this night.

I live in a ghost town. This is temporary. It's the night tonight: Bellefonte will resurrect itself by morning.

It's a charmed night, in a not-so-charming way.

Let me preface this. This story needs a context.

Let me also state for the record that it's been a weird, weird, weird, weird night. The style of this post will probably reflect that.

I started out today unable to turn over and go back to sleep, despite having granted myself permission to sleep in. Eight hours after I went to sleep, almost on the dot. It's been this way for awhile. Can't get more than eight. Often get less, but that's due to my weekday alarm.

So today, unlike most, I was horribly unable to focus. I had a to-do list as long as my leg, but managed to get all of one thing on it done, and that not even properly so.

As interruptus, in the present there's something in here with me that's whistling, and I don't know what it is. I'm strangely not unnerved by this. The rest of the night has reassured me that nothing else out of the ordinary can happen.

And this won't be all of it. As another interruptus, something in the sink shifted: knife sliding off a plate and clinking against the aluminum sink wall, I imagine, but again, strangely not startling to me.

If this shifting of scene seems like a dream, you're with me. Yes. Stay with me.

I have the day off tomorrow, giving me leeway to get this all down. Thankfully. I'd hate to lose it. Despite being weird, weird, weird, this ending is strange and beautiful. I love it. I want to go outside and drink it. And bottle some to save for later.

Back to this afternoon. No focus, constant interruptions (don't apologize, dear other J--I was thankful for yours, short as they were), frustration of each and every thing I started or wished to have started. I got some photos uploaded and laundry started. That's about the limit of my productivity.

Wait. Untrue. I did take care of L's kitties, last-minute. And a guest cat, who was a real handful. But! that was my limit.

And it was this way--knowing I was wasting time, but unable to do anything about it--until I had to leave for the club job.

Or thought I did. I ended up on the road early and got there a good twenty minutes before I needed to be. And realized this nearing town, but it wasn't worth the time to turn back.

I knew this. I knew this, I knew this. And this entire night, almost everything was full of this crystal awareness of the situation, but complete giving-over of myself to it, unable to struggle against its tides. And it was frustrating to watch, but impossible to fight.

So I got into town. My usual lot was full. I moved to the next-handiest street and parked comfortably. I got out to greet the night air, oppressive with humidity and frustrated potential. I shook my head even then, with the premonition of the weird wyrd ahead. (That may sound redundant, but it's not. Trust.)

I spent the twenty or so picking up some coffee for my late evening, sitting down with it on a big leather couch there, taking the time to squeeze in some reading. Reading was a perfect task for today, but I hadn't managed to tear myself away from trying to get things done, despite the futility.

And the realization of the futility. That's what kills me. The awareness tonight. I knew it all. I just couldn't do anything about it.

[For those who understand the reference, this night is so House of Leaves, minus the terror. There's no fear here, only mazes and knowing and realizations.]

{And maybe I should blame my perfume. Wearing Lune Noire on a full moon, the brightest I've seen in months, perhaps was not the best of plans. But it did start before that, this day.}

So it was that I was ducking in and out between the humidity of outside to air conditioning in my car to humid to coffee shop AC to outside oppression to coolness of the club when empty. And my allergies had been set off by L's cats.

And as soon as I arrived, total tragedy. We couldn't get the Steelers game on any of the monitors, no matter how many of us tried. Manager of the club? No luck. And this was tragic to the folks who needed (needed!) to see it (mostly staff).

The club opened with the majority of the monitors black, and us still struggling to fix the issue. Nothing I did had any effect. I tried every trick I had. All had turned against me.

Eventually, my manager (of our company, not the club's staff) managed to get it worked out, by manually switching every monitor in the place, almost. And this a temporary fix.

Tonight was the first night I'd worked after the recent change-over to being smoke-free. And I was asked to remind folks, and I did. And next had an assistant manager of the club rush over to add an addendum: folks could only smoke out the front of the club, not the back. They'd be locked out. Again, announced.

From the previous week, we'd had some issues with two of the speakers on the dancefloor, so we had turned down the highs in such a fashion that we were having trouble hearing the microphone inside the booth, so I stepped outside it to make the announcement. My co-pilot stayed in the booth.

Later, he stepped out for a cigarette. It was only after he'd made it out of eyeshot (and let's not even talk about earshot) that I realized he'd headed to the back, not having heard my announcement (though I had mentioned the fact to him).

I ran out to prop the door for him. He rushed to join me at the door, thinking something was wrong. I kicked the prop down and he misunderstood me. And then couldn't hear me due to the exhaust fans. And so forth.

The whole night, I'd been feeling strange. Off. I kept stretching, trying to work out odd sensations in my limbs and joints. Wondering if my co-pilot would take the movements amiss. Never occurred to me to address them with him.

We've had an odd relationship, he and I. On-again, off-again friendship-slash-something-else. Undefined, of course. But there's static there somewhere. Nothing enough to put a finger on, mind. We discussed it once, both at the time not entirely ourselves, and managed to leave the conversation entirely in the same place we'd started it, other than the fact that it occurred, and fallen back to amicability as a default, no deeper on any level. Which is fine, and may not change. Also fine. Though change would likely also be fine. I'm too flexible for my own good sometimes.

I've been having several online conversations in the past few days. One handles on masculinity and what it means, calling to mind my old Men's Studies class and conversations for that class with my father. The other about images of me online and my resistance to them, calling to mind my divorce and the aftermath of that initial split, as well as a ton of self-esteem garbage. Both had turned terribly unpleasant for me, and distasteful, though only in the very last exchange before I'd gone to work.

While at the club, I received the most recent responses from both. One was entirely more open than I'd expected of a response, which made me smile as I was perusing it on my iPhone during the breakdown of a song. And the other--the other was magic. The person I'm chatting with about it is a terrible, wonderful person for sending me the exact right response to my concerns. Exact. I love her and hate her for it, because she's going to get exactly what she wanted, and I know I'm being manipulated, but damn is she good at it. And I can't not respect that. And I almost resent it. But it is beautiful in its execution.

beautiful.

And I know me. And I know I wasn't shuttering my face, my response. I had no reason to, there. And I know he probably saw me bite my lip, smile in that bemused half-way that I have when I'm being viciously charmed, turn my head to consider, and put down my phone. And stare at it. And pick it up. And read her message again. And smile and bite my lip again. And put the phone down. And look at it. And try to open my book. And shut it. And distract myself with the music change and changing the video and lights. And stare unseeing at the dancefloor. And look at the phone again.

Or he may have missed it. Also fine.

But I wonder what he thought if he caught it. Though not enough to ask.

So stretching. Simple standing yoga poses. And then he complained of a headache. And joint pain. Which, along with the minor power flickers (and worry about more major outages, of course) and reminder of the arms of Ike passing through with wind and stormage and pressure changes, finally brought me to what today's whole problem may have been.

Major storm front. Full moon. Winds. Celestials whirling.

I had my answer. My two and two finally didn't add up to 3.78 billion. They became four and an eighth, roundabout. Not too badly off.

And because I have tomorrow off, and the buses don't run on Sundays and he didn't have his usual ride and doesn't drive himself, I drove him home. With a pause outside my car so he could have a cigarette.

And we talked about the moon. His experience seeing it rise brilliant over the ocean in the northeast, my experience seeing it rise huge over the desert in the southwest. Lying under it, thinking it was pre-dawn and wondering why my camp-mates weren't stirring. Watching it rise, taking up a good eighth of the horizon, every pockmark on its surface etched as if in crystal. Like the bowl on the dining room table at home that my grandmother had brought over from Denmark. The bowl round, its surface grooved.

I didn't draw that comparison then. I'm glad I didn't: he might've thought me entirely moon-mad.

And maybe I am. It'll be short-lived. It's just the night tonight.

So I drove him home, and we made plans that I half-expect to fall through just like so many other times we've tried to make plans. Something comes up, and it ends up just as well for both of us in the end. No skin off anyone's nose. And really, I'm pretty ligeglad (literally "like glad" in Danish--ambivalence in the way people abuse it in English, basically) about it each time. Which may say something. May not.

And then I drove home, leaving him to corral the trash that had been blown halfway down their yard.

I'd seen debris on the road as we drove, mostly branches and bunches of leaves. Saw more as I headed to the bypass towards Bellefonte. But upon arriving in Bellefonte, I saw things were much worse there.

Two intersections with lights out and police actually directing traffic with lights like those landing guys at airports. A truck in the middle of the second intersection, headlights beaming into my eyes, as they tried to fix things. Propped-up stop signs by other lights-out intersections. A bewildering sense of things-not-right-here. But also an innate reassurance that all will be right by morning.

My car, gliding through downtown Bellefonte like the only thing alive, like some dark ghost, saw no other movement than those men. Even the trees were silent. No waving in the breeze. Just their detritus on the ground. Unanswering.

What happened here? I wondered, but knew the answer. Darkened windows yawned at me from every building surrounding me, and I was reminded of my visit to New Orleans after Katrina. The ghost-town suburbs we slid through to catch my early-morning flight home. Desolate due to low population, doubly so due to the hour, and then the mist rising from the low-lying areas. Which was everywhere, there.

The space was potential, but also ghostly. I waited for the rise of the supernatural.

And so it was on my way home tonight. But I turned onto my street and found, to my surprise, that my side of the street had power. The other side had none.

I parked, got out, gathered my things, locked my doors. Turned to face the lit side of the street. And turned my back to it to face the unlit houses, to drink in the moonlight for a moment. The oppressive humidity had broken, granting us the clear night sky, the crickets and night-insects of a dying summer. I listened, and felt the night connect to me. Then I trudged inside to survey the damage.

I found my usually-touchy stove clock un-reset, not flashing, and had a hope for my computer, which I'd foolishly left on. I found that it, though, had restarted. And worse, my keyboard was disabled. I restarted properly, super-sensitive for any bad signs, and checked and re-checked that it was on a surge protector. Yes. No problem. Should be unharmed, right?

And interruptus: my computer, as I'm typing this into my blog platform, informs me I have an IP conflict with another computer. There should be nothing else on this network: I'm password-protected and don't broadcast my network name, at the very least. But there it is. Might be my iPhone. I'll investigate later: it seems to not be doing me harm.

So I restarted, and was concerned by my boot time, and I started to remember all I'd done, created, saved but not backed up since my last big back-up project. Half of my Hawaii photo originals could go poof, I realized. But I was being over-sensitive. It was fine, and all was in order when it restarted.

And that leads us to--well, right about now.

And a way-fuller understanding of this evening of mine than you probably wanted. And it's tl;dr to most of you, I'm sure.

Mercury retro? Full moon antics? Storm blowing through, causing associated discomfort? A combination? That's where I've settled. I'm going to sleep now, and I'll drift off half-wishing the universe into righting itself by the time I wake, and half-hoping some of the disjointed madness can stay with me, so I can keep this out-of-time-and-reality pseudo-madness in a back pocket, to pull out when my life gets too normal.

And leave you wishing you'd had a taste of your own tonight. Perhaps.

supervision

Let me just say that after the past few days I've had, I'm thanking every little star in my sky that I have a supervisor who isn't afraid to help me prioritize.

These days, I've got a ton of conflicting priorities and people on all sides are demanding my time and attention. Some are sending multiple emails (though understandably, since I'm about to declare email bankruptcy), as well as copying in my old supervisor, weirdly enough. But when I'm entirely overloaded, it's an immense relief to be able to say "no" and refer them to someone farther up the chain than I am. Especially when that someone else can easily say that I've got more important tasks than theirs.

Being able to work down my list with someone who can make the call and take the heat that might follow is exactly what I need when I'm overwhelmed. I'd say it about halves my stress level, though that might be an exaggeration.

At the very least, it takes me out of the "I'll never get this all done" mindset. Instead, it provides a path to how it might all get done.

I once had a supervisor who refused to prioritize my duties, tasks and projects. Even when I asked, the supervisor in question refused. And nothing drove me battier.

And I was less productive for it. I ended up switching between things, trying to do them all semi-evenly until one of them or another became an emergency. And that was no help at all. My stress level was immense.

Having learned from that, I try to make priorities quite clear to the folks who report to me. I realize not everyone works in the same fashion, nor does prioritization lower everyone else's stress level the way it does mine, but it's been my best tool to make things clear.

And it works on my end, at least. I get things when I need them, and no one in my charge complains they don't know what to work on next.  I just hope it helps them with their stress level as well.

Dreaming work

I woke this morning after dreaming about how to implement a really useful, effective way to use Twitter for the Admissions Office. Thankfully, I didn't lose all the details upon waking, which sometimes happens to me with dreams interrupted by an alarm.

But I did think, upon waking, that the dream was a really bad sign. A really good sign too, but also a really bad sign.

It told me I don't have enough waking time to process this sort of thing.

I suspect either tomorrow or the next day I'm going to have to tell my boss that I've reached critical mass. That I have too many tasks and need help. It's swallow my pride time and I hate that.

He's just back from vacation and the approximately minute-and-a-half I had with him today was not the time to address this, but it does need to happen soon.

The firefighting I've been doing has shoved the less pressing things to a back shelf, and if we want to keep them alive, I've got to lean on others.

I hate that. I've always been a bit of an overachiever, and not always good at delegation: I've always subscribed to the "to get things done right, do it yourself" school of thought. But I'm learning. Sometimes the hard way.

In the process, though, I'm learning that people like to be challenged. When I hand over non-drudge work, work that requires critical thought and judgment, they appreciate it. Most of them realize that means I trust them.

And that trust is, sometimes, hard to come by. Hate to admit it, but it's true. But I've got to learn better.  Hopefully other folks will help me out by doing well with the projects I hand over.

Process: one/day

Following Cole's lead, a little reflection about the One Post a Day project.

I agree with him in that it helps focus a concept to the point of sharing succinctly, but the down side I'd share is that I certainly have less time.

In fact, today's the first night in a week that I haven't had obligations other than this post. Well, I do, but they're not as pressing/scheduled as the others have been. Haven't even touched WoW in that time, in fact.

And I also suspect that quality suffers.

From memory, my blog output has generally been best when it's one or two a week. That gives me some time to percolate on a subject rather than just tossing it out there for the sake of having something up for the day.

And in fact, after the obligation of one-a-day is over, I suspect I'll take a hiatus to get things back to normal, and then try to go back to a schedule of that sort.

One a week is manageable. One a day is pressure, and it's not a good kind of pressure considering everything else I've got going on. But I've made it this far, so I'll (be trying to) finish out the month.

On the light side

Lest you think it's always like last Friday:

Everyone needs some levity in their lives. Especially so after a tough day at work, I'd say. Or a Monday. Or a Tuesday. You get the idea.

To that end, I'd like to share some of the sources of such that I turn to:

• Tales from Redesignland - for work-related woes, comic style
  
• I Can Has Cheezburger - cats with captions  
  
• Indexed - humorous Venn diagrams
• Apostophe Abuse - for the grammarian in me
  
• Week in Pictures - Reginald Golding's intermittent work. ;)

Fires vs. meetings

My day in brief:

• Meetings 8:00 to 12:30, some of which were interrupted by three different people looking for me, all leaving tasks for me behind them.
• Brief hour at my desk for email/IM and lunch.
• Interview for a programmer position open from 1:30 to 2:30,
• half-hour of post-interview review, then
• a good hour of fire-putting-out on our online application for admission--with no resolution.
• Back to email/tasks left behind.

No way I can answer all the email I got today, nor catch up on what I got previously and haven't gotten to/resolved yet.

While today was mostly an exception, this sort of thing happens all the time, to one extent or another. And it's frustrating.

And I know it's not just me. Other people have similar workloads.

At some point, I'm going to have to call an embargo on meetings, or
declare email bankruptcy, or not be on IM, or close and lock my door. Or all of the above. Something. Because otherwise, I can't actually put into action the things I'm in those meetings for.

We're down two content people in my office now, so that could be aggravating the problem. But man. Rough Friday.

The web obviously needs some man-hours, and not just in my office. If there are any web folks out there at Penn State twiddling their thumbs (not that I think there are), drop me a line. I sure could use the help.