Friday, May 30, 2008

May

What happened to my May? What the hell?

School ended, work started, we found a new apartment (have to move from the lovely place we're in now because the landlord is becoming a slum lord), and life life life.

Work's good. It's necessitated a change in schedule though - I've gone from being an evening person in all ways to needing to be at work (over 15 mostly country miles from my place) at 8:30 AM. Ugh! But I'm proud to say I managed to do it, mostly. I overslept a bit today but made it in on time with some rushing about. I had been expecting this to be just a short term summer job but I guess they like me because my boss mentioned that she was looking into hiring me "during the semester". I need to follow up on that. At the time, I was on my way off to do something (work related) and so all I had time for was a quick "Oh that'd be great....especially since I am in need of employment".

I like and am good at what I do, which is also a relief.

The down side - there's always a down side. The temporary negative right now is that we're moving, like NOW. My fella's been awesome, as usual, and so he's taken care of much of the move stuff. His diligence, as wonderful as it is, happens to be taxing my "gimp-guilt" as I call it, which relates to potentially more enduring down side of my post-graduate school, employed life my new smaller life on account of having less than stellar health. I swear to god my warranty ran out at 31. Since then I've had more health shit than you can shake a stethoscope at, none of it fully resolvable (by which I mean "curable"), and some of it only marginally treatable. I hate giving the full list of ailments but the highlights includee the endometriosis/adenomyosis and the shitty immune system which is better at attacking me than it is at doing its job on viruses, bacteria, or even (as I've recently learned) fungi. Now that I've put this miserable body to work for normal work hours and something approaching a full work week (so far it's been more like a 30 hour than 40 hour work week), I am confronting the question which was hinted at by my soon to be former advisor when she asked so casually "are you healthy enough to have even a regular job?" I found this question to be rather insulting for a number of reasons but I knew even then that while the context was fucked up, the content is in many ways legitimate. And the answer is...it's hard to know. Perhaps this is just denial, but for now I'm going to say the jury's still out. What I tell myself is that I need to give it more time to know for certain whether the massive fatigue I feel throughout the day even after plenty of sleep and no strenuous activity is just a by product of changing my schedule or if this is a permanent and fixed aspect of my life post 31. If it turns out to be the latter, then yeah, I'm kind of fucked.

For now, there won't be lots of posts here because I'm either at work, asleep, moving, unpacking, or sick and exhausted. The moving and unpacking should be done by mid June and hopefully, the daily sick and exhausted will let up as I adjust. If not, well, there could be lots more posts later while I chronicle the apparently wretched process of filing for disability.

Thursday, May 08, 2008

graddeled

It's like addled, but with grades. Or grads. Or grads grading. Fortunately, there are people out there who make things like this for times like these.