Levels Rising

2009 has featured a tremendous capacity for dealing with stress. It's amazing how being happy, being in love, and feeling hopeful and optimistic can leave you with strong reserves to deal with stress. It's been a great year in that regard.

That being said, the last couple of weeks have left me a little more frazzled than I would prefer. It's all work related, not lifestyle focused. We just tacked on a major element to our new work endeavor, which comes directly from my old department, while demanding that we set up entire new operations on our end. It's a big, crucial initiative that I'm currently carrying on my shoulders, and I spend my nights dreaming of spreadsheets, and my mornings waking up with my first thoughts about what work-related things I should be doing that very moment. Brushing my teeth I'm game-planning my agenda, and by the time I have my coffee, I'm already three steps ahead of what I should be doing.

All of this is theoretically great in terms of experience and career, but the plan is to be hiring someone to take on many of these duties I'm pitch-hitting for. That plan was set in motion, aspiring to make the process smooth and easy in terms of a resource, but due to something as mundane and insidious as company politics, it got blown to smithereens. Lots of people ended up doing things in a far less than optimal way, and my agenda gets compromised badly as a result of it, and who knows if there will be later political fall-out. A really unfortunate circumstance that's ultimately going to cost my company a fantastic employee, and me the ability to keep the ship moving forward smoothly and quickly. While I've felt like a superstar at times this year, this was something that I felt I could deliver, and I failed. That's a bummer.

So I've felt more than my share of work-stress for the past few weeks, and I feel badly that I've burdened L. with it. She doesn't deserve it, and though I don't feel that I've been a bad guy at all, she knows that I'm preoccupied, and not as focused on us as I'd like to be. So that's a shame, and I don't want it to be that way. It makes me realize that I'm not perfect when it comes to coping with stress, but then again, what does that mean: to be perfect when it comes to stress? Isn't the very nature of that to upset the psychological apple cart and not be able to be perfect? I still think that I'm generally better than most in that regard, but I'm not sure what all the coping strategies and mechanisms are, from person to person.

And, on top of that, my wonderful L. is in some far away place called Fresno tonight. Fresno. The word itself sounds like abandoned drive-ins and Chinese restaurants called Oriental Palace. But I hope that she's having relaxing family time with her father, and that moments like these help build a stronger bridge between them, which may not have been consistently stable and strong through much of her life. It's good that she's doing it, and me being away from her for a night isn't much of a price to pay for that.