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2002-10-13 - 11:37 a.m.

"I have no time for time and so I break time into little pieces like dog biscuits and lumps of sugar, and keep them in my pocket. All day long I nibble on hours, half hours, and their crumbs -- the brittle minutes between one activity or person and the next. This diet gives me emergency energy, but I can't write poetry on it -- my mind wanders. I fantasize constantly about real time-food: a home-cured day, a spring-fed weekend, the feast of a succulent month simmered in solitude." --Judith Thurman

Everybody is bizzy. I get tired of talking about it and I get tired of hearing about it, and most of all I get tired of being it: bizzy bizzy bizzy..... do until you drop. I used to pride myself on how well I was able to evade situations that put me under pressure and gobbled up my time. Having unstructured personal time is high on my list of priorities. NEVERTHELESS. I find myself running from thing to thing these days, with more to do than I want to do, and art/books/writing/home projects are only a wistful memory.

One outcome of all this is that I have gained more empathy for everyone I know who is having job stress. Not that I was ever unsympathetic, but like so many experiences, you can't really know what it feels like until it happens in your own life. I have had this easy job for years.... it requires a certain level of expertise, but it was not challenging on a daily basis. I work primarily with data and, in truth, if something didn't get done one day it could just as well be done the next day or the next week. Work always stays behind when I walk out the door at five.... or four-thirty....or four. That was always part of my justification for staying in this job that isn't really challenging or high profile: it doesn't take up too much space in my life. And I want it to take up as little space as possible. Recently, however, since I have had the responsibility for making decisions on petitions, work has built an outpost in my head. The work soldiers are advancing out of the stockade on evenings and weekends and shooting down my other thoughts as they race by on their painted ponies.....

My level of emotional involvement is different when work means being responsible to other people and dealing with their problems. Even when I was relaxing with a glass of wine on Friday night, I caught myself thinking: I wonder how the guy with the head injury is doing.... I wonder if he got his check. I woke up this morning thinking of the girl who was moving to New York to pursue an acting career. Would she make it? I honestly don't know how social workers and therapists are able to keep a sense of perspective. I can only assume that it gets easier with time, and you learn some skills for maintaining professional distance. I am doing something I am not really trained for and my mind is working overtime trying to accomodate it into my stream of understanding.

Then there is the tedium and constancy of the ongoing binder project, and the knowledge that, at any time I am doing something else, I should really be bindering. Or I fear we will have a house full of office supplies until Christmas and we won't have room for a Christmas tree, and we will use our precious holiday vacation on binders.... I am trying to suspend all my feelings and just learn to live with the disorder. Just trying to soldier through until it is done and I will have the time and space for my life again. The list of things to do after the binders are done is growing....

Then of course there is the keeping up with every day life, the tasks of home and body maintenance (too numerous and boring to mention). And keeping up with my music lessons, which I am happy to say I am still doing, carving out time for practice at odd moments before work, on my lunch hour, while waiting for something to cook....

Skootie continues to struggle with her incredibly bizzy life: the dreaded Milton class, for which she is cranking out a paper this weekend, the demanding job with the bizarre nut-case boss, the neighborhood organization (which she just quit.... yea!). And when one of us is under stress, the other tries to take up the slack, because our home life is a delicately balanced combination of our individual needs and priorities.

But....this is my life. As John Lennon so astutely put it, life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. I was just realizing that I have this vague abstract notion that someday all of this stuff will be "done" and some other life will open up to me. The one where I take long walks on the beach and spend the afternoons painting in watercolors or writing at my desk by a window with a view of the horizon. Where I sip a glass of wine while watching the sunset, a pot of soup simmering on the stove and loaves of homemade bread in the oven. Where I curl up with all the long books I ever wanted to read and am not interrupted for hours.

I know it is a fantasy that will never be realized. Because (assuming we will not win the lottery and buy ourselves a whole new life, complete with household servants) whose life is ever free from the reality of dishes and dusting and grocery shopping and oil changes and exercise? Who ever really gets to feast on time?

I suppose I am learning to be content with my moments of satisfaction carved out of a bizzy day..... and I hope I can keep the creative fires at least banked and smouldering, ready to be fanned into flames when I turn to them again.

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