The Holidays

Ahh, the holidays. The most glorious time of the year. I almost typed that with a straight face. :) Fresh off spending the day with family yesterday, and in anticipation of spending all day with them tomorrow, I thought I'd share a few of my observations about the most stressful part of the holiday season. Say it together, people: Family.

Why is family so stressful? Consider the dynamics. You take a large group of people together. This large group may or may not know each other well. More than likely, they are slightly more than acquaintances. You put them in one house together to eat, drink, and socialize. Imagine trying this with 30 random acquaintances...friends of friends, coworkers, and/or the bagel guy. It's essentially a recipe for disaster.

So here you are, smack dab in the middle of a group of people you probably haven't seen since last Christmas, and now you get to spend all day long with them! An entire day's worth of small talk. The same inane questions over and over again. "What have you been up to?" "How's your job going?" "What are your plans for the weekend?"...until you want to crawl into a whole and stay there until after New Years.

My survival technique? Bring a cartoon, in my case, "Wall-E," and hide in the basement with the most normal members of my family: the kids. It works surprisingly well. I get an entire 2 hours away from all the crazy people...you can stretch it out if you factor in a bathroom break in about half way through. It takes awhile for six kids to use the bathroom. :)

Annoyance

I am in a bad mood today. Work was bad, people made me mad. My performance evaluation is on Friday. Yuck. People who walk up behind you until they're just out of your peripheral vision drive me crazy. People who can't figure out a four-way stop should be shot. The guy in the car in front of me tonight who was driving 35 in 45 zone should know that he really upset me. I am stressed out. I can't think normally. My brain feels like it's shutting down. Lack of sleep. Life sucks and then you die.

I've always loved Keats

I bring to you my single favorite stanza of poetry of all time, courtesy of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightengale."

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
Tasting of Flora and county green,
Dance and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!
O for a beaker of full warmed South,
Full of the the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink, and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim

More on why this is so awesome, and recent revelations about British authors to come...

Productivity

I'm one of those people who only accomplishes things when there is a significant level of stress present. This seems counter-productive since when I'm stressed out, I'm a cranky, emotional mess teetering on the edge of a mental breakdown. But there's what I think of as the "productive stress zone," the sweet spot of stress that motivates me to create great things.

Example: I have copious amounts of reading and paper-writing to do each week. Do I spread it out, try to tackle a little each day? No...nothing gets accomplished that way. I find myself on Facebook, or reading stupid websites like Perez all night. Come Sunday afternoon, though...Bam! I swing into action and knock out three papers in six hours, complete my reading for the week, and do all of my online class postings in another two.

This is certainly not the healthiest mode of operation, but it's what works for me...