taking a breather

I can’t even begin to describe how intensely busy my life has been over the past few months. My main job has been busy and stressful, while freelancing has been completely out of control, mostly because I’ve taken on some additional projects that I really don’t have time to do, solely because I desperately need the money. My frantic work schedule is somewhat akin to me putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound. I need the money because the past few months have brought a busted computer, $700 in car repairs, a few hundred dollars in vet bills, and the news that my mortgage has shot up an additional $100/month, simply because some douchebag at my mortgage company miscalculated my escrow payments.

I’m very grateful to have jobs during this recession, but nonetheless, I don’t handle stress and excessive multitasking very well; having this many balls in the air is proving to be an enormous strain. I’m running on adrenaline in a bid to keep hanging on by my fingernails. I can’t stop for a minute or really devote much time to think about anything other than work, because if I do, I will crash. The adrenaline and hyperfocus form a kind of supportive exoskeleton around me; without it I’ll hit the ground and inertia will keep me pinned there. This is one of the reasons why I’ve been neglecting my blog (and my journal, too, for that matter). Everything extraneous is being cast by the wayside, as if I’m shedding luggage from the back of my car in order to make my paltry gas reserves last longer.

That being said...I still can’t believe it’s 2009! Ten years ago, when I rang in 1999 with friends, we marveled that we finally hit the year immortalized by Prince back in the early ’80s, and remembered how far away it seemed when we heard that song as kids. Ten years ago the world began gearing up for the new millennium and Y2K. Ten years ago I finally got my ass back to England. The millennium is almost a full decade old, for chrissake!

2008 wasn’t a horrible year for me, personally. Sure, I encountered ongoing money woes and I was dreadfully overworked, and in October I learned the wrenching news that a former coworker of mine, a really wonderful woman just a few months shy of her 30th birthday, had been murdered in her home by an unknown assailant one month earlier.

But on the whole, things weren’t bad. However, they were bad all around me, lurking at my periphery. We slipped into a recession. Gas prices rose to record highs (although they later dropped to near-record lows, I can’t easily forget what it was like to pay over $4/gallon). The news was constantly filled with one horror or another: two failing wars, high unemployment, a nosediving housing market and stock market (I don’t even want to know what kind of a hit my pension fund took), natural disasters (most notably, the cyclone in Myanmar, hurricanes in the US, and the earthquake in China). People in my life experienced many losses: pets, parents, grandparents. I feel like I’ve escaped the executioner’s noose by a hair’s width and I’m always waiting for his axe to fall on me in lieu of my being hung.

I took off the week between Christmas and the New Year, but I think I set my sights too high, because I didn’t accomplish everything I set out to do during that much-needed vacation of mine. To be fair, though, it wasn’t a total washout. I started making headway in carving out a new life for myself (the details of which can’t be mentioned here, unfortunately), I got through some freelancing, and I completed some art projects I set out to do. This included painting the bed springs I stole from Centralia in November and making a paint chip picture frame, a canvas collage, a wooden and clay hearts “love letter” to someone who shall remain nameless, and a clay and X-acto knife-tip-studded heart that serves as a wake-up call to my currently suppressed inner life.

I also made the unfortunate decision—even though my gut was warning me against it—to paint my appliances black with appliance spray paint. I thought spray paint would look much more professional than paint that goes on with brushes, because I didn’t want to see brush marks (it never even occurred to me to use a roller). In typical Jen fashion, I made an unholy mess of the situation. The dishwasher turned out okay, but I saw some bubbling and streaking with the bottom half of the stove, and it sent me into full-fledged panic mode. Like, I just suddenly doubted my ability to do the rest of the stove and, more importantly (given the fact that I spent a lot of money on it and it was brand new), doubted my ability to do my refrigerator. I also realized just how much of a mess I had made. I’d taped down paper around each appliance I was spraying, and that caught some of the wayward paint, but the entire floor had gotten covered in a thin film of paint, and it even extended to the wood floors beyond the kitchen. So I screeched to a halt and tried to do a 360. I raced to Home Depot and bought mineral spirits and spray paint remover, along with a mop and sponges, and spent a good chunk of the rest of the evening trying to clean up my mess. I failed miserably. The most I could do was remove thin streaks of paint from the stove (I didn’t even attempt to get the paint off the dishwasher). I got some of the paint off the floor, but a residue remained, making it look like my floor is covered in soot. The stove adds to this effect, because it looks like it got charred in a fucking fire. Jesus Christ, what a mess. I felt like smashing my head into a wall for being so sloppy. My new game plan is to buy some roll-on faux stainless steel appliance paint that Heather heard about on the DIY Network and get a friend to help me apply it. Another disaster in the making? Who knows. Maybe. Probably.

My social life, always tenuous at best, has been particularly flattened lately, partially because of my work schedule and partially because of my stress-induced emotional withdrawal. My friend David visited me from Chicago the weekend after Christmas, though, and we had a splendid time. And I spent New Year’s Eve with some of my wonderful pals from home. We did our white elephant gift exchange and Beck gave everyone the kick-ass framed cross-stitch pieces she had made for us, using funny sayings and quotes from my collection. We set out to make an is-it-male-or-female Maury Povich segment with Joel’s camcorder but it kind of fell apart in the end, since getting this group organized is like the proverbial herding of cats. However, we did get Brad to walk around in a corset and his underwear, wearing bright red lipstick, so that’s at least something (it helped that he was kind of drunk).

Two weeks ago I attended a high school musical reunion. Yes, way before High School Musical became a phenomenon, my geeky self partook in the various shows produced by my high school. I served on the makeup crew in 9th and 10th grades, because I was too shy or lazy to actually appear in the shows, but I became a full-fledged non-speaking cast member in 11th and 12th grades. Musical was this crazy amalgam of dorks, gays, drama queens, and social misfits, with a sprinkling of popular people thrown in for added taste. I loved and hated the experience in equal measure. I’m still good friends with several of my musical compatriots, but I lost touch with a great many more…at least until Facebook came along. Then I began reconnecting with musical folks I hadn’t seen since high school or immediately beyond. Seeing them in the flesh at our reunion was fantastic! A reunion like this was so much more beneficial than a class reunion, because it gave me a chance to see folks who graduated after me. It was nice not being restricted to members of my class. There were a couple folks there who I didn’t know, as they only started high school after I graduated, and there several people who either couldn’t show up for one reason or another or who failed to show up after promising to be there. Still, I was so pleased with the turnout and I think the mastermind behind it all, Ang, did an incredible job with organizing things. I’m hoping that this was the first of many musical reunions to come. And hopefully future reunions won’t involve two skeevy old guys at the bar constantly staring at my ass.



song heard most recently before posting:
Outsiders—Franz Ferdinand