I Am Large, I Contain Multitudes

I came home one night (a Thursday) a few weeks ago and promptly had a meltdown over the fact that I constantly feel like I'm too tired to do anything useful. That is, I only have one or two half-hour scraps of baby-free time in a day (at least on weekdays), and even though there are surely small pending tasks I could fruitfully accomplish in that half-hour, all I want to do is sit down and stare at the ceiling. Same on weekends during baby naptime: I think all morning about the things I want to work on when she goes down, and then once it happens, all I do is sit and veg.

( thinky )

Oh, and, technically I am taking a vacation next week, except that the occasion is a weeklong visit from my mom, so it's not exactly downtime even though it will be fun times! Hopefully some extra downtime for Etrace though, if he can chill at home while we take Aria and go run around/pay social calls.

This past Shabbat morning, August 6th, tremontstshul had a farewell kiddush in my honor.

I got to stand up and say a few words (it was Parshat Dvarim, get it??) -- although I wasn't sure if I felt more like the Israelites about to cross the Jordan (which, as I pointed out, in Italian is il Giordano), or like Moshe admonishing the Israelites by way of a historical overview of their sojourn. But it seemed to go okay.

And there was lox, and real whitefish (lovingly deboned by B"H Model), and black-and-whites.

There were also a couple of nice tribute parodies offered, which I found so delightful that I wanted to record them here for posterity and share with you all. One was written by father-of-hilaritea to the tune of the Major General's song from The Pirates of Penzance:

( I am the very model of egalitarian orthodox... )

Edited To Add, since someone asked: In fact, no, I don't consider myself Orthodox by any stretch. We noted that privately at the time of the dramatic reading. (But it does rhyme so beautifully with "paradox".)

The other was written by la_vie_en_rosie and her spouse, RLS formerly of the Menschen, in the vein of Eishet Chayil (A Woman of Valor), which is a passage from Proverbs traditionally sung on Friday nights to the woman of the household:

( Erica Chayil )

I was absolutely tickled.

A number of other people very dear to me were specially present, and we had lots of singing, and a fair quantity of Scotch, and it was a lovely sendoff. Thanks to all those of you who were there.

(And if you missed it, it looks like I'm still going to be in town after all for the Community Shabbat Dinner on August 19th, so you can sign up for that. There'll probably even still be some Scotch left.)

Things of which chanalehs require an inexhaustible supply:

Novelty socks
Umbrellas
Mary Chung's egg drop soup
Cobalt blue glassware
Dichroic glass (jewelry and otherwise)
Peanuts memorabilia (in general)
Snoopy Band-Aids (in particular)
Lip balm
Mineral bath salts (anything from Epsom to Dead Sea)
( Read more... )

Sunshine
Lenience for tardiness :-}

... and with that, it's off to the grocery store with me.

Here's a meme that was going around again recently.

Five random idiosyncratic things about me you probably don't know:

1. I have to have at least two kinds of shampoo and three kinds of conditioner in my shower at all times. (Not always the same two or three kinds, although I certainly go through phases. But I have to have an active rotation.)
   
2. I have never lived in a house with cable television.
   
3. I have a thing for radiant heat. Saunas, hot tubs, sunbathing. (This is apparently one of the traits I inherit from my dad. Unless I was a salamander in some previous life.)
   
4. Breakfast just does not taste as good unless eaten in pajamas. Bathrobe is an acceptable second-best. But the only reason to put on the day's actual clothes before breakfast is pressure of time, and I hate that. (I make an exception for breakfast or brunch out.)
   
5. I am drawn to objects that use text as a decorative motif. E.g.: My cookie jar is green glass with the words for "cookie" in a dozen languages embossed on it. My old coworker Sadi said this was because I was a typographer at heart. I believe it.

Five more facts about me which I consider obvious but are apparently not universally known:

1. I converted to Judaism at the age of 23. (Really, it amazes me that more people do not know this. But I 'pass' extremely well.)
   
2. I grew up in northwest Indiana, about an hour outside of Chicago.
   
3. I have only one sibling (my brother Rick, two years younger than me) and four cousins (two on each side, all girls).
   
4. I graduated high school at 16 and college at 20.
   
5. Every job I have had since graduating college has had to do with books (retail or publishing).

... And now, I'm off to meet Tiger Boy at Burdick's. :-)

Some friends of Tiger Boy's have a regular games night. I went with him one night several weeks ago, and what we played when I got there was Frank's Zoo.

I'd never heard of it. "It's fun," they said. "It's a trick-taking game." Crap, I thought. Well, I ought to at least be a good sport and try it.

What I knew from before was that I cannot play trick-taking games. Not just "suck at," although I do, but literally "cannot play" -- because they stress me out enough that it simply is no longer playing.

What was interesting to notice on this particular occasion was that it stressed me out in essentially the same ways that my job had been stressing me out. Strategizing. Prioritizing. Being supposed to keep track of a dozen factors, their relative weights, and -- oh yeah -- when not to play the thing that looks obvious because it might be better used down the road, if I could think far enough ahead (and understand enough of the relevant factors) to predict what that would be. Or then again, not. Duh.

Add this to the cold I was acutely fighting off, and the general run-down exhausted feeling I'd had for a couple of weeks, and... it really pushed my buttons. It was totally fascinating to observe (in a third-party kind of way) myself approaching the verge of a nervous breakdown. I had to get up from the table for a few minutes to escape to the bathroom and try to collect myself.

I just now took the "Are You Burned Out?" quiz du jour, putting in the answers from the past several weeks, and I got 68%. "You are very burned out. You need a huge break from your responsibilities, starting as soon as possible. And you need this time to reevaluate what you really want out of your life. Because you're working hard and going no where... and that would burn anyone out!"

Luckily, I figured that out in the interim -- and have taken the appropriate steps.

Yesterday was my first official day of full-time self-employment. Today, I had a massage in the morning (yay!) and a really energizing screening interview with PSG in the afternoon.

Tonight, there's another games night.
I think I'm ready. :-D