Swimming in it.
Dear God, I’m swimming in the busy right now… I hate to neglect this one outlet for writing that I’m trying to keep up with, but I’m currently in the middle of daily production hell. Basically, for any of you who have ever attended a conference that offered a handy little paper to let you know what happened each day, you can now know that booklet is the product of hours and hours of session attending, quote grabbing, weeks of pre-writing, incessant editing, and lots and lots of alcohol.
This weekend was my reunion, which was a lot of fun, despite my initial apprehension about going. The timing couldn’t have been worse, since I am smack dab in the middle of pure work/life insanity, but at the same time, that made the timing perfect. It was nice to stumble around WAC with drunken nostalgia while people I actually knew were there to share in the feeling. That’s the one thing I learned from this weekend: the campus may have changed and I am getting older, and maybe I cannot pop in to C-town whenever I want anymore and feel instantly at home, but at least for one weekend a year I know I can reclaim some of that magic that will forever tie me to that little town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
After spending the night down there on Friday, we attended some of the official college events before walking around downtown and then heading home so I could prepare for my work trip in DC. Admittedly, not much preparation went down Saturday night at all, since I was a) recovering from being up until 4:30 the night before and b) enjoying kicking Donnie’s ass in Super Mario Bros. 3. True to myself, I saved all my packing for the absolute last minute, still throwing a few items in my luggage before the extremely sketchy cab picked me up in front of the apartment.
Sketchy is actually an understatement. This cab looked like it was a repo car from a junk shop with a “taxi” sign haphazardly stuck on top. The paint was chipping off all over the car, the inside interior was gashed and bleeding yellowed foam, and when he put my luggage in the trunk, he had to move aside a dirty tire and even dirtier stained baby carseat (I’m hoping that isn’t what he has on hand for passengers with kiddies).
After getting lost going to the bridge (which is literally 2 blocks from my apartment), we finally made our way to the train station. Fortunately, from there things were pretty smooth sailing and I got to the station in plenty of time.
Since getting to DC, things have been pretty nonstop. I literally had 15 minutes to throw down my stuff after getting in to the hotel before having to head to the Convention Center to begin getting stuff together. We spent most of yesterday here and then popped back into the hotel for about 10 minutes before heading out for dinner. Dinner turned to drinks, drinks turned into drunkeness, which led to another bar and a plate of hummus and fries at 1 a.m. I literally stumbled into the hotel and was asleep before the covers were completely on.
(this is when I resort to college-level creative writing… engage in 5, 4, 3, 2…) The morning came like a 17-year-old: rough and too soon. I felt the effects of last night married with the rest of my weekend all day. Every time I turn my head, it feels like my eyes are on a 5 second delay behind the movement. I’m grateful I have other people’s lead to follow because I am not currently capable of functioning on my own. Caught the cab with a coworker, relied on them to order lunch, followed their direction for the most part to get to my coverage areas. I will say though I’ve been able to hide my hangover handicap pretty well: the head of my dept. has complimented me a couple times for the work I’m doing. My experience at the paper is definitely coming through–I’m essentially living my Mondays from 2006-2008 over again for the next 3 days.
We’re hoping to wrap up things here soon, although it seems there’s one more task to do before we can finally call it quits. I’m supposed to be meeting my friend for dinner tonight… hopefully we’ll be out of here soon to make that happen.
Share this:
#musings #thingstodo