Burned Out?

I have not been in the greatest of mental spaces for the past day and a half. I’m cranky, irritable, mildly depressed and having a difficult time focusing on anything. I’m completely disinterested doing anything work or fun related. Last night I spent several hours in ten minutes chunks, moving from one activity to another and finding no satisfaction in anything. Angry Birds? Boring. Listening to music? Dragging me down. Nothing worth seeing on Netflix. Even researching activities for my upcoming vacation seemed too much work.

Work is overwhelming right now. Last week was 15 hours worth of meetings, primarily for the project I will be working on starting at the end of June. The rest of the week was spent frantically attempting to get data together for my current project, missing lunch most days to get back the some of the time spent in meetings.

This week I’ve finished data sets and am trying to set up my machine for testing on the new project. Except that I can’t even get past reading the instructions for the setup. The reading alone leaves me feeling overwhelmed.

One of my co-workers suggested that I take a day off, which I am already scheduled to do at the end of June. I don’t know how to get there from here right now. I feel paralyzed and out of focus.

The only movement I’ve done in the last two days is to yell at J for kicking me in his sleep for the past two nights. Last night he managed to hit the bruise I obtained earlier in the evening when I backed into the corner of a coffee table.

I went to the bathroom and tried to cry. I wanted to. I wanted the relief of tears. But I only managed to eke out a few salty drops. After several minutes, I crawled back into bed, tossing a pillow down the middle of the mattress as a barrier against future assaults. J’s comment about a chaperone elicited the response that the pillow would go once he stopped accidentally beating me up in his sleep

Against the Current

My cortex hurts. A fancy way of saying that my ability to think constructively has been hampered by a series of work and home frustrations. I have spent a lot of time over the past several months staring at a blank word processing screen, paralyzed by my inability to write anything I would find interesting while --edit: not finishing my sentences...

I have also attempted to ameliorate some of the frustration and stress by spreading some kindness – sending an old college classmate a vintage Esterbrook pen from my small collection. Waving that guy in the big ass truck into my lane. Driving slowly through downtown Pittsburgh streets while listening to electronic tango music to calm my nerves against the inevitable road rage.

This past weekend was spent playing referee between J and TA. J had a headache for most of the weekend and made the decision to power through it without taking aspirin, acetaminophen or ibuprofen for the pain. The headache made him impatient and short with TA, which trickled down to me.

The result was the two of us attempting to come to some sort of agreement on an appropriate standard of public behavior in restaurants. I am of the mind that as long as TA is eating the majority of his meal with a fork and/or spoon and is not screaming, crying, throwing food, running around or otherwise acting in a manner that would be disruptive to other dining patrons, then we can give him a bit of leeway in how he sits at the table, as long as he is not attempting to lie down.

J is of the mind that TA should sit up straight until the end of the meal. Which lead to two incidents over the weekend in which TA was chastised by J for slumping and cuddling up to J while we were finishing up our meal. As to the point of this mommy-blog entry: Guess which one of us had to remove TA from the table and deal with the tears?

By Sunday evening I was worn down by J's untreated headache, TA's totally appropriate 2.5 year behavior and refereeing their battle of the wills.

Only to get sucked into another battle of the wills. In this case, the battle being an extended “discussion” over the disaster that was this last development cycle following an official product release. A development cycle which was mostly spend fixing defects in the newly released product. Which could have been avoided with a short cycle of integration and regression testing before release. Which was scrapped in favor of adding new features. And the defects? My fault for not regression testing during the development cycles.