cutting and running...

Miz Susan wondered aloud on Friday morning how long it would take me to stop waking up so damn early.  To be fair, I don't sleep thru to the alarm on my crummy little cell phone (now set for 5:10 in the AM) more than twice a month.  But it hadn't been much earlier than 4:30 on Friday.  And it's not like I'd been sneaking out of bed and leaving the phone upstairs to go off an hour and a half before her usual wake up call.  So what right did she have to get all bent out of shape with me?  She was still getting her coffee delivered bedside, as usual.

OK, so it had been at 4:00 on both Wednesday and Thursday.  And at least once at 3:30 the week before.  But still, just because I was slipping into a sleep-deprived psychosis, I hadn't taken to going outside and baying at the moon when almost everyone west of the Atlantic coastline was still sound asleep.  Or threatened Susan with one of the tennis balls we keep on the back deck to chuck at the rabbits which Olive and Grey haven't slaughtered.

I'd had a lot on my mind.  I'd finally turned in a letter of resignation from my prestigious and highly paid position (ha!) as the textbook manager at North Hennepin Community College up in Brooklyn Park.  It had gotten to the point that the 40-mile round trip slog up and down I-94 was one of the bright spots of the job.  The pace and the pressure felt like they were both on the uptick since last fall.  And at some kind of exponentially accelerated rate.  It was getting close to either killing me or moving me to kill someone else.  I tempered that threat by telling people that if I felt like I had to kill someone, I'd go after one of the publishers' sales reps before I focused on the campus community at large.  Jeez, sales reps are a dime a dozen.

This past Friday was my last day and the previous two weeks had been a frenzied whirlwind.  Is that redundant?  I'd add more adjectives for effect, if necessary.  How about fevered, panicked, disjointed, stretched-thin?  I felt as if I needed to get 2 months' worth of work done in 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc days.  I had plenty to do and it was coming home with me both in the forms of overtime from my laptop's keyboard and injections into what should have been hours of restorative REM snoozing.

Now I feel as if I've had a huge weight lifted from my back.  Maybe that's because quitting a job that had become overwhelming lifted that weight but was also a step into a free-fall void.  We'll see if the gravity of the free-fall is easier to bear than the weight that had been on my back.  I dashed home at 2:15 on Friday afternoon to meet with a real estate agent about getting a for sale sign in front of our now unaffordable house.  Maybe I've traded one painful pressure for another.

But that said, both Miz Susan and I are almost giddy with the prospect of spending a chunk of our summer together without job pressures hanging over us.  Hopefully, we'll avoid our tendencies to niggling micromanagement and voicing opinions about each others' questionable behaviors.  Questionable to the voicer but, of course, perfectly rational to the behaver.  But if those are gonna be the worst of our problems, sign me up.

I slept in until 5:30 yesterday which ain't bad for me.  Today, though, I woke up at 3:00 in the middle of some incomprehensible bookstore-flavored near-nightmare.  But I shook that off, crawled back into bed and didn't wake up again until 6:30.  I think it's gonna get better.