I have always been an early riser but these days, I am up by 5 am. No matter what time I go to bed. (AH still needs the whole 8+ hours thing which sometimes infuriates me and makes me want to stomp around shouting that saying I've read on baby onesie's "Sleep is for the Weak!" but to no avail, he slumbers on.) This should be a good time to do things for myself. I would like very much to use this time to go to the gym. I have a special deal through the University that makes gym going affordable and lord knows I need, need, need it. I much prefer getting my exercise incidentally, by commuting by bike or doing errands by walking and not the car but HA! - I live here. With a baby. So I really really wish I could use the gym at 5 or 6 am. But it opens at 7, which means the soonest I could return would be 8 am which is the time we leave the house en masse for our various days and in between then, the baby needs attending to. On weekends it opens at 9 am, which drives me even more bonkers. It is open until midnight but this does not help me at all. Have I mentioned I am up at 5 am every day? There is no going to the gym at even 9 pm, no way. There are a variety of reasons I can't use an exercise tape that have to do with space and the fact that if I get up and the baby so much as hears me crack our bedroom door then she makes it plain that she too is awake and ready for company. So between 5 am and 7 am I generally read, because that is important to me too and it is a silent activity so the baby won't hear me. Also, I worry worry worry because that is just how I roll,and also because it is warranted- times are tight everywhere I'm sure. Everyone asks me if I'm enjoying Christmas Break and I just kinda want to punch them in the face because classes have stopped but work rolls on, actually work is more plentiful than ever because I'm making up all the hours I had to ditch while doing final papers etc. So classes end, I work more AND there is the holidays and the resultant To Do lists. But no homework, so that is good. I don't feel real hot about how I ended the semester - a horrifyingly bad presentation, some friction with professors I have deemed incompetent and because I can't hide ANYTHING, they know it, just a whole ton of stress in the final weeks that I likely didn't handle well. I hope next semester goes better. I'm torn between how feeling like I have a bad perception of how I am doing and how it is all going and feeling like this is just another part of my life I will screw up and barely squeak through because of this odd indifference and ennui that takes over when I've been doing something for awhile. If it wasn't so laughable, I would totally like a life coach right now, to correct my form a little.
On the side of the balance sheet that reads ASSHOLE but has (sorta justified) written next to it, I got really really really mad at AH last week while writing my final paper and freaking about Christmas and the state of the house in general. For instance, there was a vacuum in the middle of the hallway that I was leaving as a test to see how many times he would walk right around it and not put it away. (I ended up doing it). Anyway, I looked over and he was doing something on his computer - frittering time, I felt then - and I did not sweetly ask if he could help out with some items on our To Do list. Instead, I barked it. And he replied that he was waiting for me to be done school so we could do these things together because if he did it alone, it would be wrong and I would get mad. I am not a raving perfectionist but do you hear me on this point, that sometimes there IS a right and wrong way to do something? Anyway,I assured him rather tersely that I thought he could cut up our Christmas cards without me hovering over him and so please, go ahead and try! So he shuffles around in the other room for a minute and I'm thinking to myself, "If you come and ask me WHERE the cards are, so help me, I will explode ..."and instead he comes back in the room with the cards and seriously, a pair of the dullest, gummiest scissors that I use to hack open horrible clamshell packaging and stab at boxes with and basically anything that doesn't need a sharp edge and I see the scissors and debate saying anything but goddamned, we have 8 superfine pairs of scissors in the same basket and x-acto knives and everything one could need to make a nice clean cut - but he somehow finds the ONE pair that will.not.do. I said something. It did not please him. We're going to try to cut the cards today, together. Sigh. It sounds like reductionist sexist stereotyping but man, seriously, sometimes men can't grasp the details. What makes me feel bad is how he never ever chides me, not even the next night when I went out for beers with a friends and didn't tell him and he came to pick me up and waited and then picked up our kid and fed her alone and then when I brought my friend home unannounced for dinner and more end of semester beers, he greeted us all kind and smiles and you better BELIEVE I would have been bitchy about it, if not in front of company, than later but nope, nary a word of reproach. You see why I struggle with liking myself, most of these days.