See, I woke up around 7:30, and I felt well-rested, and the sun was brightly shining through my window, and I had been having some relatively pleasant dream. If I'd gotten up then, all would've been well. But since I'm not teaching today and don't have to be on campus until 12:30, I decided I could stay in bed a little longer, so I dozed until 8:00. By which point the sun had disappeared between clouds, my body had started feeling a bit sluggish, and I'd had some semi-unpleasant half-dreams. This always seems to happen when I try to snatch a little more sleep; you'd think I would have learned by now.
But it's not so bad as all that. I finished my silly driver's course yesterday (and may I note in indignation that I spent hours and hours working through that damned notebook, and the girl just picked it up, flipped through it to make sure there was writing on every page, and then checked it off the list -- argh!). Their exam was ludicrously easy -- I haven't thought about driving stuff since last spring, and I still managed to get 90% in the ten minutes I spent on the test. (You need 80% to pass -- that means you can get 20 out of a 100 answers wrong!!) I don't know what these people think they're doing, but they sure aren't teaching anyone anything. I also spent at least two hours getting down to Sandy and back for this 10 minute nuisance...but I'm letting it go. I'm letting it all go. I'm done with the course, and tomorrow Paul will drive me to the DMV and I can take the written test and schedule a driving test and if it looks like I won't get in there before the end of April, I can pay $25 and schedule a driving test with my driving school and trek all the way down to Sandy again and be done with the damn thing one way or the other by the end of April. I suppose I might fail the driving test. There's no possible way I can fail the written test. I can't believe they let people out on the streets with this kind of training. Don't they know that they're giving incompetent 16-year-old's the keys to free-wheeling death machines?
Anyway, it's done, and the stupid notebook is out of my house, which is a relief. The plan for this morning is to finish up a few more overdue tasks; if I'm good about them, then I might even not be overdue on anything by lunchtime. That can't be right. I'm sure I'm forgetting something. It's a nice thought, though... I'll finish my dishes, and make a nice big batch of chicken and potato curry, and then I'll go off to class, and then run some errands (because Kathryn's out of town, speaking at Yale), and then meet with Melanie, and then I have two hours to kill before a 5:30 meeting, so if I'm good I'll find a quiet spot and read Nabokov. Although finding Susan and playing some pool is also an option.
I've just had too many unfinished things hanging over me for too long, I think. That's the real trouble with taking lots of projects on; it's not that I won't have time to do them, but that with each one I add, a part of my brain gets a little more anxious. On Myers-Briggs, I'm ENTJ or ENFJ, pretty evenly split between T and F, but the relevant bit is that I am way over on the J side of things. If you're not familiar with this personality test, the key to know here is that people who are strongly J (judgement) really hate leaving things up in the air. If there's a decision to be made, then we like to just make it as soon as possible. We don't like waiting for more information. We don't like thinking it over longer. We really hate 'wait and see'. (Kevin is far over on the P side of things, which we eventually figured out was one of the reasons we had trouble with some sorts of decisions -- real, frustrating trouble. It helps a little knowing that it's just our personality-types clashing, and not that the other person is being deliberately difficult. A bit. :-) So I've had a whole ton of things in the last couple of months that have been wait-and-see or deal-with-it-later for various reasons, and that just drives me batty. I think I'm starting to come out of it now, though. Fingers crossed.
One side of my sunroom faces east, where huge grey banks of clouds are hanging over the mountains. But the windows to the west show tall trees reaching up into a bright blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. No sun yet, but possibly soon. I'm gonna face west for a while...
9:45. Added the sf market database to my own pages, so that I can continue updating it. I find it a useful tool for myself. I was delighted to see that since I wrote the piece, Chiaroscuro has moved from semi-pro to pro; that's terrific! Hoping they can keep it up!