When It Rains and When It Pours and When the Car Won't Start

I'm am growing increasingly lethargic and I'm not sure why. At first, I thought it was because I was PMS-ing, and I was, but then I wasn't, and I'm still lethargic. I've slept a solid eight to ten hours a night and I'm finding it difficult to wake up. Instead of getting out of bed at the first alarm, I turn it on and wait for the second one to go off an hour later. When it does, I keep snoozing it. Every ten minutes, I snooze it again. After four refusals to wake up, I've had it. Forty minutes has passed since my last alarm of the morning, and I give in and give up. But only partly. For the next twenty minutes, I lay in bed and pet the dog or wrestle with him. It may appear to be a gesture of love and caring, but it's not. It's the most selfish thing I do all day. It's my excuse to keep laying in bed. I get into the shower and out, make coffee, let the dog out and back in, toast some bread, pack a lunch, and jet out the door in less time than it took me to ultimately concede to the final alarm.

It's something of a wonder that I'm always early to work. Sometimes by more than an hour. When you take into account that I have a forty minute drive to work, it's even more so. This includes near daily stops for ciggies and/or gas. Sometimes, if I forget to make or run out of coffee, it includes a stop at either a Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts drive-thru. Perhaps the inability to be late is something of my true superhero nature shining through procrastination to do anything other than be at work, anything other than get out of bed. Scientists should study me.

For what it's worth, I'm clearly overwhelmed. Some days, it's worse than others. Some days, I barely feel it at all. Long gone are the days when I would hit the gym for over an hour at seven in the morning. I wouldn't have to be at work until nine, but I was there, in the same strip mall, sweating my ass off in really unbecoming pants and sports bras just to stay sane. Going to the gym with some sort of religious obligation--there was no fervor there--became something of a mind-saver. Long gone are those days. Those days of over a year of dedication to nothing more than just going, just showing up. It's not like I was a supermodel figure then, I was just, you know, able to do twenty or so girly push-ups at the drop of a dime. I maybe could've squatted the shit out of most people. Except, you know, people who give a shit. I maybe could've squatted the shit out of, you know, most people just because I was kind of bored. For what it's worth, I couldn't care less about getting my ass into a gym though, some might say with that aura of professional conviction, that it might lessen the "whelming" and put the wind back in my sails enough to at least want to get out of bed at a reasonable hour.

At least my fashion hasn't suffered. At least my love life's finally taking off. Until it doesn't anymore, I suppose. Until it's back to having to make appointments at the gym or suffer the pangs of really not having anything to wake up for anymore.

I'm not really sure when all of this started. The lethargy, I mean. For a few weeks, I was high-as-a-kite on the novelty of love. The Bear, to this day, gives breath to my drowning. Still, with my head above water a bit as it's been this week or so, I'm drawn into the heaviness of Yeah, I've just about had it with the way things are going. I might still be high on The Bear's promise of ever but for the fact that the ticker counting down to the day he'll arrive is down to two and now I've got to face the rest of the shit I'm trying not to live for anymore.

Maybe a year ago, I'd written about some Spanish saying I'd heard on some talk radio show. The whole "Work to live not live to work" thing that I'd postulated on and on about until it had become something entirely else that I'd been writing myself into. Now, I'm back at that place, wondering about the hold that things other than the things that I want having a hold on my every-day. The routine and the mundane, for a while blissfully having fallen into the background of my every-day, now back at the forefront as I have to consider what the Hell else I'm going to do with my life. Suddenly, I'm back into awares that work, society, obligations to either or both have all become a drudge for me to wade through. And, for what? And, why? No reason but because, now, I'm looking elsewhere to find some sense of belonging, some sense of fulfillment. Given the sense of priority that The Next Move has on me right now, the looking around and realizing the weight of my job and my life's idiosyncratic relationships, I am, as stated, overwhelmed. It seems answering the big question I've been seeking this whole time has done nothing but served to make me realize how tired I am of it all. While my dreams are brilliant with longing and a newfound possibility of 1+1=1 with The Bear, the waking hours are such a strain. I guess no one says it's going to be easy.

This morning, I woke up, took forever to make it out the door, but made it out on time. My coffee in a thermos and two small slices of toasted rye with chunky real peanut butter smeared on them and my wet hair picked up into a fancy up-do held together in black clips, I was out before eight. Then, the car didn't start. It didn't and it wouldn't and it wasn't going to let me make it to work. It wasn't going to let me make it there early and, certainly, it wouldn't allow me to make it on time. Pressured with crunching five days' worth of work into two and three-quarters at the start of the workweek, the trappings of reality locked me in the house waiting for AAA to arrive. They stranded me at the auto shop while my car battery was replaced. They wrestled me away from my office until almost eleven. And, I don't believe, they had any intention of letting me go on with a normal day. Perhaps, I postulate, it is normal. This, this tug-o-war with the things that will always keep me under, this is what is normal.

I consider this, all of it, as I'm home now, finally, albeit "early" by most people's standards. Already, by two, I was tired. Exhausted from the mill. Because, it seems, even the slackest of jobs is the most arduous of labors when you really care about getting things done right. I consider this, all of it, when I'm home, having smoked too many ciggies and having drunk too much coffee and eaten too much crap in what's been too short of a day. I consider this, all of it, and all I want to do is go to sleep already and get to Wednesday when the Bear will be here and being in love can be at the forefront of the day, even if it means that the every-day's burdens will be halted and thus procrastinated until he's gone the next week. But, even when he's here, we have to talk about the every-days. The ones that are, the ones I want to leave behind, and the ones that will be when I get to where I am going. It is an endless string of anti-dreams. It is a perpetual current taking me off to the rest of the things that adulthood has in store for us all. All the resumes I have to put out to find a single job that will have me that I may or may not want. All the discussions of rents that we may or may not end up paying so that we can, at least, be together in the same city for some certain amount of time or, at least, until one of us breaks the lease to strike out on our own. And that's not even the stuff the concerns me. That's just the baby-cake that comes along with the shower. That's just the shitty pin-the-pacifier-in-the-baby's-mouth fun stuff that all the preggers and wanna-be-preggers ladies have considered appropriate to the occasion. There's still the matter of getting up in the morning and wanting to make it out of the door.

Two days and at least I can pretend that none of it's important. Two more days of it till I can finally relax before finding myself overwhelmed again.