And So It Goes

I am sitting here in the final hour and twenty minutes of my official "day off." There is a never-ending laundry list of things I could be doing. Should be doing. I should be writing next week’s schedule. I could be unloading the aprons out of the dryer and folding them. I could be designing next month’s ad or the new menu. I should be sleeping; I have to be back at it in a little more than eight hours. But I’m not inclined to do any of those things, dammit. It’s still my day off. Neener neener.

So, how are things going, you ask? The very fact that I HAVE a day off indicates that things are going okay. Business is…well, up and down. Up two weeks ago (inexplicably) and down last week (though not as far down as last year.) Back up a bit again this week. Still frustrating, though, because there is absolutely no discernable rhyme or reason to the business patterns. One week, Tuesday will be our big day. The next week, it might be Thursday. Or Sunday. Or the whole week will suck. Or it will be busy all week for no reason whatsoever. I’ve given up trying to predict it; scheduling is nearly impossible. But I’m becoming accustomed to dealing with the impossible.

If I’ve learned anything in the past year, it’s that what I’m feeling today, at this moment, about my relationship to the restaurant and my level of success/failure in the whole venture, will not be the same five days, or even five minutes from now. It’s partly just me… I overthink everything. There’s no such thing as just having a bad week, or a bad day, or a bad hour. There’s always that surrounding angst: What am I doing wrong? What should I have done differently? Which of the three dozen balls I’m trying to keep in the air did I take my eye off of for a millisecond too long?

And then there’s the fatigue. To a certain extent, I’m beginning to leave that behind. The sleep-deprived haze in which I attempted to function for so many months has begun to abate somewhat; I’m not exhausted to the point of feeling half-drunk all the time. There are times I feel almost back to normal. But my reserves—emotional and physical—are nearly nonexistent. If I start feeling frisky and try to stretch the envelope, the exhaustion drags me down like a 100 lb. anchor. Like tonight. I know I will pay a heavy price for staying up past midnight when I have to be up at 6:00. But there are some things…some trade-offs I am willing to make in order to remain in contact with the outside world; to sustain a thread of my life as it was thirteen short months ago.

I have to laugh at my attempts to blog over this past year. Looking back at my posts, there is a definite pattern. It’s easy to tell when things were going well…lots of posts, even a political rant or two. When the going got rough, there were fewer posts, thrown out like SOS’s from a rapidly sinking ship. There was a time when I had an identity here in the blogosphere. A persona with which I was comfortable, and which I had no trouble maintaining—because it was, essentially, me. The "me" of that time, anyway. Then reality happened, and the ether had to take a back seat. Sort of.

But I still like it here. This is where my friends are. So I keep coming back. Even when I have barely an ounce left of…whatever it takes to maintain this relationship. It’s worth whatever it takes. Even forty-five minutes of much-needed sleep. J