Between the 8-4 corporate day job, the kids’ schedules (and their personalities!), helping plan an epic Halloween party for middle-schoolers, keeping calendars for 3-4 different groups of people, writing for me, reading, beer-making, personal hygiene, getting to PT for the bad back, learning to play ukelele, scanning photos from the dark ages of film, and trying to have a social life involving face-to-face human interaction, I’m wondering why it seems I spend most of my non-work time sitting on the couch playing Words with Friends and catching up on Twitter while forgetting to finish my beer.

So the nagging question I constantly push on myself, because I need more nagging, is: what could I do with that time if I devoted it to the betterment of humanity? I tell myself I could do really cool stuff, making videos, writing songs, writing meaningful, publishable works… But I suspect the answer is really probably not a hell of a lot. This is because I’m on empty, because my brain of jelly might really explode if I push things much further, and then not only would there be no betterment, there would be a hell of a mess for someone else to clean up, and I’m not sure my life insurance covers cleaning exploded gelatinous brain matter off the walls. Post-mortem guilt I do not need…

This is my favorite self-portrait, because it captures my overwhelmed feelings, and also, my hair looks pretty good.

I drew it to go with a little scribble on insomnia, but really, it looks a lot like me on most days.

So I took tomorrow off from work to go to the beach for the weekend with a group of friends to celebrate my friend Scott’s 40th birthday, only now I don’t want to go because I’m all stressed out about who’s going, and will they care about how fat I look in my bathing suit, and omg a hot tub? No, I don’t do that sort of thing, and what if they want to go out and dance, and I just want to sit and breathe, and maybe even read a bit, because I could really use some quiet salt-air reading… Plus the place isn’t even really on the beach, just near the beach, so will it be worth all that angst to take a shuttle when I really just want to listen to the waves and pretend I’m alone? This is why my face looks like that in the picture. This sort of crap is going on in my head all the time.

This is what I want.

I still haven’t decided if I’m going yet, but Scott said on Facebook he plans to just pick me up tonight and drag me away. I did not respond. John is being his usual awesome self and saying either way, just don’t stress about it. But he can’t come because he has a gig, and if I stayed I could go out to his gig and that would be fun too, except then I’d feel like I had to do all these other things I should do for the whole weekend. I’m just full of shoulds and reasons. Funny how I’m stressing about how to de-stress. I wonder what I’ll end up doing? At least my own life gets to be like a mystery story, sometimes, which is kind of sweet.