Wednesday, October 1, 2008

A Flaw in My Plan

So far, my master plan for dealing with my life right now has been to take one day at a time. But this morning I realized that there is a flaw in the plan: what if a single day seems too overwhelming to deal with? It’s 8:35am and I’m already worried I might not make it through the rest of the day.

Last night I tossed and turned and couldn’t get comfortable. It felt like my hands and feet were throbbing to the point where it was audible, and the noise was keeping me awake. Needless to say, I didn’t sleep much or well last night. Which made it particularly unpleasant that I had to get up early this morning to meet the painters at our house between 7:00am and 8:00am.

The painters are re-painting the outside of our townhouse to the correct color. If you want to know why our townhouse is the “wrong” color, well, that’s a saga of months of fighting with our HOA and dealing with extremely sketchy contractors that is so tremendously frustrating that I can’t even bear to think about it right now. Suffice to say that in the next day or two, $875 for a re-paint job should finally put the whole ugly matter to rest.

But getting up early these days is no easy task. In fact, getting up at all is pretty difficult. Every day I wake up stiff and painful; like someone broke half the bones in my body by beating me repeatedly with a baseball bat last night and I have been laying in the same position ever since. APL is an enormous help when it comes to getting up. He wakes me gently, giving me time to snooze. Even though he has a rule that the puppy isn’t allowed to sleep in our bed with us, he’s been bringing her upstairs in the morning to snuggle with me and make me smile as I try to get up. On days where I have to get up earlier than usual, APL will make me a cup of tea and put it on the bedside table before he goes to work. Some days I think I wouldn’t bother to get out of bed at all without his help.

But today, while he was putting on his socks, APL accidentally sat on my left foot. The toes on my left foot are probably the most consistently painful part of my whole body. The way they got compressed this morning was so painful that I was instantly in sobbing tears. APL felt awful about it. And I’m sure he felt worse when the time forced him to leave for work while I was still curled up on the bed, sniffling.

I did finally manage to get up in time to talk with the painters before they started this morning. But after that I just sat back down in bed, totally overwhelmed and exhausted at 8:30am in the morning. The list of things I have to do today seems really daunting. This morning I have to finish reading for the classes I have this afternoon. The reading includes a couple of cases and a few statutes, which you really have to be able to concentrate on to figure out what on earth they are about. Today is also my “long” day of classes, though I put “long” in quotation marks because it only seems long to me now – last semester I wouldn’t have blinked an eye at this schedule. My first class today goes from 1:00pm to 2:20pm, and is then immediately followed by a class from 2:30pm to 4:10pm. By the time I get to the end of the second class I am generally really stiff from sitting so long, my hands hurt too much to take appropriate notes, and my ability to concentrate has been almost totally lost. So it doesn’t help that I am behind in the reading in that class, so I haven’t been doing a good job following the last two lectures.

But I think if my day ended there I wouldn’t feel quite so overwhelmed. I can slog through those things, more or less. The problem is that I am expected to attend a Scholarship Recognition Reception this evening from 6:00pm to 8:00pm, to thank the Dean and the donor of my scholarship in person for funding me this year. Not only do I have to be there, but I also need to look presentable and interact with these people so that they believe they have made the right decision in awarding me the scholarship. I have to be at my best this afternoon, appearing the grateful and diligent student, at a time where I will almost certainly be feeling close to my worst.

I have no idea how I'm supposed to get through this day.

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