Current location:	The Homestead
Current mood:	sleepy
Current music:	"Vinum Sabbathi" by Electric Wizard
Entry tags:	stress

Repeat 1,000 Times: Everything is Okay . . .
Today, this morning, I can happily report that life at Fear, Loathing, & Publishing has resumed its natural state of affairs after a serious detour through Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas over the course of actually getting out of town for Thanksgiving. As Brutha Drain would say, it was one of those episodes where you get up the next day and the only documentation for the world (or even, especially, yourself) you want to leave is to write "Dear Diary, last night NOTHING happened!"

So, today, this morning, we're back on track: I'm having my regularly scheduled series of anxiety-laden dreams that mean I'm waking up too early and repeating to myself "everything is okay" while in bed which sometimes means I can go back to sleep before the white noise in my head takes over but most days, like today, actually winds up getting me up and engendering the drinking too much coffee too soon that will cause me to look moderately too wild-eyed by the time I get to work and means I will be too tired, too soon to have any semblance of a normal blood-sugar level by the end of the day. 

Remember Andie McDowell in Sex, Lies, and Videotape? How she was all freaked out about how much trash there was to deal with? How obsessing over all this kept her from facing the real (& local) problems that confronted her? I don't know about this last part--what's THAT got to do with ANYTHING?--but publishing requires entirely too much multitasking. Each week I make a "next step" list of the things that need to be done to keep things moving along. One upon a time, like, when I first moved out of the English department, it had like 10 things on it that were in a nice palatino linotype 16-point font but which, over time, has turned into a two-column nightmare in 8-point font with like, no shit, 50 goddamn things on it. But, what you gonna do about it? That's why the school pays me what they consider the big bucks: to seriously worry about all the shit that nobody else could care less about. Then again, while I was putting crappy certificates of completion for the interns in crappy plastic frames the DS (departmental secretary) was doing a final copyedit on the dental books . . . riddle me this, Batman, about how that could possibly be the most cost-efficient expense of our respective time?  It's just too much, man, too much!

Mainly, as always, I have a sense of overlapping dread about the intern reception. On the one hand, it signals the end of the semester for us. On the other hand, it requires the big public spectacle with a bunch of--that is 40-50--people from the school, most of whom I could go the rest of of my life--and have a happily complete life--without seeing again. A big norther blew in last night so I was hoping against hope, praying against prayer, that we might get snow day today but, of course, no such luck. Normally, that is, based on past experience, I would have had too much to drink the night before the reception so that I could add a low-grade hangover to the reception fun, but this time around I manage to avoid that. So, instead, it's just a matter of waking up two hours before I really had to.

On another note entirely, I'm going to start adding tags at the bottom of each entry that will categorize it. That way, if someone/anyone/only me wants to find all the entries for that category, all they'll have to do, I think, is click any particular tag. I was looking for a blog template that would list the tags on the right-hand column but I couldn't locate on. It's at times like these I wonder why I ever got a livejournal blog to start with: uploading pictures is a hassle, no traffic tracking, and not near the features of blogger or even wordpress. What was I thinking? Duh: I wasn't thinking.

Story of my life.