An Angel Walk Un Sodden Wings

In which our Hero wishes his inner child would stop screaming and whining on the floor because the kid’s embarrassing my imaginary friends and making the insides of my ears hurt

All it takes is enough fatigue to bring every sorrow, remembered, manufactured, imagined and true, down upon me with the weight of a monsoon rain. Tragedy and injustice bear me down beneath their weight with no reason or basis. I am tired. Not “So tired,” nor “exhausted,” though those things are encompassed in this feeling. Monday, I spent half the day with sleep trying to claim me so hard that my bones hurt from the effort of staying upright. Today, today, I’m almost comfortable today.

Comfortable and sad of silly things.

Here is something I learned on Tuesday. That a week can be enough for me to completely lose my place. I didn’t think of work at all for one week and I had to struggle to remember my password, to remember what I was supposed to be doing and where I was supposed to be in the doing of it.

I spent hours combing my email and drive, searching for a document that explained the requirements of one of my projects, and I could not. I tried contacting the person I would have sent it to, but he is on vacation until next week. I called Hollywood, despite his vacation, to ask him for help and he searched and then scolded me for not copying him, he’s been my backup many times.

It wasn’t till the afternoon that I found my missing document. And the reason I couldn’t find the requirements I’d written, and the reason I hadn’t sent them to Hollywood to at least review for stupidity is because I gave him a stack of notes and *HE* wrote the document and sent it to me.

Here’s something I learned today. Shopping for workout gear in the first week of January is nearly impossible without a real specialty store. At the local mall, the anchor stores had great prices but just 3 ugly pairs of shorts that were unwearable, and the pseudo sports store had nothing at all.

And at the larger sporting goods store, the selection was limited, but I found myself a new pair of running shoes and… “Sir?”

“Um, yes?”

“You know these shoes are different size?”

“I know what?”

“People mix them up so often we make a point to check at the register. This one is a 10, this one is an 11. Don’t worry, it happens a lot when people are trying on different sizes.”

“But I didn’t try them at the same time. I tried the one, gave it back and then asked for the next.”

“Oh. Well. Let me go see if we can find you the right size.”

They couldn’t. And I waited for 20 minutes while the charming and helpful people tried to get me shoes but I don’t want to go to a different store, and I’ve already wasted enough time and I can make do with the runners I have so, screw it. I’m going home.

Except ever since, I’ve been sulking because I was supposed to get shoes. That was the main point of the trip, to get me shoes. I liked my almost shoes. I was excited. And at low energy, my mind is stupidly lacking the energy to keep from idiotically curling up around my ridiculously trivial disappointment, and thus the whole world sucks a little today.

And the damned thing is that today didn’t suck. Today I knocked another one of those dangling tasks off my to-do list, another zombie to-do that’s been casting a shadow for at least five years, because I was working on this project on planes.

The best part is that the client already came back with changes and my answer was, “That’s perfect, we can use those to teach you how to make those changes.” This was great, this was a proof of many concepts I can now use on my next big outstanding project.

And the other best part is that it means I convert this client to pay now. An amount trivial to the point of being embarrassing. But it’s a lot easier to stomach the lethargy when they’re paying me to wait.

So a milestone that I’m much too tired to drink to. Hip hip, and all that. A good day. Even if my emotions are having a tantrum on the floor because I want shoes and I didn’t get a snack from McDonald’s and so on and so on.