"Will the last neuron in Eva's brain please turn out the lights!"
Any one who has had the mildly-to-very unpleasant experience of talking to me on one of my busy days this past semester will attest to the fact that I, uh, overbooked myself this spring term. Tasks like grocery shopping, laundry and cooking "bucket food" have become the recreational activities I long for. My usual love of Fridays has faded as Friday's close affiliation with Saturday and Sunday (ie. the days when I can really get work done without distraction) has made it a day to dread. As I run from home to gym to lab to class, I have been cranky, exhausted, hurried and down-right rude to kind-hearted folks who really just wanted to say hi.
To all of you, I apologize. For what it's worth, I think I have finally been forced to acknowledge that sleep is actually necessary. Not doing errands after work and finding my bed before midnight has done wonders for my attitude, despite the fact that the corresponding increase in laundry hamper mass and decrease in food in the fridge may not be a sustainable long-term.
In addition to heavily investing in sleep time, I am in the process of developing a protocol for increasing my daily rating on the Happy-Eva-o-meter. The hope is that a happier Eva will result in less whining, more smiling and an overall decrease in the amount of time I feel that I spend being Sub-optimal Eva due to Bad Attitude/Why does my life suck-itis. Progress so far has resulted in the following program:
Step 1. Eat more meatballs.
Attempts at successfully completing Step 1 have been made for several months now, thanks entirely to the cooperation of Olivia, pictured above. Olivia is a post-doc in a lab down the hall and when her own, usually unflappable good humor is shaken, I find post-it notes on my desk with the simple message, "Meatballs!!" A time is then set and off to IKEA we go.
Oh, you thought I was MAKING meatballs? With an IKEA within visual range of my lab? No way, man. The only swedish meatballs better than IKEA meatballs are my mom's curly meatballs and those are about 2,799 miles further away. I usually get the 10 meatball plate (they're very small!!) with fries and gravy all over. The lingenberry sauce is killer and a nice wedge of swedish apple cake finishes off the meal and me quite nicely.
The key is to then get back to my desk in lab before what Olivia refers to as "Delayed Action Meatballs," or D.A.M.'s, take effect. D.A.M.'s results in a sudden and incapacitating stupor that takes at least an hour to resolve. Best to be safely at your desk "reading the literature" or "analysing data" when this happens. Try not to snore too loudly.
Step 2. Enjoy the hard stuff.
The requirements of this step are far more difficult to define than Step 1, but the Happy-Eva-o-meter requires a significant boost and you can only eat so many meatballs. So far, I have come up with a few examples of how to implement Step 2 in my daily routine:
Example A. This past Monday at 5 p.m., my students handed in their term papers. On Wednesday at 9 a.m., they took their final exam. Yesterday, I went and collected 42 10-12 page papers and 42 exams from my slot in the WGSS office. When I asked Prof. Summers when he needed the grading done by, he simply replied, "soon."
Looks like I have some grading to do. I don't really know how to grade term papers, though I tried to keep that a secret from my students. My learning curve has been steep and while I think I'm getting the hang of it, it has taken my about three hours this afternoon to grade six papers.
So this is the hard stuff. The 'enjoying' part began to happen while I was reading the fourth straight paper on how to incorporate intersex people into society. It seems that the author of this paper is a huge fan of her thesaurus. Big words abound, words I haven't seen since the S.A.T., almost all of them used correctly. My particular favorite was when she used 'the occident' when refering to Western society. I LOVE verbiage! Yep, that was a good sized spike on the Happy-Eva-o-meter.
Example B. For the past two years, my downstairs neighbors have tormented me with their stereo. They have a woofer, a sub-woofer and a sub-sub-make-your-water-glass-rattle-on-the-table woofer. They like to come home from partying at 2 or 3 a.m. and crank it up. I used to try to knock on their door to get them to turn it down, but after a while I realized that their music was so loud they couldn't hear me knocking. Sad Eva. The last time I went down, my banging did get them to come to the door. In my half-conscious rage, I think I blurted out something about calling the police. They turned it down for about a month and then were back to their normal, ear-splitting musical habits.
In recent weeks, as they're graduation from Yale Law approaches, they have switched from thumping hip-hop to classics they can sing to. And sing they do,
"I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead..."
"I'm buh-buh-buh-bad to the bone... buh-buh-buh-baaaaad..."
So, in keeping with my new plan to just plain change my attitude about things that get me down, I have decided that my neighbors are actually providing me with a valuble service. After all, I don't have a stereo of my own. I have a radio in the kitchen that kind of gets NPR and one Glenn Miller-dominated AM station. Their music is always up loud enough so that I can clearly hear treble, bass and lyric tracks. Maybe I should just slip a request list under their door.
Step 3. Well, rats. There isn't really a Step 3 yet. In my lower moments, I mutter that Step 3 involves graduating right now and getting out of this hell hole, but that sentiment is in direct violation of Step 2, so I'll have to think further.
Now back to work. I've got Cat Stevens kickin' from down below and a paper titled "Androgen-Based Predispositions in Sexual Orientation" to grade.
It doesn't get any better than this!!
To all of you, I apologize. For what it's worth, I think I have finally been forced to acknowledge that sleep is actually necessary. Not doing errands after work and finding my bed before midnight has done wonders for my attitude, despite the fact that the corresponding increase in laundry hamper mass and decrease in food in the fridge may not be a sustainable long-term.
In addition to heavily investing in sleep time, I am in the process of developing a protocol for increasing my daily rating on the Happy-Eva-o-meter. The hope is that a happier Eva will result in less whining, more smiling and an overall decrease in the amount of time I feel that I spend being Sub-optimal Eva due to Bad Attitude/Why does my life suck-itis. Progress so far has resulted in the following program:
Step 1. Eat more meatballs.
Attempts at successfully completing Step 1 have been made for several months now, thanks entirely to the cooperation of Olivia, pictured above. Olivia is a post-doc in a lab down the hall and when her own, usually unflappable good humor is shaken, I find post-it notes on my desk with the simple message, "Meatballs!!" A time is then set and off to IKEA we go.
Oh, you thought I was MAKING meatballs? With an IKEA within visual range of my lab? No way, man. The only swedish meatballs better than IKEA meatballs are my mom's curly meatballs and those are about 2,799 miles further away. I usually get the 10 meatball plate (they're very small!!) with fries and gravy all over. The lingenberry sauce is killer and a nice wedge of swedish apple cake finishes off the meal and me quite nicely.
The key is to then get back to my desk in lab before what Olivia refers to as "Delayed Action Meatballs," or D.A.M.'s, take effect. D.A.M.'s results in a sudden and incapacitating stupor that takes at least an hour to resolve. Best to be safely at your desk "reading the literature" or "analysing data" when this happens. Try not to snore too loudly.
Step 2. Enjoy the hard stuff.
The requirements of this step are far more difficult to define than Step 1, but the Happy-Eva-o-meter requires a significant boost and you can only eat so many meatballs. So far, I have come up with a few examples of how to implement Step 2 in my daily routine:
Example A. This past Monday at 5 p.m., my students handed in their term papers. On Wednesday at 9 a.m., they took their final exam. Yesterday, I went and collected 42 10-12 page papers and 42 exams from my slot in the WGSS office. When I asked Prof. Summers when he needed the grading done by, he simply replied, "soon."
Looks like I have some grading to do. I don't really know how to grade term papers, though I tried to keep that a secret from my students. My learning curve has been steep and while I think I'm getting the hang of it, it has taken my about three hours this afternoon to grade six papers.
So this is the hard stuff. The 'enjoying' part began to happen while I was reading the fourth straight paper on how to incorporate intersex people into society. It seems that the author of this paper is a huge fan of her thesaurus. Big words abound, words I haven't seen since the S.A.T., almost all of them used correctly. My particular favorite was when she used 'the occident' when refering to Western society. I LOVE verbiage! Yep, that was a good sized spike on the Happy-Eva-o-meter.
Example B. For the past two years, my downstairs neighbors have tormented me with their stereo. They have a woofer, a sub-woofer and a sub-sub-make-your-water-glass-rattle-on-the-table woofer. They like to come home from partying at 2 or 3 a.m. and crank it up. I used to try to knock on their door to get them to turn it down, but after a while I realized that their music was so loud they couldn't hear me knocking. Sad Eva. The last time I went down, my banging did get them to come to the door. In my half-conscious rage, I think I blurted out something about calling the police. They turned it down for about a month and then were back to their normal, ear-splitting musical habits.
In recent weeks, as they're graduation from Yale Law approaches, they have switched from thumping hip-hop to classics they can sing to. And sing they do,
"I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead..."
"I'm buh-buh-buh-bad to the bone... buh-buh-buh-baaaaad..."
So, in keeping with my new plan to just plain change my attitude about things that get me down, I have decided that my neighbors are actually providing me with a valuble service. After all, I don't have a stereo of my own. I have a radio in the kitchen that kind of gets NPR and one Glenn Miller-dominated AM station. Their music is always up loud enough so that I can clearly hear treble, bass and lyric tracks. Maybe I should just slip a request list under their door.
Step 3. Well, rats. There isn't really a Step 3 yet. In my lower moments, I mutter that Step 3 involves graduating right now and getting out of this hell hole, but that sentiment is in direct violation of Step 2, so I'll have to think further.
Now back to work. I've got Cat Stevens kickin' from down below and a paper titled "Androgen-Based Predispositions in Sexual Orientation" to grade.
It doesn't get any better than this!!
posted by Eva Marie at 6:30 PM
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