Pushing Thirty

     I don’t seem to interface well with business hours.  I’m hoping that the exhaustion and low energy level I’ve been left with at the end of each day is just some sort of employment jet-lag, that my natural rhythm will take over at some point and I’ll know the way a day is supposed to go soon.  I’m not all that good at changing routines, I’ll  admit that, but this has been totally different.  I was pretty much a career waitress for a long long time.  I could carry 25 pounds of used fajita setups on one hand with the best of them, never close to toppling yet balanced like a Jenga game about to go wrong.  Eight margaritas on a tray, no problem.  Carrying buckets of ice up flights of stairs while dodging servers and runners, no problem.  Start work at 11am and roll out of the restaurant at the end of the night at 2am, no problem.  So why can’t I do regular hours at a position that is much less physically draining?

It doesn’t seem to me like spending the time from 7am to 5:30pm on my couch, lifting only my hands to type customer information and dispatch calls should leave me as tired as it has.  I’m literally working in my pajamas with a cup of coffee and morning television to keep me company between calls these days.  I should find myself at 5:30 ready to go, bounding off the couch to take advantage of the whole night opening up in front of me.  But so far I can just about handle making the trip to the grocery store after I finish up, cooking dinner, doing maybe one or two things such as laundry or finishing the dishes, and then it’s 10 at night all of a sudden, and I haven’t technically relaxed all day.

Help…. I mean, I know that there’s a way that this works, after all, the whole darn world works during the day like I finally started doing.  People get home from work and live their lives.  I had the details down the other way.  I could get up in the morning and get three days worth of stuff done in the morning before I started a shift in the late afternoon and worked till the date changed, take a cab home, wake up, and do it all again.  I’m hoping this is just an adjustment period.  I’m going to try another cup of coffee after I sign out of work to see if that may give me a boost.  I’m trying to make concrete plans with friends so that I push myself out the door.  I’m hoping that just plodding through it I’ll get used to it, but a few weeks in it’s not working too well.  Maybe I need to rework all that I’ve learned of time management, I don’t seem to be playing by the same rules anymore.  Maybe I’m just going to have to grow up a bit more and start learning how all the other adults out there do it.  Whatever it is I just hope I can figure it out, cause this has got me wiped out.

     It’s been the sort of six days that can spin your head around.  It’s been one of those weeks where everything seems to change, suddenly, and suddenly for the better.  It went kind of like….. Interview for new job on Tuesday.  Get a call offering the position on Wednesday.  Train Thursday.  Train Friday and get my new computer software installed.  Work 7am to 530pm Saturday and then 7am to 130pm Sunday and I get to start again at 7am tomorrow too.  Kind of a no-time to full-time in a heartbeat kinda thing.

      And I can’t complain.  I’ll have to keep you all posted on my new job being a secretary/dispatcher for a locksmith company, because really, if they could have made a job for me, this would be it.  I get the sort of intellectual entertainment from it as I do when I play a really good simulation game.  I’m working from home now, which in the winters in Boston is going to be it’s own reason to be excited about this position.  But somewhere along the way as I was cleaning my apartment and trying to get set up to have a home office something changed.

     To say that coffee runs in my blood would be an understatement.  I was that girl that worked at a coffee shop for a long time.  I’m very rarely without a cup of coffee any time day or night.  It doesn’t keep me up, I’ve been known to brew a pot an hour before bed and be just fine with sleeping caffeinated.  But last night, when at nine at night I went for a walk to get a cup of iced coffee I thought to myself about halfway there, “If I have to get up at six, I should really get decaf.”

     Now, I know this seems like common sense to pretty much the whole world.  But if I have ever had an addiction, a true addiction, it’s caffeine.  It’s not just the headaches from withdrawal, it’s not just the fact that I can’t get over the way it feels on the roof of my mouth or the way it coats my throat, warm in the winter and cool in the summer.  It is a ritual for me, a little thing I do for myself that makes me feel content and calm and good on the most basic of levels.  But at a pure chemical level, it’s the caffeine within the taste that is what I love.

     So within the next five minutes I decided that something would be wrong with me if I gave in to the sudden urge to be rational and that I Must get a regular coffee no matter what, simply to stay true to myself.  I opened the door, I stood in the short line of one person in front of me, and I had it on the tip of my tongue.  I was rehearsing it in my head “Medium iced french vanilla with cream and sugar please.”  And I was feeling good.  I was doing a little happy dance with my feet as I shuffled in place, the coffee, the real true thing, would be mine.  I decided I was still that insane girl who didn’t care how I was going to make it work, as long as I did make it work.  I told myself to hell with exhaustion, if I was tired tomorrow, I was just going to have to be tired tomorrow.  And then it happened.

      “Could I please get a small iced decaf, cream and sugar?”  And he repeated the order as if giving me a second chance to grab that part of myself I felt slipping away and say “No.  Not that at all.  That’s not me, that’s… too responsible, too concerned with making it work well instead of just making it work somehow, I don’t know what I was thinking, large iced french vanilla cream and sugar please.”  But I didn’t.  I said “Yup, thank you.”

     I find, personally, the more little things I do towards a new habit, the easier it is to promote that habit and make it instinct.  I love our Momma Earth.  I really do.  It’s hard sometimes in the middle of a city to feel as if in one little apartment I can make a difference.  So I try and take my attitude to the streets.  Here’s a little thing I do now that I hope helps.

     You went out to eat.  You’re about to go grab a seat and you also just grabbed a huge handful of napkins from the condiment counter.  Even though you’re trying to just take what you need sometimes the call of the food before you gets the better of all of us.  When you’re done and are tossing your trash in the bin, save the fifteen you didn’t use from certain doom and just throw away the three or four you used. 

     Pocket them, throw them in your purse, diaper bag, or backpack.  Not only will you be surprised at how handy those saved napkins can be, spills in the cars, kids, pets, spilling your coffee on the way up the stairs to your apartment, or is that just me, the uses are endless, but you also just took a little step that will add up to wasting a whole lot less.

     Five floors below me the guys who rent out the basement apartment are having their first summer party of the year.  They go to Berklee.  They have all their friends over right now, and I’m betting some of their friends’ friends as well.  They are singing at the top of their lungs to “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” and other great getting wasted before Eleven PM classics.  When they step outside for a butt it’s a cacophony of shrill girls voices and dudes saying “dude…. dude….”  It’s a good time. 

     And I love hearing it waft up between the apartment buildings.  There’s a certain way you belt it out the first few times you hear those songs at parties and everyone knows the words.  A certain newness to a party even.  I can see how it can get “loud” and “annoying” and of course I hope no one does anything stupid, but I can’t begrudge how much fun that is, how hopeful they sound.

     Which brings me around to the fact that having that sort of objective thought, hearing the party and thinking of “them” instead of going down to join the good time “they” are having, makes me feel like that time has passed.  I don’t mean to imply I feel old, I just don’t feel like a college sophomore anymore.  I have ten times more fun at the parties I’ve seen these days than any before at least the age of twenty-five.  Maybe it has something to do with our objectives these days. 

     The ingredients are the same, and I can’t say drunken belting of “Every Rose Has It’s Thorn” or other such classics has stopped, waned a bit, but not stopped.  But I go to parties to see friends, not to “party.”  To have a drink, not to get wasted.  I can’t say I haven’t had a hangover in the last six months.  But it was one and not a series of one after another.  And the drinks are better.  A nice bottle of wine brought by a friend with a good nose for a good red beats a warmed keg any night.  And the conversation, from what I can judge from what I hear outside, is much more coherent and often more interesting.  Besides, with the types of good times I’ve had, I’d be sad if I couldn’t remember it in the morning.

     I have the sort of ADHD which gets me into conversations with people about object permanence. See, at some point in a child’s early development they catch on to the fact that just because they can’t see something doesn’t mean it isn’t still there. It’s why peek-a-boo is so darn funny for a baby. Behind a blanket or a pair of hands that face is gone, totally gone to that little mind. The relief at seeing a loved one return after inexplicably disappearing, the amusement at catching on to the pattern that somehow it does come back, that’s been the reason for baby belly laughs for who knows how long.     Now, I caught on to object permanence. I know that just because I can’t see my parents in front of me it doesn’t mean they just poofed into the ether. But there are ways in which my brain does not function which makes life seem like a constant dropped blanket, a never-ending sequence of parting hands. Let me explain.

     There were always some things that I was sure of.  I would grow up.  I would go to college.  I would meet the man of my dreams and we would get married and start a family and we would be happy.  You know, all that jazz.  I never expected it to be easy.  Even as a child I had this weird sense of realism, this idea that this ideal life of mine would involve trials and tribulations and some things to be endured and overcome.  But in the end, by the time I was, say twenty-four, twenty-five, these things would be.

     And here I am.  I am twenty-eight.  I am chronically single.  I’m not even sure if what I think is love is love, or if that feeling was even real in the first place.  I can’t tell you about a good relationship, cause I’ve never really had a traditional “good” relationship.  It’s not that I can’t meet men.  Oh no, that’s not the problem.  Well, it is, but not in the way one would think.  It’s not that I’m picky.  Well, fine, maybe I am ridiculously picky, but I can’t see not waiting for something to feel right rather than going with what just feels okay.  So here I am, twenty-eight.  With a string of bad chance and circumstance behind me and a foggy road ahead.

     I’ve heard it said that thirty is the new twenty.  Funny thing about that is that I feel as if I’m still waiting to be twenty.  As the social sets slide I’ve found myself caught on the crest of the wave, hanging suspended in this strange limbo where a post-college lifestyle has become an inescapable daily fact of living.  ”Real” jobs are still just out of reach, but I’m not that twenty-two year old for whom going to a bar legally is still a novelty.  Everyone seems to have been talking about their five year plans for the last ten years and we are still holding to the same static timetable.  It seems that the shore keeps receding at the speed of the wave and in most ways I’m ready for it to break.