ninanevermore

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“Sleep? I don’t need sleep. I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” Penny said with a grin.

“If I don’t sleep, I feel dead,” I told her. Penny, the newest member of my department at work, is a walking contradiction in terms. She’s a fashion-conscious Pentecostal fitness freak, a scary good liar, and wicked prankster. Before I met her, I had no idea that a person could be all of those things at once. She gets up at 4 AM to go to the gym each day, works a full 8 hour day, attends church twice a week, raises a daughter on her own, and still has time for friends and family.

As for me, I work full-time, raise a child with the help of a spouse, and don’t have time for much else. All I want to do is sleep lately. I don’t have time to write or do much of anything else. I am drained. I’m not even sure why I’m so drained. The house is in shambles. My son eats way too much pasta, but I’m a big fan of dinners that can be boiled and served in less than 10 minutes (fortunately, so is he). ( When I’m dead, I’ll be happy for the sleep. )

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The problem with taking jobs that feed your bank account but not your soul is that the discontent hits pretty fast. I haven’t had time to read or write much these last two weeks. I go to work. I take a lunch when I can find the time. I come home. I sleep.

I need to finish reading that book about finding your calling and the work you love in only 48 days, which I started reading about 5 months ago. I never quite reached the point where I got to the tactics about setting things in motion before the ADHD set in and the outside forces in my life – some of them shiny, some of them loud – distracted me. From the start of the book, I gave myself more than 48 days to get things done, on account of the fact that time management has never been my strong point. I figured a couple of years would work better, so stop rolling your eyes (and you know you’re doing it) and thinking that there is little point to me finishing the book at this point, when I can no longer remember what it said in the first few chapters. It’s all part of my plan. Seriously.

( Red Stapler Days )

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When my cell phone rang this afternoon at about a quarter past three, I thought maybe the school was calling to confirm how my son would be getting home today. I could tell as soon as I answered that they wanted him picked up. Not that I could understand what was being said or who was saying it to me; my son was screaming pretty loud in the background. I heard the assistant principal trying to outline the series of events and behaviors that led to him being taken to the office, but it was difficult to make what she was saying.

“Can you put me on speaker phone and let me talk to him?” I asked.

“Okay. Hold on. [Sweet Pea], your mom’s on the phone. Can you talk to her?”

The line went silent, like someone had flipped a switch from hysterical to off.

( Quiet After The Storm )

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The job isn’t bad. I hate the first few days of a new job, where you feel useless and someone else is not getting their own work done because they are spending all their time training you. I am working for another Entrepreneur, but this one is more focused and less spastic than the last one I worked for. The Last Entrepreneur was 50ish, and he threw money into all kinds of projects at once to see what took root and bloomed and what blew away. The New Entrepreneur looks to be in his 30s or early 40s, and he focuses on insurance. This has allowed him to grow one of the top 100 privately owned insurance agencies in the United States (it just misses being in the top 75) after a dozen years. He’s not as flashy as the Last one. A case in point: the company cars with the logos wrapped all over them are Honda Civics. They don’t even have power locks and windows. He’s not out to impress anyone with glitz. He just want his logos to be seen.

The offices are nice, unlike the Civics, and are adjacent to the food court of a very nice shopping mall, which is full of a sort of retail glitz. When I look out the window to the left, I see a two-story Barnes and Noble bookstore. When I look to the right, I can see the carousel in the mall food court. Today I figured out that if you walk around the food court at just the right time and look like you are reading the menus and trying to decide what to eat, you can collect enough samples on toothpicks so that you are no longer hungry and don’t need to buy anything. I’m not sure how many days in a row I can get away with this, but it worked out nicely on my second day. On my first day, the COO (Chief Operations Officer) bought me lunch. If I’m lucky, I might get fed again on my birthday.

( Jack’s Mom Has Got It Goin' On )

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I should have run to the store and bought a lottery ticket yesterday; the drawing was last night, and my odds of winning seemed higher than usual because Fate, who likes to flirt but rarely delivers, was blowing me kisses like crazy. I never made it to the store, though, so I will have to be content to just go to my new job on Monday and call it good. The company I interviewed with last week called, and I accepted. I will be making almost 9 thousand more a year than I was at my last job.

Then my 6 year old came home with a perfect school conduct report – no trips to the office, no shoes thrown, no bites, no kicks, no nothing. This is the first one ever he has brought home that did not contain at least one distressing incident.

( Enjoy the sun, but watch for gathering clouds )