Taking Time Off

I'm horrendously tired at the moment.

They say opposites attract. I find this is rather, oddly, true of most of the people I hang out with; somehow they're all the boisterous kind, full of bobance and bounce, whose life is fricasseed eels and I'm channeling Puddleglum today, it seems. But 'tis true; it was driven home today, when I spent a strange couple of hours doing what was meant to be "chillaxing" (the etymology eludes me); I was there, with Announce-chan and two other friends, whom I think I've not yet named, or if I've named them before I've forgotten it.

I should go into further detail so as to provide an adequate context for my narrative.

Since the 27th (the date of the last post!), there has hardly been a day that I didn't have a meeting of some sort, or people to discuss things with or homework to catch up to or a project that needed rushing. My Google Calendar, the main way I keep track of all the things I need to do, assures me that if a busy life is a happy life then I'm absolutely hilarious.

And oh boy, hilarity is tiring. Lack of sleep is the norm rather than the exception, the bags under my eyes will soon have to pay rent given the length of time they've been staying, and such contact as I have with other people is... suffering. The contact, I mean. Not I, and hopefully not the other people.

Today, for example. Wednesdays are the day on which I schedule meetings, because on this day I have no classes at all, thanks to a deft bit of scheduling. I'd spent a hefty amount of time on Tuesday (9.30am 'til 4pm, to be exact, I think) with the final-year-project-mate, rushing about to buy steel and learn about grinding, polishing, milling, etc., wandering the school looking for workshops and (for a short, surreal period of time) acting as messenger pigeons through which our supervisor and a lab technician discussed the viability of buying lots and lots of sandpaper; but we thought we'd sorted everything out and so today we weren't really planning to spend more than maybe five hours working--we'd planned to cut, mount, and characterise the samples--and then the professor threw a series of schedule-destroying wrenches at our plans.

Now, you have to understand that I'm rather attached to my plans. It doesn't matter so much if I'm the one revising them on the go, because I always have contingencies. But when it's somebody else causing the disruption...!

And so it didn't help me that between last night and this morning, there was a flurry of messages relayed to me by the project-mate from the professor that went, roughly, don't cut, meet vendor, discuss parameters, etc; and then as the day progressed it became clearer that for all our plans we wouldn't be making any real progress on the project; we got a bit of scanning done, yes, but that was all; we didn't even meet the vendor in the end because at the time when we'd been told to meet the professor and the vendor, neither were anywhere to be found, wouldn't answer phone calls or SMSes, weren't at the offices or usual meeting-rooms, and so we hung around the place where he'd said the meeting would be until we both gave up and left.

So it was rather a waste of a day.

And then the chillaxing... we were planning to have dinner together, which was all well and good. I'm always up for a good dinner. We were planning to have it at the nearest mall, which I didn't mind too badly either, because the mall has a wider choice than the school does and it has air-conditioning too. But as it turned out we had dinner (I ordered something that came with a free flow of white rice and ended up eating three bowls) and then started wandering around, shopping. At which point my fatigue kicked in, possibly due to the strain of digesting and walking and thinking, all simultaneously, and I became quite badly uncommunicative for the rest of the time I was with them... on the bus ride back (I take a different bus from them, because I live in a different part of the school) two of them sent me SMSes saying I could unburden myself to them, whatever the pressing issue was. But there wasn't any issue more pressing than "I need sleep badly".

Which brings me to my point, I suppose. My idea of chillaxing would be their idea of deathly boredom, since when I think of relaxation I think of sitting around in silence, maybe a bit of soft music playing in the background, dimmed lights--just enough to read by but not enough to hinder sleeping--everybody sitting around on futons or pillows or floor or mattresses with books or computers or giant fluffy pillows in hand, and just chatting or sleeping. I suspect if I were to arrange such a thing, they'd take one look at it and invite me out to the mall for window-shopping or a movie or a night on the town or Monopoly Deal or something.

Being as introverted as I am has its down points, it seems. People think you're sad and depressed when you're really just tired and hankering for a place to sit down and lean on something. And goodness knows I want to lean on things right now.

I think I'll not write for the NaNo tonight, and wake up earlier tomorrow to do double work.