cygnoir.net

Because sitting in my office with the door closed while eating a wilted salad and trying not to cry is not an acceptable new hobby, here is the briefest of notes on our trip to Portland.

It feels so good to take a risk — traveling with friends — and have it turn out better than I could have hoped. Although it is always nice to have alone-time with FunkyPlaid, the four of us made a great team.

The highlights were many, and involved eating, geocaching, and visiting with friends. There was only one lowlight, in the form of an overpriced and disappointing meal at Bluehour, which I will be reviewing in detail soon. In fact, I have decided to dedicate a portion of this site to reviews, focusing on but not limited to my culinary adventures. It’s well past time.

Portland is enchanting. I love the Pacific Northwest for so many reasons, but the people I meet there consistently impress me. Seattle and Vancouver are more culturally diverse, and therefore more compelling to me, but Portland is so charming and quaint without being precious that I could easily see myself living there.

FunkyPlaid and I are Active Travelers, which is a kind way of saying that we neglect to schedule downtime and end up rather frazzled on the last days of our vacation. We ran out of time before we ran out of things we wanted to do and people we wanted to see, so we’ll just have to go back.

The big orange bird carries the mother to the last bastion of American liberals! Well, kind-of liberals. Anyway: marssie is en route!

There is no better phrase for it: I am burned out. I don’t remember ever being this burned out. As I stopped to ponder why this is hitting me so hard now, I realized I haven’t had a vacation for almost two years. This is the longest period of time I have gone without traveling in my entire life.

Work hasn’t become more difficult, but my ability to deal with it objectively is faltering. Being a manager and being in public service means I am always on even when I don’t feel like it.  There is no hiding or taking it easy.  My coworkers have been very understanding, but they also work under the same restrictions.  Such is the way of the library professional.

Although my health has improved lately, I still have off days, sometimes triggered by hidden gluten, and other times triggered by an unknown allergy or intolerance I have yet to figure out. Because I have limited sick time that I have to use for doctor’s appointments, I feel a great amount of pressure not to take time off work, even when I am feeling lousy.

At home, all I want to do is relax.  The thought of cooking for an hour or two after coming home from work is daunting.  Also daunting is the prospect of being social after a day of “social work” at the library.  I barely have the wherewithal to read some RSS feeds, let alone be productive.  Just thinking about putting energy into a focus-intensive game like World of Warcraft makes me weary.

What is most disturbing about this level of burnout is that I am not myself.  I react to things differently, with less patience and less gentleness than I ever have; I sleep fitfully and not enough; I confuse timelines and threads, awkwardly mixing past and present.  This loss of continuity and consistency unmoors me.  

All I want to do is run away.

This is not particularly how I wanted to approach this trip, this culmination of years of planning and wishing.  In fact, this is exactly the opposite mindset I need to have.  And yet the pressure of knowing that I have two days to wrest my attitude from two years of burnout is immense.

Once we are there, of course, I am sure it will take me no time at all to unfurl all these crumpled-up parts of my psyche.  Until then, I am making myself and probably everyone else miserable.  But I am tired of being nice, as awful as that is to say.  I feel as if my overwhelming drive to be nice, to smooth over rough edges, to acquiesce has more than a little to do with why I am this burned out.

I gave up and ordered a new camera battery charger. The old one must be somewhere, but I have no time before our upcoming trip to Scotland to sort through all of my boxes. Believe me, there will be some serious purging of useless belongings happening when I return.

My handy countdown widget tells me that only 23 days remain until our trip. It is so paltry to say that I am excited to see this beloved country, this heart-home of my beloved, and to meet and re-meet friends far away. I am beyond excited. Every time I read a page in a guidebook I start bouncing in my chair and have to put it down.

I know that no small part of my excitement stems from a frantic need to be Not-Here for a short time. Living in San Francisco has become exhausting, and because this is such an amazing city I know my fuse must be particularly short.  I have not had a proper vacation, even a weekend getaway, in almost a year.  I also admit some weariness around the subject of American politics.

So I avoided the topic as much as possible over the weekend.  FunkyPlaid and I actually had an entire weekend to ourselves, and it was excellent, only marred by the news of David Foster Wallace’s death. Others have been much more eloquent than I could be, than I have tried to be multiple times tonight in eulogy.

This perfectionist phase of writing silence does not suit me. In part, I am paranoid because I know that not everyone reading this thinks well of me, and so instead of inciting critique for whichever turn of phrase I keep silent.  We then encounter the usual “you can’t control what other people think of you” argument, which leads me quickly to the “yes but why NOT” denial, usually appended with “especially when I haven’t done anything to THEM” tantrum.

That doesn’t matter. None of it matters. What you think of me, what I think of you — in the grand and happy quilt of meaning, we’re not even stitches.  I don’t write here to be loved; I write here because I am compelled to connect through words. If our connection involves your loathing or disdain, so be it.  It is what it is, and nothing more.

And to think this all began with a lost piece of technology.

I can hardly sit still long enough to write this entry — today FunkyPlaid and I bought our tickets for our trip to Scotland this autumn!  We will be there for just over two weeks, and it will be my first time in Scotland.  FunkyPlaid lived there while he earned his graduate degree in Scottish history, and he has been there many times, so I will have an excellent guide.  My visit to Scotland is also laced with emotional symbolism; FunkyPlaid and I spent two rollercoaster months getting to know each other before he moved to Edinburgh, and I was more than a little envious of his big adventure.  Existing in Edinburgh with him will bring that part of our history full-circle.  It will also be a litmus test to see if I can stand to live there in the future when FunkyPlaid moves back for his doctorate, although truthfully I can stick it out anywhere for a few years.

I am so grateful for the ability to and predilection for travel.  Ever since I was born, my parents instilled in me a great love of seeing new places which has only grown.  Today at a gathering of friends at the Palace of Fine Arts, someone was talking about visiting Zanzibar, and I immediately thrilled at the thought of being there someday myself.  I hope to get to see as many places on my long, long list as possible.

(This entry is part of one month of gratitude.)