i hope this counts as "work."

Today is a very strange day, friends. Today is a Sunday. Today is sort of a pause in the middle of all the plans Michael and I have been making. It's a little between period, a border. Today is calm and peaceful.

It's driving me crazy.

Today is so boring. I have guilt about today. Over the past month I've gotten into a routine of working from home, taking classes from home, applying for more work I can do at home, all while doing a whole bunch of other stuff outside my home. Today I am just sitting here in front of the computer doing absolutely nothing. Connor is taking a marathon nap. All of my paying work is done, and I haven't gotten any new work. My schoolwork is all done. The apartment is as clean as it ever gets, and I am even on top of the laundry situation.

I don't know what to do with today. Tomorrow starts a whole new segment of this year's festivities. Tomorrow, Michael and I start house-hunting in a different town. Tomorrow I pick up my first check in a couple of months, a check for some serious money that we will use to do serious things. (Well, and also some not-so-serious things.) Tomorrow I will need to do more schoolwork. Today, though, I am sitting at my desk surfing Pamie's archives while eating ice cream.

I've convinced myself, over the past month or so, that if I'm going to work and attend school from home, I must be working every single second of every single day. I am terrified that if I take an hour to answer email or goof around on LiveJournal, I will morph into one of those people who thinks “working from home” means “sitting around in your underwear getting dropped from one project after another because the word 'deadline' might as well be in Japanese to you.” I have busted my ass over the past seven months to get myself into this position, this place where I can head into a different educational field while also putting myself into the employment position of my dreams. I'm still working at it; the jobs I have gotten so far are so tiny as to be invisible… except that they pay. They pay me for doing what I like to do, which is crack silly jokes and correct other people's grammar. So, in the face of that overwhelming wonderfulness, I seem to have soaked up some sort of Puritan work ethic: if I'm going to be given this great opportunity, I better work twice as hard to not fuck it up.

I have been. I have been working really hard. Yeah, 90% of that work involves sitting on my butt in my own living room, but it's a new arena to me. It's exciting and brain-taxing and strange. Today just makes me antsy about all of this. What if I get off-schedule and end up doing nothing tomorrow too? What if I get two days behind on all of my stuff, thus becoming so overwhelmed by my backlog that I just give up and have to go back to serving drinks or changing diapers? What if I fail all of my classes and we can't move to Clovis and we're stuck in this stupid crappy apartment for all eternity?

People, please. Give me a project and a deadline. Point an imperious finger at me and spout some lame management maxim like, “If you can lean, you can clean.” Write something with lots of dangling participles and misplaced prepositions. Help a sister out, here.