A Day Off

Today I'm doing nothing. Well, almost nothing. Well, only things that have to be done. At any rate, I've done nothing so far but sleep in (until 6:45!) and read other people's blogs. Oh, and, feel anxious about the doing-nothing thing, even though I decided last night that I deserved a day off.

Except, you know, for that proofreading job that has to be finished by 9:00 am Monday (400 pages of slow cooker recipes) and I still have nearly 100 pages to go plus the 15-page cross-referenced-by-ingredient bitch of an index. Oh, and learning lines. Because rehearsal last night totally sucked because I hadn't looked at my script for three days and, as JT says, even though I'm not getting paid I do have a responsibility to the director and the Playhouse and the other actors. Being, like, you know, the star and all that and it wasn't for lack of interest but lack of time that I ignored the script, being all busy applying for scholarships at Antioch, scholarships for which I had exactly 8 days from notification to when the 500-word essays had to in hand, no fax or e-mail. In California. So it's not like I could just crank them out at the last minute and drop them by on my way to rehearsal (and all this for a school I may not even go to), and then the winter writing workshop ended on Tuesday and the spring session starts next Tuesday and what was I thinking, not taking a break? and there's a shit-load of handouts and nametags and details to prepare and what was I thinking, wanting to do the smells exercise at Saturday's prison workshop when a nice first-lines exercise would have been just fine and required no preparation, unlike the smells exercise for which I had to come up with a suitable list, submit it, come up with alternatives for (Vicks, bubblegum and nail polish), find film cannisters, and now I'll have to fill the damn things...

Okay. Okay.

Enough.

Breathe, Hannah, breathe.

One of the downsides of working at home is the loss of the traditional lines of demarcation between work and home. 5 o'clock? Yay, time to go home and leave all this behind. TGIF? Yay, time to go home and leave all this behind. For two days. Yeah, yeah, I know that many people work many more than 40 hours a week. And that they take work home. (Why do you think I quit working for someone else?) But here's the thing: the stuff I'm working on? Is always with me. Particularly since I persist in ignoring the perfectly good guest bedroom that I insisted we turn into an office (what? I can't get anything done in there.) I prefer to spread my junk the length and width of our dining room table, and the so-called office is basically just a place to shove all my papers and projects on Tuesday nights when my writing workshop meets.

I can't remember the last time I had a day off, or even a day when I wasn't careening from one thing to another. Oh, yeah, maybe it was March 1. They're calling for strong storms here today. I can't wait. It will make me feel more virtuous about all this doing-nothing that I'm not yet doing.