Born to Slack

I feel like I’m coming down with a slight cold, mainly because of one tell-tale symptom, the specific flavor of burning sensation in my sinuses that is more indicative of “sick” than “allergic to something” or, for that matter, “epic wrong-pipe fail while eating Thai hot peppers”. (I also have a secondary symptom of fatigue but since the baby woke up screaming at 4 a.m. today I’m ruling that evidence as inadmissible.) Having cold symptoms always makes me feel like a bad commuter. On some level I worry that I might infect my fellow Metro passengers, and on another level even if I’m not highly contagious I feel like I might be causing my fellow Metro passengers mental distress because they are forced to worry about catching whatever I have when they hear me cough or sneeze or snort or whatever. And then not feeling well just makes me more rude; when I need to get off the train and get past seven or eight unmoving people to do so, instead of saying “Excuse me” to every person as I pass (which I don’t have the energy for and/or my voice is too scratchy to contemplate) the best I can muster is to say “Excuse me” to the person standing closest to me and then hope for a domino effect, where the person on the other side sees someone moving out of my way, and they also move out of my way unasked, and the person next to them sees the shift and similarly makes way, and so on. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t, but the guilt is pretty much constant, and doesn’t seem to cut me any slack for being under the weather.

It’s an odd thing to obsess over, I admit, especially since there are so many, many areas of my life where I cut myself entirely too much slack. Work, for instance. For all the years I’ve been desk-job employed, I’ve always gotten things done in the timeframe they were requested, except for rare occasions when the original timeframe was ludicrously unfair and understood to be not really achievable, but we had to say we TRIED. I’ve never really tried to get things done early, to go to my boss and say “I’m not just caught up but ahead, can you give me some more things to work on?” Some well-meaning counselor in some career center somewhere would probably have me believe that I am hamstringing my own career by never exploring that particular avenue, but I just don’t buy it. I do the work I’m asked to do; I get paid the amount I agreed to be paid when I took the job. This strikes me as a very happily balanced equation.


So the fact that I long ago tied my personal performance to other people’s expectations means that a week like this should be very slack indeed – everyone’s slouching towards Thanksgiving, some people are already out of the office on vacation, and nobody really expects a whole lot to get done. I find myself unable to join wholeheartedly in the slackitude, however, which is deeply troubling. The problems I was having with the servers operated by our new hosting provider, problems which I could do nothing about except report and wait for a fix and test and find still broken and report and wait ad infinitum, were finally resolved yesterday, which freed me up to actually move the damn project forward. The project is now hopelessly off-schedule, but it’s going to be incumbent on me to get it back on schedule, and that means a bit less slacking on my part. Of course, I’m still relatively powerless in the whole process, which means the only action I can take is running down the project checklist and e-mailing other people and asking them to do things on the list they are empowered to do or maybe asking them what they’d like me to do. And the project has dragged on so long that I am fundamentally sick of it and, if it were a personal project, I would have long ago passed the point of losing interest and giving up. Boo hoo hoo and so it goes.

Sometimes being a slacker has its own unexpected advantages. When I bought myself lunch yesterday, the intricate choreography of juggling my wallet and cash pulled out of it and the food I was carrying away and the change I received from the cashier meant that the paper-money component of the change ended up in my front pocket while the wallet went in my back pocket, and over the course of the day the wallet migrated to my work bag and the change stayed in my pants and I never quite managed to work up the energy to get out the crumpled bills, smooth them, get them facing in the right direction and put them in my wallet. Instead a wad of bills and change went on top of my dresser at the end of the night, and this morning the same wad went into my pocket again (in the abstract sense, since I was wearing a different pair of pants than the day before) along with the intention of sorting things out later in the day.

When I got off the Metro in Rosslyn this morning there was a street musician playing Christmas carols on tenor sax near the station entrance. I am kind of a sucker for street musicians, especially the ones who are tolerably competent (and this one was) and I am also kind of a sucker for Christmas carols, even before Thanksgiving, so I was highly inclined to toss the guy a buck. Usually I ignore this inclination because usually I (a) don’t have any cash at all, (b) only have cash in the form of twenty dollar bills, or (c) my wallet is buried somewhere in my work bag and I don’t want to break stride in the flow of pedestrians leaving the metro to fish it out. But today I had singles in my pocket and so I was able to toss one to the sax man, and that was cool.