So Much to Do

Spring semester: day seventy-one

It's 45 degrees outside and raining. In response, my allergies have once again gone completely nuts.

You know, I thought I was done with all of this allergy shit; we had almost two weeks where the temperatures were in the 70s and 80s straight through, with very little rain and wind, and my seasonal allergies had normalized and all but disappeared. No longer did I wake up in the mornings and blow my nose forty times or hack up a lung, because I could actually breathe without mucus obstructing any and all of my airways. It felt good. I felt like a normal human being for once. And then the high temperatures dropped by twenty or thirty degrees, it began raining cold rain, and the wind became near-constant 30mph or higher gusts -- so strong that it knocked my big trash/recycling bins over twice yesterday. And they're not light or small.

One week from today is my last day of classes. This is the last Tuesday morning I'll need to be awake at 5AM for the rest of the semester, and the last long, fifteen-hour day of the semester for me. I've been waiting for this day for a long while. Obviously. Today I will get gas, drive to West campus, collect my 102 students' final papers, give them their practice exam, drive across town to main campus, wait in the parking lot for one of my friends so that he can pick up a box of poetry books I promised him, take the shuttle to my office building, give another friend a video game I promised her, make copies of my 102's final exams, sit in my office grading those aforementioned final papers as long as I can stand to, stay awake, go teach my last real 011 class of the semester (next week they take their own practice final), dismiss, take the shuttle back to my car, drive said car back to Newton, stop at Walmart to get groceries, and (finally) arrive back home around 10:30 or 11PM an exhausted, frazzled mess.

I don't get paid enough for this shit. I suppose that's why Daisy's parents -- who admire what I do for the reasons I do it -- still call it "slave labor." If I had to do it five days a week, I'd probably call it that too...and I'd more than likely be suicidal if I were still paid the same amount. Ironically enough, with everything Daisy and I have to deal with regarding the move and the wedding, I'm now sort of glad that I didn't get four or five classes this semester, even though the money would have been nice -- the workload, with all of this current stuff on top of it now -- probably would have killed me. I'm already having mini-nightmares about things going wrong with the move or with the wedding. Mini-nightmares meaning that as I'm falling asleep some little worry will worm its way into my head and I'll wake up again, fully, with a start.

It's stress. Simply put, it's stress and worry and anxiety.

"Shit will go wrong," Parker told me last week. "It will, despite your best plans and best intentions. Don't let it get to you, because it will seem major at the time when it's really not. Just push it aside and work through it. It'll all work out."

He's right, of course. Daisy tells me a variation of the same message when I'm stressed out too, and she's right as well. It's all mental, and I just have to put my head down and power through all of it.

Daisy got a three-piece furniture set yesterday -- a couch, loveseat, and chair (if I remember correctly) -- as well as a full-body adjustable floor mirror and an ottoman with storage space inside to go along with the chair. She got a good deal on all of it (of course, it's not like any of it was cheap anyway) and we qualified for the credit card/financing plan that Nebraska Furniture Mart offered -- 36 months with 0% interest. Even if we pay only the minimum payment every month, it'll all be paid off in 22 months, as she did the math there. The couch and the loveseat were, surprisingly, ones that I told her to get because I liked them. The chair she got because she and mama (who went with her) both loved it. It all gets delivered to the new place on her moving-in day (basically, a week from today) so that she can set it up and get everything ready before I move my own stuff up there later in the month.

Daisy calls it "socializing furniture." My response to that was, "what, you mean it talks to you? Does it moan when you sit on it? Sit on me harder, baby, and all that?"

Unfortunately, that's not the case; it's furniture that she says will make our new place feel like a home, and will be good for when we have guests. For example, Rae is staying with us for at least two of the days she's in town for the wedding, I expect my parents to come visit and see the new place, and my friend Jane will stop by as well (she wants to meet the cats). And, obviously, we have a lot more friends in Omaha who will stop by for visits.

Anyway, she paid extra for the workers to deliver it and bring it into our new place, which I agreed was well worth the money as it would be a huge pain in the ass otherwise. Apparently it's also stain-protected and if it does stain, we can call someone to have them come to the house and get the stain out. I'm not making that up. So, uh, whatever works, I guess.

Despite the fact that I'm going to be really busy/swamped this week with a ton of stuff to do, I am once more in relatively good spirits. This could be because my coffee is finally kicking in, or because I can see the light at the end of the tunnel a little more by the day, or both. For the moment, it's even stopped raining. I'm still tired, though; I was tired last night, but it took me forever to actually fall asleep. Part of that was because I didn't take my normal Monday night sleeping pills, and part of it was because my body didn't want to go to sleep at 10PM or so. It was well after midnight when I actually fell asleep, I'm sure. Since I don't have to leave the house tomorrow (and I know I'm going to be exhausted by the time I get home tonight) I have decided that for one day, let most of my responsibilities be damned, because I need to go to bed tonight and hopefully not awaken before noon tomorrow. I'll still be busy as hell when I do get up, and will still have a lot of things to do, but my body needs sleep more than most of those things need to be (immediately) done.

Meanwhile, for some reason Daisy and her best friend/maid of honor are making a trip to Des Moines today -- some spur-of-the-moment thing. Daisy doesn't go back to work for her week until tomorrow night, so she actually has the time and energy to do this. For what? I don't know; she didn't tell me, and she's still asleep right now. I'm sure she'll message me to tell me when she wakes up, though I probably won't get to read my messages until late afternoon at least. Her entire trip there and back will take place during the time I'm on campus this afternoon -- which should tell you just how long and grueling my Tuesdays are.

Last night, as I mentioned before, the brother of one of my colleagues brought up his truck and loaded a bunch of my stuff into it for said colleague and another friend in the department; I gave them a table, two chairs, and a file cabinet that I have no use for whatsoever. I'd originally planned to give them bookshelves and the like as well, but I wasn't able to get them hosed off this weekend (some of them are in the garage) or cleaned off within the house. Truthfully the bookshelves are terrible and half-broken anyway, so I doubt anyone would want them. I told my colleagues/friends that they didn't need to give me any money for the stuff, as it was stuff I was going to give away at the yard sale this weekend anyway, but they both insisted on giving me something that they said I could use to help cover "moving costs." While I'd normally turn that down outright and wave it off simply because getting rid of the clutter and extra shit is more valuable to me than anything else, I am also quite worried about money (as you know) and if they want to pay me a small amount for the stuff, I won't refuse it -- even if it does make me feel somewhat guilty. When your fiancee spends over a grand on furniture in one day and adds another minimum payment bill to the pile, and when I do have to pay close to $400 to rent a moving truck...yeah, anything helps. My friend who's meeting me this morning to pick up the box of books asked me how much I wanted for them as well. I told him I didn't really care, that it was totally up to him to be the judge. Again, it's more important and more fulfilling to me to get stuff out of the house than it is to worry about charging my friends for things of mine they want. That sort of makes me feel like an asshole.

Still, the books are my poetry collections I bought for studying for comps, and there's probably 30 of them total -- most of which I bought new at full price on Amazon a year and a half ago. I probably spent $200 on them overall, so if said friend wants to pay me a bit of cash for them, I'm also sort of fine with that.

In about ten minutes, I shall leave the house to start my day. I'm awake enough to get it over with, I suppose. I don't necessarily want to do it, but I keep telling myself that it's the last long day I'll have, and because of that I can just suck it up and deal.