Weak coffee and box-building

I never drink coffee anymore. Especially not instant coffee. But it's just been one of those weeks, and now that I'm finally in the office alone with no pressing emergency task, well... I'm tired.

It all started on Monday, as most weeks do. I spent the whole day trying to input information on our South East county kids, which is difficult because a lot of those families are poor, or new immigrants, or generally negligent, and therefore can't or won't give us the information we need to enroll their kids. The longer I work here, the more I see how much these children have to suffer because of the attitudes of their parents, not just by the border, but across the board: the rich, white, upstanding citizen parents can oftentimes be worse. At the very least, I'm learning not to be that way, for the sake of my own eventual children. Anyway, in the middle of this frustrating day, we got a call from one of our teachers saying he wouldn't be able to come to rehearsal that night because he's going blind/has a brain tumor/has meningitis - in any case, he needs an MRI. (They are now pretty sure it's MS, which is no less devastating.) I also found out that day that our City grant application was due by 5 p.m. on Wednesday, and that my priority Tuesday morning was going to be to copy-edit the text for grammar, punctuation, and consistency.

Tuesday morning came, I got the grant app narrative out of my email, printed it, and started marking it with a ballpoint pen and a highlighter - I would've done it straight on the computer, but I like to see what I've changed in case it's called into question later. The woman who was putting together the grant came flying into the office halfway through the day, took my scribbled-on hard copy, and went home to make the changes. When we got it back a few hours later, hardly any of said changes had been made, and the ones that had been were arbitrarily chosen. (An example: "Charters Cathedral" had been changed to "Chartres Cathedral," but "Sperckels Organ Society" had not been changed to "Spreckels Organ Society.")

My boss was up in arms. Apparently, [grant lady] means well, but is like a bull in a china shop as well as always wanting to maintain control over her pet projects - she always sends locked pdf files so that we can't fix her spelling mistakes, presumably because she assumes that whatever she's done is leagues better than any changes we would possibly want to make. So I volunteered to stay late and change the grant proposal in the computer; then on Wednesday, we'd simply have to check her latest "revision" for any major additions or deletions, and adjust my "good version" accordingly. I figured this would take about an hour, maybe two, but in actuality it took four hours. The next day, everything went according to plan: my boss and I eventually wore [grant lady] down and regained control over the proposal, although she wasn't at all pleased when she found out I'd done it the night before; and we even managed to get the thing turned in an hour or so early.

Anyway, here's my point. I was at work for ten hours on Tuesday, and frantically editing until about 3:00 on Wednesday as well. And yes, now that the adrenaline has stopped propelling me forward, I'm exhausted, which is why today, instead of working, I'm blogging; and my plans for actual work mostly involve building music-storage boxes. But the thing is, I hardly even noticed that I was at work for ten hours, because I was having fun. I wasn't filing, or inputting, or copying, or calling angry parents; I was editing. And I was thriving. I've also been working on the newsletter lately (which sadly is overseen by the same flaky woman as the grant), and people seem to be so impressed that my articles sound like real articles rather than the amateur drivel they've been publishing for the past few years (at least, this is my understanding of the situation). From my point of view, I'm just excited to be starting documents with "< Body text >" again.

In conclusion, I do have a passion, I do have a purpose, I do have something to fuel me and drive me. It's not about finding the premise for the next Great American Novel; it's about writing and editing wherever, whatever, however I can. And if I could come home every day as invigorated as I have been for the past two, well... Just imagine how exciting my sex life would become!*

*I read recently that positive stress improves the libido every bit as much as negative stress impairs it. Which seems like a really good thing to know.