Self-Indulgent Ramblings

…people have families. It’s not for the companionship and the love and the tax breaks. It’s so that they can actually schedule vacation time from work. All year, my coworkers schedule a week with their families in Jamaica or a long weekend on the coast… and no one questions it because they’re going with the family and you don’t change that.

Me… I don’t have a family. When I FINALLY find a hole in the schedule where I can take one measly day off, it’s easy to cancel that cuz, hey, it’s not like I’m going anywhere. It’s not like anyone else is affected by it. So sure, let’s just go ahead and cancel that day off. You can take it next month.

Until next month… when we have to cancel it again.

I’m so sick of this crap. And I am in an excruciatingly bad mood right now.

First spending the morning working on a client I don’t enjoy, then spending what should have been my lunch break talking about why it’s completely impossible to schedule a vacation day, and then… when I was about to go to lunch after all… getting roped into a conversation about real life desperate housewives who have nothing but money and leisure.

And now it’s raining so hard that I can’t run to my car for lunch.

It’s one of those days. One of those days when people asking you stupid questions will just make your head explode.

Okay… you know how much it pisses me off when people start a big hubbub about nothing, and then everyone else lets them turn it into a big hubbub. I hate it when people overreact. It just makes me angry. And I’m so pissy about my job these days anyway, that any time someone sets out to make it more unpleasant, I feel the need to scream. One person doesn’t understand that cookies are a necessary part of survey software (because they’re old and don’t understand computers to begin with) so they email our client to complain and, since our client doesn’t understand computers, they panic and email us. And because my account manager doesn’t understand computers, she has to panic and wants to call the survey company, and all they could possibly tell her is, “well, that’s how it’s built.” So I have to hear about it. I have to calm people down, I have to explain how things work… but all anyone else wants to do is make a big fat hairy deal out of it.

Just shut the hell up and stop bugging me! I can’t be responsible for one idiot.

Man… I am consistently in a bad mood lately.

AND… I was supposed to get to take this Friday off… since I have 5.5 days of vacation I’m supposed to use by the end of May (that we’ve actually had to extend into June because they keep turning down my requests)… and now it looks like I’m not going to be able to take Friday after all. What the hell.

I hate everyone.

I have a sunburn. On my tummy. I mean, I’m red on my chest and my arms and my nose, but the only place it really hurts is on my tummy. Yesterday I spent four hours with my friend Kathie drinking wine and sunning ourselves on her driveway.

And now I have a sunburn on my tummy.

I’ve been on a business trip for the last two weeks… and now I’m back in the office. I keep trying to schedule vacation, but it keeps getting pushed off. My vacation days actually expire at the end of May… and they’re talking about extending it to June because they keep postponing my vacation time. And I can’t even figure out exactly why I want a vacation. I don’t know where I would go or what I would do. I couldn’t take just hanging around Greenville with nothing to do. That would bore me to tears. I don’t have the money to go to London to visit my cousin. I can’t expect my {gulp} boyfriend to be able to take off the same time as me. It seems almost pointless. Just let the days expire. What do I care? I would have wasted them anyway. BUT… I’m exhausted. And I am spread thin. Here’s the count:

2 weeks on the road
5 airports
6 airplanes
2 clients
30+ interviews
3 hotels
4 hotel rooms
4 coworkers
1 old college friend
5 ferrets (pets of 1 old college friend)
13 tollbooths

And now that I’m back, I have

1 client presentation tomorrow
1 internal presentation tomorrow
1 client presentation next week
1 new client meeting next week
2 business trips in May
and
1 angry kitty

And I’m getting itchy because it’s been such a long time since I’ve been in a show, so I have no outlet whatsoever. And my {gulp} boyfriend is always in a show and there’s a part of me that’s really jealous and I wish I had the time to audition occasionally, but they just send me out of town at the drop of a hat… so I can’t commit to anything more than a couple of weeks in advance so I can’t do any of what I want to be doing and it’s making me NUTS!

{shrug}

I am currently sitting in the window box in my hotel in Baltimore… my second in a three-city tour of the scrapbooking capitols of the US. Our day isn’t too booked, so I’m catching up on other work and, of course, procrastinating by writing my personal blog post. I just watched an odd occurrence outside of my hotel room window. I only caught the end of it, so my knowledge is limited, but it seemed strange nonetheless. I watched a cavalcade of Budweiser-branded semis drive through downtown Baltimore with a police escort. Yup. I had no idea cheap beer was so revered here.

Los Angeles was my first stop, and it was awesome. Los Angeles is always a weird place for me, since it’s where my grandparents used to live. Heck, the last two times I visited it was for their respective funerals, so I felt that very strongly as I wandered around the airport. Plus, we went to Disneyland on Saturday… and that was awesome. The two people I was traveling with had only ever been to Disney World, so they kept talking about how small things were, etc. But for me, it was coming home. I had always gone to Disneyland… and I love it! I almost cried when I walked through the main gates which read “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” I just love Disneyland. Plus… they just re-did Space Mountain… and it was awesome.