Tired Girl

I work not with the reading material people buy for pleasure, but with textbooks.
Not with the textbooks themselves, but with the supplements that accompany them.
Not with the content of the supplements, but with the formatting.
And the production schedules:
Has authoring begun yet?
No, that's late. Will that make the supplement late?
Yes, that will make it late.
It's taking a while for the author to answer the copyeditor's queries, too. Will that make it late?
Yes, that will make it late.
I just sent the author some files I found, rather than wait for you to send me formatted ones. Will that affect the formatting?
Yes, that will affect the formatting, and it will make it late, because it will take time for me to fix it all.

Are you bored yet? Falling asleep, maybe? Me, too. Literally. I fall asleep at work. Shhhh, don't tell anyone. You might wake me up.

I start to feel tired on Saturday night, at the thought that only one day separates me from having to return to my job. Most days I don't hate it, but some days I do. And I'm always looking forward to the weekend, when I'll be able to rest. I haven't figured out how much of my tiredness is related to my medical condition (which has improved since the second surgery -- yay!); how much to my lack of inspiration at my job; how much to my lack of physical activity (which my roommate and I will try to change this coming week); how much to the fact that I'm nocturnal, and I won't be well-rested until I'm allowed to sleep past 9am on a regular basis; and how much is my non-physical temperament, which means I'm always more inclined to recline than to jump up and down. Whatever it is, it feels physical, mental and emotional -- the Complete Tiredness Package.

The thing is, I've had worse, at least as far as jobs go. I've done retail, where I was constantly apologizing to customers who assumed that because I was wearing an apron, I must be stupid. I've worked in sales, where the boss liked to call people into his office on a regular basis an yell at them (and I mean yell). I've temped. I've earned much, much less than I do now (which is really saying something). So I haven't been inclined to leave my current job unless I found something fabulous to take its place; I need a benign job to keep the bills paid while I figure out what I really want to do, and this job fits the bill.

At least it did.

This past week, I started wondering if there might be a better interim job, something that could be a stepping stone to the pipe dream. I certainly don't want to pick something arbitrarily, and I'm wary of getting stuck in something that's just good enough to keep me complacent and cause me to stop looking for my ideal. But maybe there's something out there that would be worth smiling about in the morning.

I do OK. It's a bit like math and science in high school were for me: I'm smart enough, and work hard enough, but they sure as heck weren't my strong points. I can get the job done, but it doesn't showcase any of my greatest gifts (except for some people skills). And now that most of my immediate colleagues have left and I'm picking up their work, I find myself being asked on a fairly regular basis to do tasks that I just barely understand. It's like spending all day writing with my left hand. Oh, did I mention that I work with computers all day? Surely the it's only a matter of time before the incongruous pairing of me and computers tears a whole in the universe, creating a vortex into which space, time, and reality itself are sucked and altered forever.

I hope that doesn't result in a new universe in which I'm again asked to work with computers. Then the vortex wouldn't be the only thing that sucked.

Anyway, this isn't to complain. It's just what's going on. In the interest of balance, here's some good stuff about my situation: I love having a salary, with paid sick and vacation days and holidays. I like not having the pressure of having to job-search, especially as I don't yet know what kind of job I'd want to search for. Because my salary has gone up a bit and my rent has gone down a lot, I feel financially comfortable for the first time in my adult life (this is a biggie!).

So yeah, it could all be much worse. Much, much worse.

But I'm still holding out for better.