Category: crankiness

rough night

Sorry if you are looking for a list, or even any sort of entertainment. It’s Thursday, and therefore I’m due for a ThThTh list. It’s in progress, but damn those things take a lot longer to put together than you might expect. A list will be up much later today. What follows can be happily ignored by anyone who doesn’t enjoy reading about the crankiness of dealing with a toddler.

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I’m feeling less-than-fully functional today. Phoebe and I had a bad night. I didn’t mention in last night’s post that John had to run off to get a meeting this morning. In California. So he was gone last night, and will be gone tonight. I also think that Phoebe’s been teething. The biting is one clue. She’s also been drooling and sticking her hands and other things in her mouth a lot, which she’s not generally prone to anymore. For whatever reason, she woke up twice last night. Once about half an hour after she went to bed, and then a little after midnight. (As in just when I was going to get to bed.) I just could not get her to settle down.

We talked. I dosed her with Motrin. I held her. I rocked her. I sang to her. But every time I went to put her in her crib, she’d cry again. I tried leaving her, and she screamed and screamed. I went back after a few minutes, and am not pleased with myself that I snapped at her that it was time to stop crying. (I was tired. Sorry. I have a temper.) So then I started right in with the soothing and snuggling and talking, and she seemed to settle. But still objected to going back in her crib.

I asked if she was sad that Daddy wasn’t here, and she said “yeah.” So we called John. (It was only 10:30 or so California time, and John’s ususally up half the night anyhow.) He talked. He soothed.

I put Phoebe in her crib. I sang. I talked about things she likes me to talk about. Then I said it was time to go, just like I do every single night. She usually lets out a sob as I walk out the door, just to pull at my heart strings, but then goes to sleep quietly. But last night, at 2:00, she started screaming. And screaming more. I haven’t left her crying for ages. I don’t even know how long it’s been. (Yes, we did a version of the dreaded Ferberization way back when. Dr. Sears can bite me.) But I thought maybe she’d settle down without me. I went back in after 10 minutes, and got her quiet again. But the screams started in once more. I went back in and she was saying “Mommy room. Mommy room.” “You want to go to Mommy’s room?” I asked. (I swore I’d never talk about myself in the third person, but deictic pronouns are tricky beasts.) She said, “yeah.”

I caved. I brought her to bed with me. I was desperate for sleep. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. She eventually stopped squirming enough to fall asleep. At least, she appeared to be just waking up when she woke me up crying at 6:45.

Now I wonder if this will come back to bite me. She really does sleep best on her own. And she’s generally a good sleeper.

Happily, she went to daycare this morning, and I was able to get a bit more sleep. I am “working” from home today, but haven’t been able to defog my brain sufficiently. I do have a conference call at 3:30, so will need to kick into high gear.

I hope that tonight goes better, because I have to drive the two of us down to New York tomorrow. John’s dad is going back home, after over a year in various hospitals and rehab hospitals. John will be going right to New York from his trip, following his red-eye flight to Newark, rather than going home first, so that he can be there to help. Phoebe and I will go down later in the day. Our eyes may well be red, too.

no damn cat, no damn hat

So I sat on my ass
All this cold dreary day
And I said “How I wish
I had more time to play.”

No time to write posts
That are well thought-out rants,
No time to write lists
about movies with pants.

So I all I can do is to
Bitch,
        whine
                and moan
And each time the phone rings
Shout “leave me alone!”

No damn cat came in wanting
To show me his “things”
But the living room’s trashed
And the bathtub’s got rings

Glued to the keyboard
With deadlines a-loomy
The house is a mess
And my mood is all gloomy.

I should do my work now
While the clocks say it’s lating
But this is a fun way
Of procrastinating.

——
I couldn’t resist this week’s Monday Mission, which asked for a post in the style of a children’s book or poem.

give up the funk

I’ve been feeling a bit funky lately. No, not that kind of funk. I seem to have been in a bit of a funk. And I want to give up the funk.

You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been writing so often. I’ve been really tired, and pulled in lots of directions. The result is that I’ve felt a bit like hiding away in a cave.

The good news is that several of the big deadlines are now behind me, and that most of them involved getting the planned tasks done. Data was collected, annotated, and analyzed. Abstracts were submitted for one conference. An accepted paper was revised and re-submitted for another conference. The class I’m teaching is rolling along, for better or worse. (Some days are better, some days are worse.) There are some more big work deadlines approaching, but they are not as oppressively immediately pressing, so I feel like I can relax a bit for a few days.

I ended up largely (or perhaps completely) flaking on the computational linguistics chapter presentation I had said I’d do. I don’t like flaking, and I felt pretty crappy about it. But by the time the abstracts were done Friday night, I had very little left in me. I still had hopes of throwing together a handout Saturday morning, but Phoebe would have none of it. She made herself quite needy that morning, and didn’t allow me to take my attention from her. So we (John, Phoebe and I) went to the group without a presentation. People had read the chapter anyhow, and of the other 6 people there, 5 of them knew more about the topic than I did. So as John points out, any sort of formal presentation would have been largely wasted. We all worked on the exercises from the chapter, which I think worked out better. But I still feel unhappy about the whole thing. I’m usually someone who somehow manages to do everything I commit to, even if I wear myself out in the process. I just have to realize that I’m not always in control of my time anymore, and I can’t go volunteering to do extra things. Or at least so many extra things.

I did end up getting some time to be a vegetable. By the time Phoebe was in bed Saturday night, I was too tired to focus on the paper revisions. So, I got to watch the two first episodes of the new Terminator TV show (“The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), which John had downloaded. I enjoyed the episodes, and now have another show to add to my kick-ass women list. (Last night we watched the third episode, too.)

Anyhow, I’m hoping to come crawling out of my cave now.

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(Oh, and by the way. I did update the Phoebe blog a bit. I decided to just publish the whole thing, even though it included unfinished drafts.)

sulking

I’m just feeling down today.

The memorial service for Elizabeth was last night. We drove up from New York so that we could be back in time to make it there. It made for a long day, and a lot of time in the car. Poor Phoebe was not happy to have to get back in the car after only an hour back home, following close to 5 hours in the car. John ended up needing to take Phoebe out to the vestibule before the service began, as we were heading into a meltdown.

It was a nice service, if long. It was the first time I’ve been in a temple, as far as I can remember. I haven’t been to many religious ceremonies at all, and felt a bit like a visiting anthropologist. (I feel much the same way when I’ve been in a church.) I appreciated the ritual and the music. Though I did find myself craving to hear more about my friend. There was a 3-page paper of thoughts about Elizabeth from her family, but I found I couldn’t read it there without risk of excessive blubbering. The service included some words from a college friend of Elizabeth’s, and a poem written and read by her aunt. I found the poem particulary moving, as it spoke of the Elizabeth I knew. Her wit, her quirks and her complexity.

Some of my other friends who also used to work with Elizabeth also went, and I was glad to see them, and to be able to sit with them during the service. A couple more friends couldn’t make it, due to travelling for Thanksgiving.

There were a lot of people there, overall. It was moving in some ways. But in other ways it made me feel small and insignificant. I felt an outsider. I was glad to meet some friends of Elizabeth’s whose names I had heard, but had never met. I saw her parents, met a sister-in-law. But mostly there was a crowd of strangers.

The friend who spoke said that Elizabeth made everyone she knew feel like they were her best friend. And for some reason, this made me feel sadder. I wonder how often people feel this way at memorial services. Peripheral. One of many. It made me feel a bit like I wanted to stake out my claim in the grief. Declare that I had known her for 12 years. Proclaim that I had shared in the pain of witnessing her illness. Announce that I felt her loss deeply.

At the same time, I feel like I didn’t do enough. Or maybe that I really was a bit of an outsider.

I feel bad that I didn’t visit her more often. I didn’t know about her other hospital stays till after the fact. But maybe I should have known. Maybe I should have called more. When I’d call she’d often be too tired to talk, or on her way out the door. So I didn’t call much. I took her to her chemo treatments twice, and would gladly have gone with her more. Maybe I should have offered more.

And I feel bad that I hadn’t told some friends about her illness. And I feel bad that I still haven’t contacted a couple of other friends I’ve lost track of.

Mostly I just feel bad today. And I find myself missing my friend all the more.

Is sulking a stage of grief? What about crabbiness?

learning some lessons (a crankiness review)

This has been a bit of a week for learning for me. I love learning. I am a bit of a long-term student. And even my career goals for after I get the PhD involve continued research. But the truth is, sometimes, the learning process can involve some crankiness. I like to feel like I know stuff, but often learning involves being shown that I don’t know stuff. Which is not always comfortable.

Take Monday. I had my violin lesson. I hadn’t had much time to practice last week, and there were 2 new, unfamiliar pieces. Worse, I didn’t practice until late in the week, meaning I more or less couldn’t remember the pieces at all from the previous lesson. And while Phoebe has lately been encouraging me to practice (she points at the violin, and then plays quietly nearby while I practice), she has less interest in listening to me struggle with a new piece that I play poorly (she kept leaving the room). Resulting in a shorter practice session. End result: Monday’s lesson was not my best. The topic of my lack of rhythm came up. Sigh.

Take Yesterday. I noticed that a deadline for abstract submissions for a big conference was today. I had meant to submit an abstract for the work I did for my master’s project. (Re-submit, actually, as the abstract I submitted for a previous conference was rejected.) I decided that I should make the push, and spent 4 hours re-writing the abstract yesterday afternoon and evening. I then sent it to a professor (one of the reader’s for my master’s project) on the off chance she would have time to look at it and give suggestions. Remarkably, she generously agreed to read the abstract, and even came back with several helpful suggestions. She said I should definitely submit the abstract, but that it would need to be “re-written.” Crap. I thought re-writing was what I’d just done. But I re-re-wrote, and was up till 2:00 in the morning. It apparently still needs re-re-re-writing, though. (The deadline was extended, so my professor will send me more comments tonight or tomorrow.) It will definitely be very good for me to learn how to write a better abstract, but, well, I hadn’t thought the first one (or second or third) were all that bad. Showing that I indeed have stuff to learn.

Take today. Another lesson in a different domain. I took Phoebe to Whole Foods this evening, as we need some stuff for a dinner we’re having tomorrow. (The aforementioned veggie dinner.) I was trying to get out the door by 5:00, with the plan of picking up some dinner for Phoebe at the store. We didn’t manage to leave till 5:15. Phoebe usually eats around 5:30. The store is 20 minutes away. I gave her some cheese before we went in the store, thinking it would hold her till we finished shopping, when she could eat some more.

We went in the store, I plopped her in a cart. Then I plopped her in another cart, because the straps on the first cart weren’t properly attached. Then we started shopping. And more time passed. Then Phoebe realized she was cold, and I’d left her sweater in the car. (It was about 90 degrees out, but downright chilly in the frozen food aisles.) But while Phoebe is generally a very happy and well-behaved toddler, she becomes less so when her needs aren’t met. Such as when she is cold and hungry. We almost ended up leaving without most of the items on the list. After buying a bit of bread and milk for her (yes, I went all out for the gourmet dinner), and returning to the car to warm up, eat and get her sweater, we were able to then complete our shopping mission in relative calm. You’d think I would’ve known providing adequate food clothing were among the basics of parenting.

Now, it’s 1:00 a.m., and I am back at work on the abstract re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-write. I’m completely wiped out and cranky and am no longer sure I can manage to get the abstract done. Is it too late to change careers?