avoidant personality.

Internet, it's 3 PM. I have lesson plans to see to, my place is a disaster area and Miss M and I need clean clothes for the week. My adulting skills are haphazard. I feel like I live like a hungover frat boy most days of the week.**

I like to space my adulting chores out - do one on Monday morning, another late Tuesday afternoon, a third after dinner on Wednesday...etc and so forth, so by the time the weekend gets here, I'm all done with grown up stuff and can go play. 

But my high stress job, when it starts back up again, prevents this. First off, I have to get up at 5:15 (which actually is more like 5:45 by the time I'm actually standing, numb and blank, under the shower) to be at work by 7:30. I just found out that if I'm not in the door by 7:30, if I slide in at say 7:32, I'm supposed to go sign in somewhere and let them know: I was 2 minutes late. (Is there somewhere I can sign out when I leave 2 hours past the time I was allowed to?)

Anyway. This schedule doesn't really work for me. By the time I get home, I'm exhausted and can only focus on doing dinner/cleaning up dinner, helping with homework/reading, physical therapy exercises, bath, bed. The end. And by the time the weekend gets here, really I just want to lie around and impersonate a...(I tried to think of a vegetable I slightly resemble to type there, but the only ones that are coming to mind right now are carrots and rutabagas).

Also, I have avoidant personality. I'm highly selective about the things I will do. And the percentage of how much someone is REQUIRING they be done vs. the percentage of my DESIRE to meet the requiring totally depends whether or not a paycheck or some type of reward is involved. If a paycheck/reward of some type is involved, they'll be completed to specified requirements (how well you specify will exactly determine how well they are completed - if you don't care, I don't care either). If no paycheck or reward is involved? Oh ha. Then it'll entirely depend on the following: the barometric pressure, amount of clouds/rain outdoors, my hormone levels, how much sleep I've had, the moon phase, the season, the number of daylight hours, if we're currently under daylight savings time or not, how much gas is in my car, whether I've had enough coffee that morning, how many little friendship dramas I've had to deal with over the last week, my current opinions about the Middle East situation, my bank account status, and how irritating Miss M was the last time we were at Target.

I feel like, since school/work re-upped a few weeks ago, I've done nothing here but whine about how I really MUST pull it together. Get my collective shit in gear and JUST DO IT.

However. I think I'm at a point now where I just feel like this:

The Cotton Floozy! She makes excellent needlepoint art.

Because you know why? I'm finally figuring out, at age 43 and so many months, you just can't do it all. There IS no such thing as balance. You're either doing swimmingly at work but your house is a biohazard area (don't even get me started on what's happening in the backseat of my car right now, where M resides on the roads of Atlanta), or you're doing awesome at home and you're about to be handed a We-Are-So-Over-Your-Ridiculousness severance package at work. Or you've found a way to maintain home and work environments but your personal life is just big wad of WTF. There is no magic formula. There is no balance. There is no perfection.

So basically, what I'm going to do, once I hit Publish on this, is to go make my bed. Fold laundry that's been sitting in a basket on my floor for going on 2 weeks. Straighten the living room. Put some Draino in the slow running bathtub (2 girls = too much hair in the pipes...I really want to say that's a metaphor for life in some ways). And then go think about how to teach 2nd graders whatever targets they think we should be teaching 2nd graders the 4th week of school. Which, ultimately, won't matter in the long run because there will be a meeting or a classroom crisis or a state- or district-mandated test to give, and really school and becoming educated should be about problem solving and creativity, not the difference between a verb and an adverb, the end. But I don't make the rules, and I need to pay rent and pay for Internet.

But if I DID make the rules, believe me: there would be siesta breaks and no taxes involved. I'd run a country that was practically Dionysian, with grape harvest festivals, fertility rites, live outdoor theatre every night, enforced ecstasy, and ritual madness. I'm all about 4 out of 5 of those things (I'll let you guess which) right now.

Oh, and! There'd be no more freaking RAIN. omfg, if this weekly weekend rain crap doesn't cease, we are going to have a PROBLEM, Universe.

**Apologies if you get a lot of weird formatting on your end with this entry. Not my fault - Blogger's having a weird day. It was all I could do to successfully upload images. But, I think it really underscored the point of this blog, and how willing I am to put up with a lot of other people's/thing's jackassery these days. I am just a veritable barren field of a whole lotta don't-give-a-fucks. A 5'9" honey badger. Hit publish, moved on, and hope that's okay with you.