Finally! After about three years of catastrophic understaffing at MY HORRIBLE JOB, I wangled five straight days of sweet, juicy vacation time in a row. YES! There is so much stuff that I need to do, that I just haven’t had the time or energy after working MY HORRIBLE JOB all day. Things have piled up, literally. It’s a genuinely shameful situation.
But this was my chance! Five days of no HORRIBLE JOB-related responsibilities! Five days to do with exactly as I pleased! My list is a long and varied one. The apartment, haha!! oh yes, some cleaning is perhaps in order. This “floor” that I have heard of, that would be pleasant to gaze upon, methinks. Storage space must be found. The car needs maintenance, direly. I could exercise!!! An entire day spent hiking, or at the beach swimming, or anywhere I please! I could draw and paint! Get some of those images out of my rotting skull and onto canvas at last, at last! Oh sweetness! I can purchase a new mattress, joy of joys, no anomalous metallic protrusion caressing my spine nightly! Rearrange the furniture, go to the library, anything! ANYTHING!
Four days later. NOT A DAMN THING. I can’t even manage to get out of bed; I’d forgotten what it was like to sleep in. Sleep! Actual dreams! I wake up, I eat, I meander about aimlessly, I drift back to sleep. I could be doing things. I could be out walking. I could be cleaning the place up, at least. Oh god, I have no idea where to start. Wretched, wretched squalor. I am exhausted just thinking about it. Nothing has been done. There have been no accomplishments. Four days, and I think I went out to check the mail once. So much needs to be done. Things need to happen. I need to change. But there is no energy, and now there is almost no time. Four days, gone.
Will it be five? It seems likely. Months upon months without any personal time to speak of, and now that I’ve had a taste, I just turned around and wasted it all away. I hate contemplating this mess. I hate not doing things I would like to do. Shall we try for five? I don’t even know how any real progress could be made at this point. Tuesday, ashes. It seems inevitable. What a mess; what a sorry, sorry waste.
I go through precisely the same thing every. single. vacation. Except I don’t have a TERRIBLE JOB – at least, not anymore. I rather like where I work now. All the same, it’s a job, and time off of a job is awesome and welcome and needed. So, every time vacation time approacheth, I go through the same ritual:
“Okay. I’ve got two weekends and five business days all to myself! Okay, so here’s what I want to do. I want to start working on a new song, get some creative juices flowing. Oh! And maybe do a Photoshop for Worth1000. And play a video game or three. Oh, and I should organize things on the hard drive better. Then there’s the house. We need to clean stuff, vaccuum stuff, do laundry, do shopping, and so on. And maybe treat ourselves to a night out. Oh, and go to a friend’s place for a nice barbecue. And…”
Then the vacation rolls around, and what do I do? We might get a bit of cleaning done, and I’ll play some video games. And laundry. And … that’s about it. The rest of the time I’m a gelatinous blob surfing the web or watching TV or movies. :smack:
Oh thank og, I’m not the only one that does this. I, too, have a HORRIBLE JOB, but I don’t even get regular vacations like other people. A couple times a year I may get 4 or 5 days off in a row serendipitously, and I always plan all these great, life-changing, superb adventures (and cleaning) and then I do the same as you!
Gah!
Do like I do and just tell yourself that you obviously needed the rest, you were burned out, and the time was spent on a higher purpose- renewing your physical energy.
I’m on day four of a 7-day work respite, and have done nothing. Not the piles of laundry, or clean the toilet - nothing. Unless you count watching movies and spending time on the tubes productive activities.
Oh - did go see roller derby on Saturday, so I guess I can call my vacation a success!
Add me to the list, too. I try and take a week’s worth of holidays at a time, and anticipate those long days that I will do all sorts of things I never get around to or am too tired to do or just don’t have enough time for during the weekend. I think about what I’m going to do and make up a big ambitious list and imagine it in the days ahead, then…
Suddenly, it’s Sunday night, holidays are over, and my list is almost 100% intact.
Is it just a woman thing to take holidays so you have a block of time to do stuff like paint the kitchen, clean out all the closets, tackle the storage room (er, back bedroom)? I mean, don’t men plan holiday time off work for things like fishing, camping, golfing…?
I put some things in a bag this morning. This counts as “cleaning,” technically, in the same sense as combining individual drops of water to build a lake. All I need to do now is repeat the process for several hundred more years, while not generating any additional clutter in the interim.
I went out to get the mail again: two new books, two videos, bills, junk. Getting mail is fun.
Also, I drove to the supermarket and purchased some vaguely healthy food, and got my prescriptions refilled at the pharmacy. Hoo hah.
Speaking of which, I may have figured out a plausible reason for my vacation malaise. Overwhelmed by the novelty of being able to actually sleep in for the first few days in forever, I carelessly fell off the routine for my anti-depression meds. In the past, this has proven to be A Bad Thing, resulting in similar morbid doldrums, mood swings, and inability to focus on… stuff.
I’m unsure whether this is a reasonable explanation for the past week, but since I have no alternative excuse other than sheer stinking laziness, I’m going to blame the pills. You’re okay with that, aren’t you, pills?
(The pills seem fine with that.)
If it does not rain this evening, I may go for a walk…
I also need to start thinking about how to respond tomorrow when I go back to work and people ask, “Did you enjoy your vacation?” They don’t really want to know the truth, and yet I hate to lie directly to people. I need to be able to say something that sounds convincingly upbeat and unfalsifiable.
The problem here is that you are attempting to encompass elemental opposites into the same time/space frame. The opposites of course being vacation and work. Your subconscious is aware of the catastrophic danger of such an undertaking and therefore took steps to avoid ending the universe we so know and love.
The laundry can wait a couple of days, most of the time, the cleaning I know can wait a couple of days. Grocery shopping, bah, I have tap water and 3 year old cup-o-noodles. Cleaning out the closet? Why? It’s just going to get messy again and besides I know where everything is now. It’s in the back under the pile of stuff where it always is. The new book I just bought, bah, that’s what weekends are for. TV, nope not this week, that’s what the DVR is for.
Online gaming, oh baby, it’s just you and me all week. I’m going to wear you out. You’re not even going to be able to walk when I get done with you. I’m going to caress your seductive mouse and luscious keys and oh baby…ok I gotta go now.
