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Perspective
June 1, 2004
It’s the first day of AlphaBytes 2004, and I already feel like I’m failing. This is obviously a sign of a mental defect of some sort, as it’s hard to see how I could have actually screwed up already, not having written anything other than this now sentence and three quarters and still having the whole month left in which to complete the challenge. Besides, Elle runs kind and gentle collabs. She is not going to have the journaling cabal blacklist me if I write fewer than 26 entries this month or refuse to use words from the lists (including the one I submitted) or decide to write all my AlphaBytes entries about the letter “K”. If she were the enforcer type, I would have already been picked up by the Random Acts of Journaling goons for forgetting to do an entry for that effort for May, despite my good intentions evidenced by the file on my hard drive dated April 29th into which I copied the two prompts that I intended to explore. Any pressure or sense of not measuring up in this endeavor is entirely of my own making.
It’s just that I’m having a glass half empty kind of day. Part of that is coming back to work after a three-day weekend. I like my job, but not so much that I wouldn’t rather stay home if I could somehow manage to make that pay as well as coming in to the office does. Part of it is knowing that even though I declined all invitations to go out and socialize this weekend in favor of working on projects at home that I somehow didn’t get all that much done. Part of it is realizing that I should be doing a goal check-in today but I have so little success to report that I don’t even want to talk about it. (I did update all the logs, though, so you can see for yourself).
It’s mostly kinda stupid, though. There’s no good reason I should feel so down. The glass is at least half full, after all. My job may be stressing me out a bit more than usual because I don’t feel like I’m keeping up at all well with my workload , but I did just get a bonus and a raise within a few weeks of each other, so I can’t be doing that badly. I didn’t get all the items on my to do list crossed off this weekend, but I got the biggest, most important project done and even accomplished a few things that weren’t on the list, like finding not one but two bras at Kohl’s on Saturday that were perfect replacements for some really ratty old ones which are now in the trash. (We are talking really ratty here– elastic whiskers sticking out of the sides ratty in one case and wear spots at the nipples ratty in the other). I didn’t accomplish all my goals last month, but it’s not as if I did nothing at all. I managed to LOSE a pound on my business trip instead of gaining several as I had during the previous visits, and I got the photo album caught up to the beginning of August, 2002, which is four months more than I had to do to stay on target. Those successes are just as real as the failures, so why do I have to dig down through a layer of “woe is me” to see them? If I ever finish the book club book for May, perhaps I’ll be able to convincingly argue that my genes are to blame.
A year ago, I did a real goal check-in instead of just sorta kinda slipping it in amongst some whining.
P is for Perspective