far, far slower than intended; another by omitting a third of the footwork. I simply fucked it up every time; I wasn't about to impress anyone with any of myself, all week. So I might as well just fail. I didn't stand out, though; the other 40 or so people there all fucked it up too, to varying degrees. Stunning success, there.
Then we did some other drills. The last one involved skating really fast in a circle. Welcome to the 2009 Knockouts. Just Outskate 'Em, was our motto, and it gave us fantastic results, if by 'fantastic' you didn't actually want a whole lot of bouts won. (It also, incidentally, gave a whole bunch of us repetitive-motion injuries. Including me!)
And then we sat around and talked about shit for half an hour, but we didn't know there were no more drills, so we didn't stretch out, but just sat and got cold. So my tweaked thing in my thigh is back, and I'm so happy.
I cried in the car. I just felt so shitty. It was such a shitty day. 19 hours of work in 2 days, and none of it anything I'm proud of. (They will manage not to pay me overtime, don't worry.) I can't write for shit and will never finish this novel, and won't even manage to win NaNo, which is pretty fucking pathetic. I am not much of a skater and can't even keep my mouth shut and my head up and make the most of a practice. I couldn't even eat today-- I brought in a cake and didn't even want any of it. I'm shitty at everything. So I stopped by a fast food restaurant on the way home. I never go home that way because I got pulled over and given bullshit traffic tickets by overzealous cops there twice in a month about four years ago. But the fast food restaurant is on this street, so I went over. On the way out of the parking lot I sat at a light for about eight years, so i texted Z that I'd bought food and he should be ready to get the door for me.
And a cop saw the light of the phone on my face as the traffic light turned green and i put the phone away, so he followed me and pulled me over and gave me a ticket for it.
So i got home finally, with cold food. I ate three bites of it, started crying, and gave the rest to Z. I wanted to vent about my shitty week but he was doing the stony-faced when-will-she-stop-talking look. He hates when I vent, and seems to think that if I raise my voice at any point while recounting things that annoy me, that I am yelling personally at him. So I had to stop telling him about it, and just sat there and cried, like a fucking loser.
I melodramatically wailed "And it's only Tuesday," because it's only fucking Tuesday. How much fucking worse can the week get? There are so many more days of it left until it's over. I can't handle this. Z sat there until I shut my mouth, and then went to bed.
So now it's almost 1am. I'm not feeling any better than I was. Writing this hasn't really helped. But on the off-chance that posting it will, I'm not deleting it, because then I'll feel even more fucking useless than I have been. It's all right, I wasn't trying to impress anybody. I'm 31 years old, I work a retail job, and my career aspiration is to have nights and/or weekends off. I also think it would be totally keen to have a paid sick day, and maybe a vacation day or two. Getting paid for holidays would be pretty keen-- we're supposed to be, but so far it's just worked out that they say I wouldn't have been scheduled on the holiday anyway, so it counts as my day off that week, and isn't paid.
I'm not much of a skater, and they already made it clear that not much that I can do will impress them-- the criteria for being on the travel team seem pretty cut-and-dried, and I don't make them. (They're not all about skating, that's pretty fucking obvious; I can skate till I puke for years and still be form-lettered that what I lack is "experience", so why fucking bother making assholes like me?)
And I'm no more ever going to be paid to publish anything I've written than I'm going to learn to fly using my invisible intrinsic wings that I haven't discovered yet, so I don't know why I bother taking it seriously. Writing is a hobby even more selfish than any of the other hobbies I enjoy but don't make time for; regarding it as a compulsion is charitable. It's the only thing I've ever wanted to do since I was about 8 years old, but since there are about 3 people in the world who make their living from writing, there's no reason I should ever have hoped to do so.
Also, there are many people who are both more articulate and more amusing than me, even whilst complaining (succinctly, which I can't manage to do) about how terrible their lives are, so anyone who's made it through this round of sludge is probably masochistic, and I only hope they've enjoyed it. Anyone else, sorry; did you want a real entry? I'd have to have a real life, for that to happen.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-10 05:05 pm (UTC)Anyhow, I can't really cheer you up but I wanted you to know I read it.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-10 05:33 pm (UTC)Just kidding. But it does help, thank you.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-11 12:32 am (UTC)Uxxx
no subject
Date: 2010-11-11 03:49 am (UTC)Thanks though. :)