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I remember working swing shift as one of the very best times in my life. I’d get off work between midnight and two in the morning and drive home in the dark experiencing the magic of RIGHTNESS, of everything having fallen into place and a lifelong problem being solved. That schedule didn’t make everything perfect, of course, but it was a magical gift that explained part of my life and who I am to me and let me know that things CAN fall into place. It’s one thing to complain vociferously about not being a morning person and another thing to be lucky enough to NOT HAVE TO BE. To experience yourself operating at maximum efficiency and enjoy your favorite parts of the day and night, skipping the parts that have never worked for you. To function so much better that you’ve got PROOF that this “night person” thing is real.

I’m at a point in my life where I need a new swing shift. My gears have been out of sync for years now and I keep looking for some little twinkly adjustment I can make that will fix things. I’ve given myself a bunch of tuneups and they’ve been eye-opening and helpful, but I’m desperate to feel something like the smooth, peaceful rightness of driving home on a nearly-empty freeway with the windows rolled down in the summer, smelling everything asleep and reveling in being awake, ready to go home and make a simple dinner for myself. The answer isn’t making myself work from four to midnight now, either – I don’t live alone anymore and I don’t want to; I want to go to bed WITH Delia (not a night person, so we compromise). I feel like I’ve tried everything and suspect the answer is that I need more time to be completely alone with myself, without the sounds of anybody else, without being seen or heard by anyone watching . . . just totally removed from everybody’s sounds and presence.

Last week I allowed myself the luxury of staying up all night long playing with TrixieRadio – listening to music, downloading new stuff and uploading it to the station . . . amusing myself and accomplishing something that has no monetary pay-off in the near future and is absolutely NOT what I should be spending huge blocks of time doing. But I miss listening to music. REALLY MISS IT. I am not someone who can work AND listen to music with words, so it’s not an option for me to multitask. Besides, I don’t want to. I want to do nothing but listen. NOTHING BUT. So I did, all night long, and organized my .mp3’s and made lists of cd’s I still need to rip and read about music and made a blog entry begging for money to justify doing it more. Being up all night doing that made me feel a little more like myself. And I finally bought an adaptor that provides phantom power for my months-old new microphone so I can personalize things more and potentially make more sales through the “radio” thing and podcasting. If I can figure out the perfect settings for recording with this microphone (one of those detail-oriented time-sucking tasks that annoys the shit out of me that I usually invest a couple of hours in then decide it’s not worth it / I should wait for a better time to do it / I have more important things to do).

I’ve been retreating a lot more into our guest room, off cam and alone, which has been helpful but maybe I’m still not committed enough to it to really reap the benefits of it. I feel guilty about it and still can’t get enough. I haven’t figured out how to integrate my need for solitude with work and my relationship with Delia. She’s really tolerant and understanding of my limitations in this area so it’s me that needs to work out the kinks alone along with continuing to figure out how to succeed at being my own boss. You’d think after seven years I’d be an expert, but I’m still an amateur (both at working for myself and being in a relationship). A lot of things have changed for the better in the past year but I’m still struggling to find daily “rightness”. I get glimmers of it, but very inconsistently; for everything I resolve to do better, something else falls by the wayside. It’s like there’s a never-ending rotation of things I do well and things I fuck up — every day, every week, every month, every quarter, every year the same fucking challenges just trade places with each other. I make progress but only temporarily before regressing. I feel like I haven’t CONQUERED anything in years and I’m pretty fucking sick of it. I try to be patient with myself, recognizing I’ve had some really fucked-up health problems and am still fine-tuning “curing” myself. Recognizing the economy sucks so it’s not entirely my fault that we’re on this debt merry-go-round.

The shitty thing is that having a positive attitude means feeling empowered and taking responsibility to fix stuff — believing it’s POSSIBLE to make things better; I’m just really really REALLY tired of the burden. Sometimes I just wish I could drive home and let my boss figure it out in the morning and tell me what to do when I go to work and know that it’s not my fault if that was the wrong thing. Part of me loves how I’ve complicated my life and that I *don’t* have a boss, but JESUS FUCKING CHRIST sometimes I miss having things be simple. I miss having someone else to blame. I miss not really caring about my job. That used to make me feel trapped, having to go to work for a certain number of hours and not doing anything even remotely creative. Now? I feel trapped because I *do* care about my job(s). Because it’s rare that I get to establish a rhythm doing something simple for 6-8 hours. I can’t quit because I love my work, but I have no idea when (if ever) I’ll be able to do my job BETTER and not just feel like I’m running on a treadmill. A treadmill that lurches and changes speeds unpredictably and is just like . . . possessed with multiple personalities. There’s no water-cooler where I can stand around bitching about my boss and how if I ran things I’d do them differently/better. I mean, I can do that, but it’s not really good for my self-esteem. I am my own worst boss/enemy and I’m so. TIRED of it.

I keep slogging along, promising myself that if we just get rid of our debt we’ll be able to AFFORD to establish some rhythms and magic swing shifts but right now we seriously do not have the money to do anything efficiently. Not shooting, not marketing, not exercising . . . not even fucking GROCERY shopping. Every day is a schizo fucking mess and I’m just so sleeeeeeeeeeeeeepy. Not as bad as I was before, but still . . . some days are pretty bad while I’m fine tuning different birth control pills, supplements, figuring out just how much fucking with my blood sugar I can get away with, etc.

Fuck it. I am going to order a pizza.

Sorry for the downer of a post. Things are good, I just needed to whine a little bit.

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