Friday, June 8, 2007

Professional Life Experiment Update: Suckage, or Blogging the Transition Upset

Well, apparently right now four days is my upper limit on professorial and professional adulthood. So what blew it? The day started off so right. Eating and talking with colleague. Very much like a professor and professional in the field -- check. Picked up laptop -- check. Went to work at coffeehouse but it was altogether too loud -- it happens to everyone, check. Picked up trash like a teenager on Saturday-morning detention a responsible community member -- uh okay, check. Then four hour nap, wake up at 7:30 and realize with a panic I got nothing done and determined to finish up something on Problem 1, stay up until 3am. Ah yes, there it is. The trouble of the over-long nap and panic. Tell-tale signs of. . .something bad.

I once had a therapist who told me that I wasn't very adult in the hours I kept. Uh huh, I said, thinking I'm a night owl. Always have been. Don't fence me in with your ideas of normal, man. Therapists suck because even if I totally reject what they say, it sticks with me. They're like adulthood's version of parents. But here's the problem. My friend will be over tomorrow!!! I have not done the bathroom! Do I stay up and work on the bathroom and sleep in until two hours before I'm likely to see said friend, then throw everything into the washing machine? Or do I go to bed now and worry about the bathroom getting done, oversleep and go crazy in the afternoon hours, trying to get bedclothes into the washing machine. As Bridget would say: tricky.

3 comments:

post-doc said...

Tricky, indeed. The lure of sleep is often too strong for me to resist, but I do rest better knowing that everything is done before bedtime. I hope you got things cleaned and ready and slept on your own schedule.

I also absolutely agree that therapists' opinions tend to be easily recalled, even when one thinks they're stupid. Unfortunate.

medieval woman said...

Like you, I take umbrage with that therapist's blithe categorizing of certain hours as "adult". Some people are night owls and some aren't - usually those people who are night owls become morning people when they have children. Is that the standard of being an adult??

Grrrr! As a night owl who's heard this before - I feel for ya!

Hope everything got done...

Maude said...

if it's for me you're going to clean the bathroom for, DON'T! I don't care. with any luck i'll be too drunk to notice, anyway!

:-)