I just finished my first 25-hour overnight shift at Conard, which will be a weekly thing.
Pros: About $300 after taxes for working once a week in a job where I will have a ton of time to do homework.
Cons: I am soul-crushingly tired. Something about the resonance of a place where so many people pass through, I guess, but I don't think I will ever be able to get more than a few hours of sleep while working there. But then again, I see this as the logical extension of my career path; I mean, I'm already slowly selling my sanity for money, so my soul isn't that big a leap.
I do worry though that I may begin to over-stretch a little. To be fair, it isn't like I have kids or anything approaching a long-term relationship, so I really ought to have all the time in the world to work a job and go to school. It's just that I'm not exactly famous for my time-management skills, and I would like to see my friends occasionally. Not having a weekend makes that more difficult, because right now Saturday is my only free day.
Which of course means that if I do want to make time, I have to start planning things for over the week, which means most likely falling behind on my work, let alone maybe occasionally making it the gym or doing my own cooking or meditating or any of the other crap that I like to tease myself into thinking I might occasionally do. Plus burn-out is bad.
But I have to look at it this way: this year cannot possibly suck worse than last one did. Last year started off okay and just kept sliding. Not that getting into grad school wasn't amazing, because it was, and not that I don't have a lot of awesome people in my life, because I do. But last year was the poster-child for every bad decision or error in judgment rebounding in painful and nearly immediate karma. It was the year of mostly getting my ass handed to me.
So I declare this the year of "It's gonna be a good fucking year!" And I'm not going to let the fact that I am tired as hell and already overloaded with schoolwork and struggling to maintain a social life and have no idea what the hell I'm doing get in the way of that.
Fuck off, me-karma.
2 comments:
Context, please. So this is an optional on the side thing and not part of your program? Or is it an optional part of your program? Or is it non-optional, making the "why the hell am I doing this to myself?" question largely rhetorical?
Glad to see you blogging again. I didn't give up hope and kept checking.
Oh, and the plus side of the being soul-crushingly tired is that the brief periods of rest you get are infinitely sweeter. Maybe I'm weird, but I sometimes prefer that to having tons and tons of free time. Because then the free time isn't all that great anymore, it just gets boring. A healthy balance of work and rest is probably best in the long run though.
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