Hamster, meet wheel

When I decided to begin blogging, I had thought originally that this was going to be a great way for me to keep my far-flung friends updated with everything that has been going on with me. I had romantic notions of blog dialogue (blogalogue? I am coining it right now if no one else claims this speck of vocabulary brilliance) that would be both entertaining and a fantastic way to stay connected. So what happened to that plan? Well, a couple things actually. First off, I have told very few of these friends that I am here. I think two, to be exact. My primary audience appears to be my husband and seeing as how he has a front row seat to what goes on day-to-day, reading about me online is a generous, yet unnecessary exercise. Secondly, my daily life is far less interesting than I had hoped. Alas, it really does seem to be the same thing day in, day out. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Typically I wake up at an ungodly hour. We used to sleep until the alarm went off at 5 a.m. but somewhere along the line we stopped setting the alarm, and we just woke up automatically. Over the past year, the time at which my little eyes pop open has crept back into the 4 o’clock hour. I don’t understand how or why this has happened, but I would like it to stop. If my regular waking time is in the 4’s, that pushes my wake up time into the 3 o’clock hour when I am in a particularly manic phase. This is what we refer to as “not good”. After slinking out of bed and cursing myself for being a habitual early riser (although this seems like an understatement), I turn on the coffee. Now the coffee pot is indeed set to turn on at a particular time, despite the fact that I rarely, if ever, manage to sleep until 4:50. I know, I know, you’re wondering why I don’t just surrender and set it for 3:40. Even rats learn faster than that. I keep hoping against hope that the affirmations I recite before falling asleep at night (“I will sleep until at least 5 a.m., I will sleep until at least 5 a.m.”) will be more effective than those I utter to get myself through the day (“I will not choke my officemate” or “I will resist the urge to gorge myself on deep-fried cheesy food dipped in chocolate and subsequently dunked in vodka”).

In the hour between waking and getting to the gym, a flurry of activity occurs. Without boring you with the details, let me sum it up by saying I prepare 8 out of the 10 meals that will be consumed by the two of us over the course of the day, I straighten up, and pretty much just putter around in the kitchen while listening to NPR. I really enjoy this part of the day. It is still quiet and serene, minus the jarring sound of the blender. Sometimes if I have gotten up extra early, I’ll even do some light cooking-like steaming vegetables or making rice. I try not to broil salmon or braise chicken with onions in balsamic vinegar, or anything too pungent like that. That type of cooking has not gone over well in the past. Apparently those smells are welcoming at 5 p.m. but downright repugnant 12 hours earlier.

Next up is the gym. I will spare you the details of this as well, considering that in addition to excessive sweating, grunting, and lactic acid, this particular story could involve naked old men and no one wants to hear about that. At least that is what I tell hubby when he tells me who was doing what in the locker room. So let’s allow that 60-90 min block of the day to remain a black box, shall we?

The workday is typically pretty good. I would go so far as to call it “fine”, which I believe is as vanilla as it gets. It’s not fantastic, but it’s not horrible. It’s work-it is what it is. And what it is usually consists of thinking of experiments, trying to get funding for the experiments, running the experiments, and writing about the experiments. That’s it in a nutshell-or more accurately, in a nut house. The other less tangible aspects of my typical workday include (in no specific order): 1) not pummeling one of my four officemates who would prefer martyrdom above all else. The sight of her in the morning literally makes me want to lunge and I don’t mean the kind of lunge I would do in the gym portion of my day. That lunge makes my ass defy gravity. This lunge will land my ass in jail; 2) counseling another officemate off the ledge despite the fact that she is the licensed psychologist and ironically, completely tunes out when it’s my turn to talk; 3) devising complicated schemes to work around the support staff who would rather chew off their right arms than actually provide support; 4) trying to extract things from people that I need in order to move forward in my career such as signatures of department heads, letters of support or recommendation, manuscripts, etc; 5) lamenting about these four main elements of my workday either via email, on the phone, or to someone else in the building.

After work there is the usual rigamarole of determining what is for dinner and trying to cram 2 weeks of unwinding and decompressing into 2 hours before we fall into bed, sleep, and get up and do it all over again. And there you have it. That is what is going on with me, day in and day out. You haven't been missing much, now have you?