RSS

Category Editorial

Getting Out of Your Head

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , , March 11th, 2010 @ 4:59 pm

My husband recently requested Forgetting Sarah Marshall from Netflix, and as it was the only movie at our house, I watched it.

Vulgar. Funny, but vulgar. I liked it.

My favorite part was the line by Mila Kulis’ character, which was something to the effect of,

Get out of your head, man, it’s nice out here!

I was like, “Hey, I do that!”

I do – I live in my head. I analyze, worry, fret, and examine every emotion I have, every word that comes out of my – or another’s – mouth. I don’t take things at face value anymore because I’ve been burned. Not always, but enough to make me hesitate.

Plus, you know, my self-esteem isn’t great.

I’m starting to recognize it at work. I’m sitting there freaking out – what if I’m about to get fired? What if everyone hates me? What if I never get another bonus or a raise – can I afford to keep working here? Shit like that starts to take over and I can’t stop.

Turning on music helps. Talking doesn’t, really. Pretending to be happy when people are talking to me and I can’t avoid them sometimes will turn my mood around.

But how do you really stop living in your head? How can you become confident enough that the squeak of the Fire Exit sign doesn’t drive you into depression because you’re the only one it squeaks for when you walk by (the conclusion here is, of course, that I’m the fattest person in the office)?

Just do it.

It’s the Nike slogan that everyone repeats. “How do I XYZ?” “Just do it,” they say. I’ve even said it myself, I’m sure of it. But come on, people, when you’re in a bad spot, it’s not that easy! When you’re down, or neurotic, or paranoid, or depressed – it’s just so much easier to just stay there, or sleep, or eat, or whatever it is that you overdo when you’re feeling that way.

Are you nodding your head right now? Well, I’m with you. The best I can do right now is try to drown out my thoughts when I realize I’m in my head too deep. Slap on some music, put in the earplugs, start singing if I’m lucky.

We’ll see how it goes.

I’m So Busy! (How Busy Are You?)

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , , , March 9th, 2010 @ 10:46 pm

I was at work until 8:30 tonight, and I still hadn’t run out of things to do.

I will go in early tomorrow morning and still not be completed with my tasks by the end of the day. In fact, I’m sure my list will be longer.

This no longer feels unusual to me.

I’m drinking more alcohol to relax.

I’m getting (more than) a little stressed out.

I think about quitting.

And something is wrong with my Wordpress. I seem to have lost…something.

It’s definitely time for bed.

Stressed Out

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , , , March 4th, 2010 @ 9:03 am

Stress. Not the good kind.

That nasty, tingly feeling of absolute panic that you get when there is more on your plate than you can possibly accomplish in the time provided. Even when you squeeze in extra time, you’re still not able to complete the tasks.

You can’t think straight, and don’t know where to start next. What is most important? It all has to be done yesterday, or last week, so how do you choose? Who are you going to piss off?

All you want to do is scream, and you know that it won’t help. You start to snap at people you work with because you’re so frustrated that they don’t understand – you’re busy! Come on, there’s no way you have time to give them thirty minutes!

There’s nothing to strangle, no way to get the frustration to pass. Here’s another task, and then another. Your list gets longer, two or three more jobs for every one you complete.

Welcome to my world.

“I really need a beer,” you think. Some alcohol, anything to turn off the panic that won’t go away. A glass of wine, then maybe two. You cross the line from “I really shouldn’t have too much because I have work tomorrow,” to “Who cares how much I drink?”

When do you get to say, “Enough!” When do you put your foot down and say, “If I don’t get more assistance here, I can’t be here any more.” When are you not caring about yourself enough that you change your situation in good concience?

Pain Relief

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , March 2nd, 2010 @ 10:28 pm

As desperately hoped and expected, thankfully my back pain has waned to the point where I feel normal again.

Well, not completely normal. I still can’t put on my own socks. I get my 4-year-old to help me in the mornings.

And the morning car rides are difficult, but not impossible. Discomfort now rather than outright pain. I’ve just been taking Aleve in the mornings, and then…

In the evenings, after I’ve been up and down and have walked around and moved all day, I don’t feel much at all.

I’m really eager for the weather to warm more and the light to stay longer in the evenings so I can start walking, which I am confident will help even more. Plus, it won’t hurt the waistline. When I can get out and walk in the evenings I am less likely to sit and pork out on snacks and more likely to get a glass of water so I don’t ruin all the good I’ve done.

Aside from that, well, work is stressful as always. The next two weeks will be chock full of one task repeated over and over again, and at the end I’ll sag down in defeat with a case of Lager and drown my misery for one night, then go back to the grind. It just never lets up, and it’s…

Well, it’s hard. Nobody said it would be easy, though, huh?

Spring Is Here-ah!

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , March 1st, 2010 @ 9:38 pm

Yay, Spring!

Snow, I love you, but really, we’ve had enough.

Yay, Spring!

Signs of Spring

  1. It’s light late enough that I can read on the way home.
  2. I can go outside with no coat regularly.
  3. Daffodils.
  4. Spring Time Change (March 14th – set your clocks forward 1 hour!)

So as you can see, Spring is absolutely here. I love it, I love it, I love it.

My kids started begging for their bikes to be let out. Since I’m not quite ready to let them ride around the neighborhood yet, I pushed it off. Plus, I’m going to have to either fix the training wheels or remove them on my son’s bike.

The snow has nearly all melted away, and I feel safe in scheduling a car wash for this week. If the snow isn’t over yet completely, at least I can get rid of the layer of salt and grime that’s all over it. Not to mention the bird poo on the window from the flock of seagulls I saw earlier. (There must have been over 1000 of them, no kidding.)

What are seagulls doing so far inland, by the way? This is strange to me.

Plus, they don’t say “mine” like they do in Finding Nemo. I wish they would. ;)

Bye-bye, Vancouver

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial, Financial, Planning Tagged with , February 28th, 2010 @ 10:48 pm

Well, I got to watch the Canada v. USA Gold Medal hockey game today, and loved it. I’m glad that Canada won – they were hosting the games, they should have won. I think if the Olympics had been hosted any other location other than Vancouver, Canada, I would have been all “GO USA!”, but I couldn’t manage it today.

And I don’t think it’s being un-American, as has been suggested. It’s just a game, they’re all NHL players (and even NHL Refs!), and it doesn’t matter that much to me. In the scheme of things, I mean.

But I missed most of the rest of The Games. I didn’t see any Downhill Skiing, nor did I catch any of the really cool looking snowboarding (Downhill Snowboarding?), or the figure skating. I just took a moment to watch some recaps – only about ten minutes worth – and I realize again just how much I missed it.

I want to be in a position, two years from now, to be able to have cable and sit and watch Olympics from the moment they start until the second they finish. To be able to take two weeks off of work, still send the kid’s to daycare, and just veg. Turn up the television and clean in the other rooms when there’s something on I’m not completely in love with.

That would be cool.

So I’ve got some events queued up in another tab, and I’m going to enjoy the things I missed. It won’t be the same, of course. I can see who won already, and I know who crashes and who doesn’t stand a chance. A lot of the fun is gone.

On the other hand, I did finally figure out who that squat little man-figure is supposed to represent, all on my own. Yay, me!

TV Zombies and The Zone

1 comment By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , , February 22nd, 2010 @ 9:10 am

When my daughter watches television, she does nothing else. She could sit there for hours and watch Spongebob and then Dora and then Sailor Moon (yay, VHS!), and not complain a moment (except for the traditional V battle cry, “I’m hungry!”).

My son could play on the computer for hours. On a lazy Saturday morning with only half-awake parentage, he could easily kill three hours on Kidzui.

Lately, if the TV isn’t on, my daughter doesn’t want to do anything. And if my son can’t play “something with electricity”, he’s not happy.

That’s not good.

They both have tons of toys, and when we do finally manage to get them to start playing, they get totally into their respective activities – blocks, coloring, playing Spy – and don’t miss the television at all. It’s just getting through the whines and cries of “I’m bored!” and “There’s nothing to do – can’t I play on your iPod?” that’s the difficult part.

My husband had a suggestion – no television for a week. It’s a great idea, and something I want to try as well.

You see, I can’t really complain about my kids’ habits, because they’re my habits, too. When I’m up in the evenings after everyone else has gone to bed, I “have” to have the television on to keep me company. Usually I’ll put in a movie I’ve seen about 16 times. And then I turn on the computer, and start playing games on Facebook, addicted to Farmville and Cafe World (darn you to heck, Zynga Games!).

But when I have the television off, and I’m actually working, I easily slip into The Zone, that place where everything gets done and you lose track of time because you’re so focused on what you’re doing. And that just helps – the pocketbook, the bills get paid, my task list, everything.

So – a week without TV. I’ve got other things for this week too, but I’ll try hard to focus on getting this done.

Wish me luck!

Photo by Wynand Delport

I Want, I Want, I Want!

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , February 21st, 2010 @ 11:06 am

We don’t have cable right now, and while I realize how much I really miss it just after I get back from doing laundry at my parents’ house, I’m so glad we don’t. Because when the kids come with me to do laundry, I hear one thing for the entire trip.

“Mommy, come here, quick! I want that!”

Commercials suck. They teach my kids to beg for things they don’t need. An overpriced robe you wear backwards? My son wants it. A machine that squeezes toothpaste out of the tube automatically because the user can’t figure out how to get the last drop out? My daughter needs it. A bunch of markers that change colors? The helicopter that floats around your living room? The latest TV show card game toy?

“I want it! I want it! I want it!”

I’m trying to get them to change their verbiage. “That’s neat! I like that! It looks like fun!” But with kids, it’s hard. I like to get stuff, too, so teaching my kids to not want everything they see is hard. Still, I feel like if I can steer them away from always saying they “want” something, or it’s something they have to “have”, that maybe I can adjust their attitudes a little.

There’s got to be a book out there to teach me what to do. All the advice that’s spread out on the Internet in all the great blogs that I read, all in one spot so I can read it all at once and reference it. Does anyone know where that link went?

Photo by Ivan Petrov

Things Move in My House Without Being Told

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with , , February 17th, 2010 @ 7:24 am

And I can’t tell you how much that freaks me out.

I believe in ghosts. Or maybe it’s that the idea of ghosts scare me, I’m not quite sure now that I think about it. If someone told me their house was haunted, I would eagerly ask what happens and shudder in sympathy. But I watch shows like Ghost Hunters with a skeptical eye. They never record much of anything, really. Not on the episodes I’ve seen.

Yet ever since I was a girl, I was afraid of dark spaces. When we lived in the country we kept a second refrigerator downstairs in our basement (formerly our living area before the 2nd and 3rd stories were built). It was at the end of a long hallway, and the light switch was strangely positioned. One had to turn off the main lights then walk down a longish, mostly dark, definitely shadowed hall to get to the stairs where there was again plentiful light.

I can’t tell you how many times I switched off the main light then ran like the bats of hell were after me, not daring to look at the open room to my right, for fear of seeing ghosts appear. Never mind the fact that I grew up down there, and there wasn’t anything remotely scary in the room. Once the lights were off, all bets were off.

Now in our new house, we have a door that doesn’t quite hang right. Plus it’s an older house with the original hardwood floors (or at least very old hardwood floors). So when you step on the floor in just the right place, and it can be in the hall, in the bathroom, or two bedrooms away, that door pops open.

Yesterday that happened to me. I was alone in the house. I had to close the door because my cat has decided that the room with it’s blue shag carpeting is her very own litter box, and she can poop there any time she wants. So I went and pulled the door shut.

I swear that I felt resistance as I closed the door, as if someone from the inside grabbed the bottom of the door for a moment, but didn’t have the strength to hold on.

To say that shook me up would be an understatement.

So you see, I’m scared of my daughter’s door. I know it’s just the funny quirks of an old house, but I believe in ghosts just enough to be scared.

It didn’t help when this morning the vanity in the bathroom opened just a little. It’s hung funny too.

Is It Bad to Admit You’re Wrong?

0 comments By Nicki Filed in Editorial Tagged with February 8th, 2010 @ 6:00 am

I’ve got a problem. I was wrong. My opinion of something was wrong. When I looked a little deeper, I saw that yes, someone else had a valid reason for being upset.

So how do I admit I was wrong?

I hate being wrong about something. It makes me feel stupid. Admitting I’m wrong makes me feel worse, as if by admitting my mistake I am not only stupid, but now I have to let everyone rub it in my face and make fun of me for it.

It happens to everyone, I’m sure. Some probably don’t want to admit it, but it happens. So why is it so hard for me to say, “Hey, you’re right – I never thought of it that way,” and then go on with things?

It’s a hard thing to think about, and a harder thing to do anything about.

Read previous entries

Copyright © Off the Beaten Plan
plan: to devise or project the realization or achievement of

Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress