iGoogle, do Yoogle?

Last night was one of those nights I should never have even thought of trying to sleep. After putting the Things to bed at 10, I started watching one of the best of all time shows ever, "Monsters Inside Me," but after a few tales of people with worms and stuff I nodded off on the couch while Biff did something at the home computer and it was all strangely unsatisfying. Like I was waiting for something to happen, or felt anxious about something NOT happening, and so when I woke up at 11 I was grouchy and sleepy and probably a little rude.

Oh yes, my friends, I am a wonderful wife and mother. Mostly. OK, largely. All right, I TRY, but not at 11 p.m. At that point I'm on autopilot and feel lucky to change out of my lounge pants and into PJs.

Shut up - don't tell me YOU don't have graduated levels of comfort. You do, and you know it.

So, anyhow, then I went to bed.

And then my brain went apeshit on me and dreamed failure dreams, then woke up, then fell back to sleep, then dreamed confusion dreams, then woke up again, rinse and repeat. I was up at 1:30 when Biff came to bed, back up at 2 when he got back up, fell asleep, woke up again at 2:37, felt anxious, peed, fell back to sleep, was up at 4:37 (how punctual!) laid there fretting, tossed, turned and finally just said fuck this and got up.

All the while, of course, I KNEW why I was so strange and irritable: work. The project I was supposed to deliver today didn't get delivered, I KNEW how much of it was my fault (about half)and my head was going around like Regan Macneil's, spinning infinite strands of excuses and self-hatred. It is at these hours that my powers of self-castigation are legion, and I can whip up some hurtful flails of loathing tipped with shards of glass-sharp disgust, then go all Shi'ite and whip away until all I can feel is an aching head and a twisted knot where my stomach should be.

It is also at these moments that the way forward becomes horrifyingly crystal clear, which is why one could have found me at 5:30 this morning writing a note of apology to those who thought they might have gotten the project today, booting it to tomorrow. It was also at 5:30 that I started working furiously, trying like mad to catch up to where I was supposed to have, in my mind, been by now.

Oh, and those people at work who I thought for sure would have been disappointed in my lack of adherence to timelines and failure to perform? Made not so much as one peep about the delay. As a matter of fact, one person was still, uh, giving me comments on draft 1 today at noon (due a week ago, if that's any indication), so maybe I'm just making myself crazy?

Be that as it may...., it's almost 9, and I'm starting up again. I'll be jiggered if the team doesn't have at least 3/4ths of this horribly complicated beast by tomorrow to look at. I fought my way through the worst of it today, dong the tasks I've put off for a week, and mapped the rest of the plan out in each subsequent part of the project, so that all I need to do is follow the trail of comments from point a to point 8 bajillion, and I'm done.

In truth, it feels good to have gotten done what I did today, but lo doth it suck to have to spend my night in a furious rampage of 'shoulda done.'

My God, if I worked all the time like I did today, this company would only need to have 2 employees: me, and the cafeteria lady.

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Tiff out. Or on. Ya know?