Pinkerton's Weblog

Fret (noun)

Something about the tail ends of the year...

Is it the financial worries? The ramped-up pace at my job? The fact that I'm moving soon? Hard to say. All I know is that I've been a solid ball of stress lately. Walking home from work tonight in a light snow, I was reviewing everything I'd gotten done today and still needed to do.

"Okay, need to clean up the apartment for a showing, should have done that last weekend but you needed to go into work then. Train ticket bought... oh God, where'd I put it? Okay, no, here in my pocket, good. Okay, gifts to buy. Paid the TV bill today... I need to pay hydro too. And I need to tell hydro I'm moving. Need to tell the cable company too. Oh, and I need to check on those insurance requests at work, and I forgot to phone that guy in Ottawa today about sending me the marketing collateral that accidentally got sent to him. And I need to order 400 more sheets of Christmas stationary for those client letters. And..."

At this point my stomach was a seething cauldron of acid from the days of stress and no sleep I'd been putting my body through. So I took a few deep breaths and mentally pep-talked myself, trying to enjoy the gently falling snow.

"Okay, guy, calm it down, callllllllm it down. It'll all get done, don't worry about it. You're going to give yourself an ulcer here. Life's too short."

My immediate response to this internal pep-talk, with hand-wringing alarm: "Oh, GOD. You're right, life IS too short!"

The response, after I'd thought about it for a second, was so ridiculous that it made me chuckle a little to myself at my own pessimism. I even managed to stay in a good mood up until I got home, where a sudden knock at the door revealed my landlord wanting to conduct a showing with a prospective buyer, and my place an uncleaned mess.

RingLord III: The King's Revenge

...and somehow it manages to get stupider by the day.

This officially marks the last time I try something as stupid as a five-day update, by the way. I vastly misjudged how much of the article had yet to be laid out and written (I'd assumed like 10%; it was more like 50%).

Including my day-job duties, Trailer Trash updating duties, News Skim updating duties, and various weekend chores (food shopping, laundry), I basically had no weekend. Imagine working all week, coming home exhausted on Friday, then hopping on the computer all weekend. That was me.

Pretty stupid, yes? Agreed. I'm not looking for pity here, mind you. Because I know for a fact if I did, somebody would write a comment to this explaining how they didn't have a weekend because they were getting treated for leukemia or something, and I'd feel small and silly. So I'm just saying, as a point of objective truth: That was stupid of me to do. It was exhausting. And never again.

Anyway, hope you enjoy it (and thanks to my references to leukemia, how could you not feel like laughing?). I'm checking my hits after all this is over -- if it turns out only five people read the fucking thing after all this work, I'll probably snap like a ballgame pretzel and just turn jaypinkerton.com into a pornography website.