I need to vent!
It is vacation and yet I feel overworked. There are projects and tests inching closer and closer with each passing moment... there are news paper deadlines only days away. There are article ideas being flung at me from neuroscientists at Tufts, entrepreneurs from the University of New Hampshire, bothered brothers in high positions in the Boston transportation department, eager nursing students calling for support on healthcare issues...
Vacation: An extended period of recreation, especially one spent away from home or in traveling. New Oxford American Dictionary
Vacation: Leisure time away from work devoted to rest or pleasure. wordnetweb.princeton.edu
Vacation: A period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel; recess or holiday. dictionary.com
Vacation: A period of rest from work. The Merriam Webster Dictionary
Nowhere in these definitions does it say: a time to spend catching up on work you fell behind on during the semester; a time to get ahead on upcoming work; a period during which certain social or educational obligations are foregone so that the individual can focus on other work.
Mass Media. School. Life. These are the paints that fill up that blank slate that is my life.
I want to see my friends. I want to write a wicked long fantasy novel then write a wicked long realistic fiction novel. I want to work out. I want to pig out... actually, I have been pigging out a bit.
These things I want to do! Some of them aren't even completely disconnected from work or school! It's true - work and school are so much a part of my life, I find myself filling my scant "free time" with school work or Mass Media work. For example, I really want to write up the two "Voices of UMB" pieces I have. I've pretty much written one (Samantha Fischbeck), but the other, an interview with the fantastic, the vivacious Donna Perezella is still waiting, an audio file in my "voices" folder on my desktop.
I, more than ever, need time. Time to work.
Despite all this belly-aching (I need to cut down on my belly-aching, complaining rarely gets anyone anywhere except the dog house) I really like school, Mass Media, and all the other work stuff that fills my time. I really like to work. But a vacation? I guess I just have to hold out for the summer when my sister and I go galavanting cross country on my first ever road trip. Because, as much as I want to work, enjoy working, I need to actually be alive at some point - I need to be more than just an animal that produces things and edits things and filters through emails. I need time for introspect and maybe some swimming. God damn it, I need a hair cut too.
I've actually been in New York City since this past Saturday. I got back early in the evening yesterday. During that trip (which was paid for by the Mass Media and thus required - justifiably - that I do some Mass Media related work) what did I do? I went to several insightful conferences on the future of the Print Media or representation of transgendered individuals in the media... hell, I spent 50 minutes of my life listening to a pleasant southern woman with a pleasant southern drawl panegyrize on font. FONT!? Okay, I shouldn't be outraged - I have spent a significant amount of time fooling around with the fonts on my mac-book and my net-book. Then, after spending a total of six hours in meetings of this sort (over the course of two days - Sunday and Monday) I had to write something about one of those meetings. So, I wrote something. Something pretty sassy, I must say, pretty insightful too and syntactically pleasing.
Saturday night, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning I was in the city that never sleeps. What did I do? I walked a few miles to a thrift shop where I bought nothing. I ate the most wonderful concoction (called a "concrete") at a NYC ice-cream and soul-food joint. I did a lot of walking... then some more walking. I went out to eat a couple times. But that's it. Probably a total of 72 hours.
The city that never sleeps... my fellow Mass Mediaers took advantage of this trip (more so than I did). They went out a night. The city that never sleeps... they probably got less than 3 hours of it a night - but they got out there! I slept. Goddamn my sensibility, going to bed at reasonable hours (11:30 or 12). I should have one night embraced the "fuck it" attitude that so many of my peers adopt and gone to a hookah bar. I should have... regret is a namesake of the unadventurous, the careful, and we wear it like a weighted badge of honor as it drags us into the sea of boredom...
Next time I will say, "screw sleep, screw work, screw deadlines - I'm going out tonight."
Next time. Next time we are going to Orlando Florida. I don't know if they have hookah bars there.
Alright. This is almost enough ventilation. I've got some shit to go do now (it's much easier to do things after ventilation). Let's see if I can't tick off some of those empty, check-less boxes on my whiteboard telling me what I need to do. Oh, and fuck it, I am going to publish this without editing it. Reckless, I know, but I'm on vacation.
