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Location: Home.
Listening: Cars beneath my window.

Again, anyone who can email me with the film my title is taken from gets a cookie. It's from one of my favorite scenes in film.

I had to abandon my earlier entry due to a sudden influx of work and my manager calling from Atlanta at precisely the moment the workload crashed upon me (like a poodle from a tenth story window) to "review your goals and objectives for 2002".

*yip* *oof*

Amusingly, the "Goal" he was most concerned about was that I had incorrectly listed his title on the official form as "Network Engineering Specialist". "I'm a Manager. My title has been Manager for sixteen months now.".

So he was openly miffed that I was not, in his strange, convoluted, former-NSA mind, respecting his authoritah. I almost asked him how his office in the new building in Georgia was working out for him--knowing full well that they still don't have enough office space out there and that he's still in a cubicle just like *gasp* everyone he outranks.

Twit.

Returned home from an amusing but uncharacteristically positive experience at the DMV (nutshell: they sent a letter claiming I owed them $700 for my car registration. I asked for an itemized bill of my "fees". The woman studied the screen for a moment and then announced "Oh girl, it's a typing error. That's supposed to be $66--not $400. I'm glad you caught that." *boggle*) to Austin calling and asking if I was up for an evening of alcohol and basketball on ESPN. We negotiated and pondered, and I finally declined, as I would have to spend the night in Silverlake and then venture the 101S-5S-710S Route of Doom at 6:30 tomorrow morning. No. Just...no.

So here I sit, freshly showered, nibbling on leftover pizza, preparing to slip into footies and watch the director's cut of Bound that Peter, in his Sweetness, was thoughtful enough to queue up for me on NetFlix while he was away. Then early to bed for the Lemur.

For those who might be wondering, I vanquished last night's bout of insomnia in short order. I did indeed march into the bedroom as Hannibal over the mountain, banish the golf club back to its corner, snuggle up to a pillow, and will myself to sleep. I did indeed respect myself in the morning. I spent the rest of the day fighting my sometimes not-so-latent hypochondria and trying to get my ducks in a row before heading out to re-register my car and renew my driver's license, which expires tomorrow.

Because, you see, tomorrow is my birthday.

In approximately twenty-two hours (I count from the hour I was actually born), I will be twenty-six years old. Twenty-five has been, honestly, a difficult year. There's been as much pain as joy, and very few truly calm spots for me. The constant stress started taking its toll months ago, and I've resolved to get it back in hand in this next year. While reading a site on health anxiety today, I stumbled across a psychologist's paper on stress management. When I came to the part that read "It is crucial that we all realize that leisure is not a luxury or a reward for having accomplished all of our tasks, but absolutely necessary for our overall well-being", I became suddenly emotional. I hadn't realized, until that moment, that I had been treating anything "fun" as a stolen pleasure--that I've been struggling with trying to excel at work, at home, in my creative work (and failing that because of partially seeing it as leisure and therefore unworthy), and in my relationship all at once, all the time. Somehow, I had fallen into the cliched "all things to all people" mindset that women since the 60's have apparently been mired in--having to be the aggressive, ambitious worker all day and then coming home and feeling that I must assume the role my mother had of cleaning, cooking, etc. When I've been too tired or too stressed to do so effectively (read: quite often), and Peter has made dinner or taken the lead in deciding the evening's entertainment, I've felt horribly--and turned that blame onto myself, for not being able to "hack it" somehow. The result of this is that academic treatises on learning to stretch out, relax, and just do something that I want to do because I want to do it can now make me want to cry. The author went on to say that [sic] "The roles that women are trying to balance in their lives and the demands that they place on themselves to excel in all of those roles, constantly, is starting to very literally kill them". More women than ever before are dying of heart attacks and other stress-related and/or exacerbated illnesses. Granted, some of the paper was vaguely chauvinist in its undertone of "this is why woman's place is in the home--they are nurterers and unfit for the stresses of the corporate world", but the majority of it rang as objective--and true.

A little known fact about snakes and other reptiles is that they can die from stress alone. If a captive snake is placed in an environment that causes it constant stress, it will eventually die of the pressure placed on it by its own biology. We are, apparently, not so different. Stress triggers the adrenaline response, which in turn triggers the release of all of those lovely chemicals that, while extremely helpful in preparing you to fight for your life, are extremely toxic in constant, high dosages. When we are stressed for long periods of time, our bodies begin to poison themselves--and some studies conducted recently are starting to reveal that women, with their different levels of hormones, etc. might be much more vulnerable to this phenomenon than men.

So basically, I realized that I have to stop the constant fretting about my health, my job, my writing, my past, my future, etc. I also need to cut down on my smoking (which has jumped to almost a pack a day) and my alcohol consumption (because, even though alcohol negates the "fight or flight" response, it is incredibly toxic in its own way) if I want to keep my immune system strong, and my mental state more balanced. My family is extremely long-lived (when my great-grandmother died of pneumonia at eighty-eight, the relatives who attended her funeral kept repeating "What a tragedy--she died so young"), but nature only goes so far and, somewhere, nurture must play its role as well. If I value the things that make my life dear to me--my health, my writing, my relationship with Peter, my academic goals--I must learn to make time to simply relax and enjoy the world around me. To paraphrase Eliot, I must learn to be still.

This is my goal for twenty-six. Considering that I'll be fighting the influence of my parents' triple-A personalities and the unforgiving workaholism that consequently lurks in my own nature, it won't be an easy one to achieve.

Twenty-one hours to go. Wish me luck.