Back to Zero

It's Sunday night. I've done the three weeks of dishes, bagged three months of recycling and four months of newspapers, taken out the trash, read the usual array of comics, found my watched, fixed two lamps, cleaned the bathroom, cleaned the living room, cleaned out the closet, scrubbed the counter, fed the cat, gotten eight hours of sleep, eaten breakfast and lunch, ordered dinner, wrote some cheques, watched anything pressing on the T.V., seen a friend, talked to my mom, talked to my dad, found my missing Netflix, been to the grocery store, looked for a location for a movie, watched Star Wars, vacuumed the carpets, scrubbed the sink, scrubbed the shower, scrubbed the toilet, checked my home email, checked my work email, straightened up, pet the cat, fed the cat, changed the kitty litter, moved some furniture, moved the coat, broke my blender, cleaned up the broken blender, bought more coffee, sat on the couch, changed all the light bulbs, drank a pot of coffee, drank six glasses of water, found some other stuff that had been missing, taken a shower, gotten dressed, and sat around. Not necessarily in that order.

Now what?

There's a strange universal feeling that one only experiences on a long Sunday afternoon. Douglas Adams wrote about it - that time when you've taken as many baths as you can usefully take in a day and you realize that you're probably not going to use the revolutionary method of pruning you're reading about in the Sunday paper.

Woody Allen wrote about how we tend to make small problems for ourselves because we don't know how to deal with the big problems.

I wrote about liminal feeling not too long ago, as well. I think the difference between now and then is that now I have a job - where as before I was killing time between nothin' and nothin', now I am stuck waiting for tomorrow, and I have a pretty good idea of exactly what tomorrow will consist of.

I work pretty hard, not enough to do any long-term damage the way working 14-hour days as a grip could do long-term damage, but hard enough to wear down my batteries. Then I spend a weekend resting up, I set everything in the apartment up to be used again, and I'm back to zero.

Which leaves me, where exactly? My life is not fundamentally different than it was Friday night, and it's not going to fundamentally change between now and Monday morning.

The thing about the big problems or the big questions is that I don't deal with them in a moment, I deal with them over a long period of time. From week to week, it's easy to feel like things just stay the same.

Oop. Dinner's here. Maybe I can put off the big problems for a bit longer...