Grouch

So the answer to the question was “sooner than expected”! My wife and I devoted much of the past weekend to night weaning the baby. The time had come, and it seemed like a fairly optimal moment. We had no real family plans for the entire weekend, barring my wife’s scheduled shift at the vet clinic on Saturday morning. So Friday night I sent her off to the basement at bedtime and I responded to the baby’s middle-of-the-night awakenings, comforting him with arm-cradling and rocking and singing (anything other than food, basically). So I got less sleep than usual, and spent much of the morning while my wife was at work moving slowly and making sure none of the three kids maimed themselves or each other. Saturday night we did the same thing, and last night we did it one more time. All three nights went about the same way, with a minor disturbance around 11 p.m. and then a semi-major to really-major freakout around 2:30 a.m., but the fact remains that we strung together three consecutive nights where the baby did not eat between 9 or 10 at night and 5 or 6 in the morning. Hopefully we can keep building on that.

I’m not fishing for sympathy, but stating a fact: I’m a teensy bit out of it today as a result of soloing through the weekend’s overnight baby ministrations. We had a two-hour all hands meeting at work this morning, where fortunately coffee was served; otherwise I might have drifted off during the overview of business functions I have no stake in whatsoever. The PowerPoint slide entitled Agenda was up as people were filing in to the conference room, and indicated the first half-hour of the all hands’ allotted running time was “social” which I assumed was a nice way of saying “enjoy your bagels and coffee”. I spent five minutes eating and drinking and the rest of the time staring down at the table, happily zoning out and conserving energy. But when the boss of all bosses brought the meeting to order, she said that she hoped we all had a chance to socialize and talk to people we don’t normally have the opportunity to exchange more than hallway greetings to.

Am I a bad person for being completely disinterested in this? I don’t socialize with people at work; I barely speak to them about anything non-work-related, and I never feel like more’s the pity. This is a perfectly acceptable, even desirable state of affairs as far as I’m concerned. It’s not that I think the people I work with are cretins (certain annoying individuals notwithstanding) unworthy of my superior time . And it’s not (entirely) due to my recent realization that I need to cut ties and move on to a new gig some time in the next few months. I just don’t conflate the socio-emotional and professional levels of my self-actualization pyramid.

Or maybe I’m just irritable from lack of sleep. Either way, no chit-chat for me. If that knocks me down a bit from being a model contractor, so it goes.