while I pondered, weak and weary

Caution: long, bitching, rambling post ahead.

I can’t sleep. This is the second time in a relatively brief period, when for many, many months I have not had this problem. I feel concerned about this.

Today was one of the worst days I’ve ever had since I took this fucking job. The reasons involve a very nice lady who died due to negligence, her three mourning adult children, and deadlines that poof! suddenly came upon the attorney who asked me to answer the interrogatories in her case. It took me all day to do this task, and on into the evening, and if she’d taken just an hour to train me and help me…but that is just one of the problems. I didn’t get to do any of my other work, and by the time I got around to it more than an hour after the office closed, my ridiculously out-of-date computer decided to run a virus scan which it didn’t need and caused a delay of three minutes plus to open a file. Much less save it and attach it to an email. And I didn’t have network permission to shut down the scan.

I also found out that not only is the furlough totally non-negotiable, even if I want to work for free on a furlough day because EP has no ability to manage deadlines, but we’re also getting paid several days late this pay period because the firm has. No. Money. OG chose to tell us this the day before supposed-to-be-payday, instead of warning us of the possibility some days earlier. She promised she’d make it up to us sometime in the next few months, when there’s more money in the bank. Cf. “you’ll have a new computer before Thanksgiving” (I know I bring it up a lot, but my computer is running Windows Fucking 2000, which is a ten-year-old OS. Inexcusable!). Also, I find “make it up to us” so vague as to be impossible to believe.

Part of the reason the interrogs took me all day is my own fear and avoidance and laziness, I admit, but another part is the utter lack of a deadline – or training – given to me by EP, until suddenly they were due in two days. Two days when I was furloughed. Because it was my first time doing interrogs, I have no idea if I did them right or just made more work for EP, for which she will punish me with iciness and isolation. I keep trying to tell myself that I did my best, I did my best. That’s all I could do, with so few resources. But there were so many little bitty pieces that were left undone. The legal profession is so much more sloppy than I thought it was when I first went into it that those little bitty pieces may not in fact matter whatsoever, but I never know what’s going to matter and what’s not.

So here I sit. Awake. I watched an episode of Good Eats on BF’s laptop (standard before-sleep fare), felt sleepy, and started drifting off, and then I had a half-dream/half-vision of an enormous spider retracting up towards the ceiling of my bedroom, its claw-legs moving, and I was thence fully awake. I tried to relax for a good hour, but here I am instead, with a cup of chamomile tea, fucking worn out from my horrible day but unable to sleep.

The worst thing that will happen in the immediate future is that a deposition will get moved back, and that happens every day, I swear, but it’s still not something I want to happen on my account. Enough! I did my best!

I think.

I, for one, can recite “The Raven” (or at least the first few verses of it) far more easily than “Casey at the Bat”, but for those of you who haven’t watched that Simpsons Halloween Special enough times, these are the lines I’m thinking of right now:

Once upon a midnight dreary
While I pondered, weak and weary
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…
Eagerly I wished the morrow
Vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow…

I guess I can be grateful that I have no lost Lenore to pine over. I hear she’s a rare and radiant maiden.

Tomorrow I have a furlough day, so the good news is I’ll be able to nod, nearly napping, at any time. I may or may not be planning to enter a Writer’s Digest contest, with entry fees I can’t really afford right now, but I’m all “what the hell” about it. Monday I have an appointment to see a man about a leg (actually a lady doctor, about my leg), so it’s easier for me to be furloughed on Monday too, and then it’s another week of whatever will be thrown at me next. I know a four-day weekend sounds nice, but I’ll be spending most of it worrying about what I should have tried to slot in during this past week, when no one was asking me to do anything. Until Thursday.

I think I’ll write up an account of Wednesday’s interesting home practice tomorrow. It might help me relax a little. I wish I’d had the chance to do yoga today; I think I reactivated the healed pinched nerve in my neck from hunching in misery over my desk all day, and my shoulders and lower back are complaining a little from compression they haven’t been accustomed to for years. But I didn’t get the chance to eat much today, much less do yoga.

My tea is drunk. My cup is emptied. I’m going to try for sleep again. Thanks for listening.