Tag Archives: work hangover

November 14, 2011, 2:16 pm

So very tired

Confession: lately when my friends with colds, the flu, or Lyme disease comment on Facebook that they are spending the day in bed with cats, television, and hot tea, I think to myself, “Oh, that sounds so nice.”

I’m tired. So tired that I am, bizarrely, jealous of my friends who are sick. And I feel guilty about feeling tired. I’m still relatively young, I don’t have children, I don’t work more than 40-45 hours a week. I should be able to find time to go to the gym, cook nice dinners, and go out and be social a couple of times a week. I should be able to keep my house cleaner. It’s not too bad, but sometimes it smells like dog, and my desk drawers are a mess. And there’s that one lightbulb in the kitchen that we’ve never gotten around to replacing. Don’t even mention the back yard.

Compared to other people in academia, I always thought I was pretty good at “taking care of myself”…

November 2, 2011, 9:45 am

Recovering from a big project

By Minerva Cheevy

Yesterday I had to turn in a major administrative report, one that took about six weeks to prepare and required bending nearly 400 people to my will. (My spouse says this makes me the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. I like that.) As a result, there are many, many tasks that I put off until November 2: manuscripts to review, a paper to revise and resubmit, encyclopedia chapters that I agreed to write, emails to answer…

Sleeping cat, hiding his face with his paw

What I'd rather be doing right now.

Now I’m sitting here, staring rather blankly at my computer screen wondering where to start. I feel like my brain is broken. It’s like a work hangover. I know I should just put down the Halloween candy, close Firefox, open up any one of these files, and just get started. But all I want to do is go back home, get under the covers, and finish reading…