I’m waiting for a meeting to start. It should have started some time ago, but here we wait, as the fire rages right outside my window.
That is not a metaphor. A house up the street from me is literally on fire; there are actual flames burning from the rooftop and the neighborhood is filled with smoke. “Right outside my window” is a slight exaggeration, as I have to actually walk out into my driveway to see the fire. But the fire is real and not symbolic in any way.
And so there’s a real firehose, and also a metaphorical firehose. The meeting, which just began, is a training meeting. My job is changing once again, and I’m collapsing under the weight of the new information and new directives that have been piled on my proverbial desk in the last few days. In business jargon, which is stupid but also sometimes very expressive, I am drinking from the firehose. So to keep everything in order, we have a real, literal fire; but a metaphorical firehose. And a real firehose, too, which the firemen used to put out the fire, which is, again, real. The house is very badly damaged, but no one was home, thank God.
*****
Do I do anything except wait for meetings to start? Apparently I don’t because here it is at 7:30 PM the next day, and I am once again waiting for a meeting to start. This one is a meeting of a board on which I serve as a volunteer. We meet monthly, and it occurs to me that August should be a month off. Two board members are on vacation and they are attending from their beach rentals. They are more dedicated than I am.
It’s 7:52 now, and the meeting is moving right along. An issue that I feared would be contentious was surprisingly completely non-controversial, and we’re ahead of schedule. That was risky, putting that in black and white. You don’t talk about a perfect game in progress, and you definitely don’t swan around the place celebrating a meeting ending on time until the meeting in fact ends on time and is actually over.
*****
See, I knew I shouldn’t have indulged in premature celebration, because it wouldn’t be a meeting if certain people (meaning a certain person) didn’t derail the conversation and drag out the proceedings with bad faith passive-aggressive victim performance.
Anyway.
Did I mention that my neighborhood was literally on fire two days ago? But big deal, because last night, we awakened at 2:30 AM to what felt very much like an earthquake. Twitter also thought it was an earthquake. That’s the thing about Twitter. It’s not the place to go for thoughtful contemplation of ideas and issues, but it’s usually pretty reliable when you need a real-time update on an immediate local situation. If 100-plus people on Maryland Twitter all say that they felt an earthquake near Columbia or Silver Spring or Rockville, then you can probably be pretty sure that it was in fact an earthquake that just woke you up.
*****
Let’s recap, shall we? A fire on Monday and an earthquake on Wednesday. It's Thursday now and so far, the day is disaster-free, unless you count my job. It’s really quite overwhelming, and I hit a wall today. Earlier this week, I thought I could handle it all. I started to regain my confidence. For a few hours there, I was downright cocky. “I’m going to shake things up,” I thought. “I am going to light this place up.”
OMG, I KILL myself.
Seriously, dying here.
Hilarious jokes notwithstanding, I’m not so cocky anymore. I bit off more than I can chew; although really, that is not quite accurate because I did not ask for this job. It would be accurate to say that I was force-fed more than I can chew, but they’re making me chew it anyway.
It’s 10:10 PM, and I’m all out of energy. I just found myself thinking about rabbits and Boston accents and the American worker and I think I might be sleeping with my eyes wide open. It’s time to stop thinking and definitely it’s time to stop typing. I’m going to go to bed soon, because the meetings start early tomorrow morning. That part, at least, is a constant. That part doesn’t change.
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