2:00 am Wednesday: to sleep, or not to sleep?

Ok seriously, have we only gotten through two days so far this work-week? Because I swear it should be Friday already.

Apparently, along with a big promotion comes expectations that you work harder. Who knew? Sheesh. I've been staying later each day since my promotion, and sooooo not because I feel like I have to put in face time; b/c I soooooo don't ever feel that need. No, it's because there's just seriously more shit to do than I can get done.

And all this extra work is totally cutting into my goofing off time at work, too. I hardly ever have time to catch up on the latest issue of People or US Weekly online anymore. It's a crying shame, is what it is.


For real though, I actually don't mind the extra busy-ness at work; mostly because I've realized that the hours are passing more quickly in the office nowadays than they used to. There's plenty to do, to the point that by the time I have a few minutes to just sit down and chill and not think about anything for a moment, I realize I'm already halfway through my day, and I'm always surprised. That's good. It also means, though, that there's always something more still to do when quitting time rolls around ... which has me thinking about and doing more work stuff at home in the evenings.

I'm never going to be a slave to work again, though. (The way I was back in the days of my old law firm - where they owned my soul; so not worth it.) So tonight I spent a couple hours working on a painting and watching Dancing with the Stars (what? Pamela Anderson is gone? what fun is it going to be to watch now?). But, of course, thoughts of all the shit that I have to do tomorrow, evidenced by my bulging briefcase sitting atop my coffee table, led me back to work stuff before hitting the sack.

And once I was finally determined to quit that work stuff for the night, shit, it was after midnight already. And I was so not tired. Now here it is, almost 2 a.m., and I feel wired - wired about work stuff, actually, thinking about how I can resolve a few things that are going on - and I have an 8 a.m. meeting in the morning. So now I can't decide: is it better to take advantage of being so wired and having all these thoughts about how to resolve work things, by staying up and taking care of some more stuff? Or would I be better off trying to force myself to get rid of those thoughts and focus instead on the darkness and stillness of the night, and make myself get some sleep? If I go the first way, I might actually take care of some shit that I need to take care of, (might as well do it while you're thinking about it), but that means I'll probably end up either staying up all night, b/c it'll be so close to time to get up in the morning that I'll figure the amount of sleep I might get wouldn't be worth the risk of oversleeping my alarm clock out of exhaustion once I did fall asleep; or, the second way, well, like I said, I'd probably, by the time I actually fell asleep, end up getting only just a little bit of sleep - not enough to be restful, just enough to make me oversleep my alarm and run late for my meeting and still feel grumpy for having a deep sleep interrupted.

Did that make sense? This late at night, it's hard to tell anymore if anything I write makes sense. The bed does beckon ... but the mind will not stop thinking ... about the four meetings I have tomorrow, all of which I'll be leading, or the motion I have to file tomorrow, which is mostly done but still needs to be edited, or the hearing I have on Thursday, for which I am mostly prepped but still will need to spend some time focusing on beforehand to freshen up and be ready for, or the two appellate briefs I have to write within the next month, or the three week trial that starts in mid-June that keeps getting closer and closer and that I have to keep preparing for, or the law clerks that will start next week that I'm co-in-chair-of, (yeah that made no sense, but you know what I mean), or the interviews I need to help schedule in order to find a new attorney to come on board and actually help me out with all this shit ....

.... yeah, ok, now that I've written all that, I'm so, so, so, so totally not going to go to sleep tonight, I've decided. Meeting prep, at the very least, for those four meetings, it will be for the rest of the night I believe ... hey, it's a three day weekend coming up, I can always catch up on sleep then anyway.

learning how to paint clouds

it's very soothing

cele*hiccup*bration

I took myself out tonight to celebrate my new promotion at work. Nothing big, just decided when I got home from work tonight, while drinking an after-work glass of wine, that I should go out to eat someplace I like for dinner. Even if I was all by myself.

So after hanging out at the house on the front porch a couple hours with the kitty cats, drinking chardonnay and reading a book, I went to a New Orleans-style restaurant near my house (excellent crawfish etoufee, I think that's their best dish, although tonight I had mahi mahi), and sat up at the bar and had myself some dinner and a couple more glasses of chardonnay. (I wasn't the only one eating at the bar, btw; place was packed, more than half the people sitting at the bar were eating right there too).

It was a good place to go on a night like that. Casual, friendly, lively, neighborhood kind of place, with good food and a live band playing bluegrass music. Nice.

By the time I left, I was feeling my wine. Even after that cup of she crab soup and the grilled mahi mahi. I think maybe I'd been pouring my glasses on the heavy side at home before even going over there.

And it's times like this, when I'm feeling pretty damn freaking buzzed but am all alone, that I realize what a talkative damn drunk I am. Because I keep talking to myself, only inside my head, and I can't seem to shut myself up. It's just drunk me, blabbering away all chatter-like, letting loose internally all these thoughts and conversational tidbits I might let loose if there were someone here to hear them. Of course, I do occasionally let those tidbits loose out loud and direct them towards my cats; Pearl, the older, lazier cat, will at least raise her head and look at me in acknowledgment, but she can't carry on her own half of a conversation. I just get the indulgent "ok, I listened, I gave it a shot anyway" look, and then she's back down for the count, napping away, oblivious to my need to communicate with another living soul. I tell her all about my happiness at getting my new promotion, and all the anxiety I have about it as well, my ambivalence about it in general - still not sure if it's such a good thing or not; she listens ok, but as soon as I'm done, she tunes out. "You've booooooooored me, woman," she seems to say when I'm done, as she stretches her long back and rolls into a new position and closes her eyes.

Well, no problem. I'll just pour myself another glass of wine. Only, see, (and this is what had me deciding to write a post tonight to begin with, right here at the end), I think I must be kind of a little too drunk at this point maybe ... because I think I just poured a glass of red wine on top of what was still left of a glass of white wine. Which was about a fourth a glass ... how did I miss that? That's not a good sign.

Worse, though, is that I'm drinking it ... and it tastes good to me. Go figure.

Holla back!

Promotion!

I just got a big promotion at work. Woo-hoo! Feels good. Well done, me! :)

Some say the glass is half empty, some say the glass is half full...

I say, are you going to drink that?

Birthday card from my mom. How appropriate, for us both.

I just bought a 6-pack of Lime Cactus Michelob Ultra.

I feel like such a girl.

According to my gay, freaky hairdresser, I'm a freak.

Last Friday, on my day off, I spent a couple hours hanging out at my hairdresser's. I was his first appointment of the day, at 10:30 in the morning, and he was a bit slow getting himself going for the day (which was fine with me, I'm that way too sometimes). He gave me a little color, boosted up my red highlights, which took a while; and he gave some foil highlights to a blond girl while I was letting my highlights sit, went back and forth between us, so the three of us - the only ones in the salon that morning - chatted lots about celebrities and the bar scene and the dating scene and gossip and whatnot. You know, the important stuff.

So we got into this thing with Sandra Bullock and her cheating, tattoed, motorcycle-loving husband. We all agreed that Sandra is pretty and cool and nice and funny, and doesn't deserve to be cheated on, especially in such a grossly public way. But then they said that Jesse James is kind of gross, and she should be with someone better anyway. And I had to disagree with them there, at least to a certain extent. I mean sure, it makes him seem kinda gross that he's apparently fucking any tattoed implanted biker chick that comes his way, while he's married. But as far as their initial getting together, I can totally see how Sandra could've gone for him.

He's hot. He's big, he's built, he's tattooed, he has awesome eyes and long hair, and he seems edgy. I think he's sexy. I think he's hot. I would totally fuck him. At least, if I were Sandra when she first met him, I totally would've fucked him. (And apparently he has a big dick, according to one of his mistresses. And I would bet everything I own that he's good at fucking.)

Jeff, my flamboyantly gay hairdresser, and Amy, the little blond dental hygenist getting foil highlights same time as me, totally disagreed with me about the hot and sexy stuff though.

We moved on from talking about celebrities' dating lives to talking about our own dating lives, and we got to talking about online dating services. Jeff doesn't think they work; he hasn't tried one, but he thinks that people who sign up for match.com, for instance, just keep getting paired up with one another, and basically all end up going on dates with and having sex with the same people. Like a 6 degrees of separation kind of thing, only in more of a three degrees of whoriness kind of way.

So I told him about my past experiences with eharmony, and how I ended up dating a couple people from there I really liked and was well matched with, including the hometown guy who I had a pretty good relationship with for a while there. Jeff asked me how many matches I got in general, from the site I mean, and I told him I might get 8 to 10 matches every 2 to 3 days. He said he couldn't believe I met that many people; I told him I didn't really spend much time getting to know most of them, that in fact there were a lot of freaks that were sent my way. "But they matched you with those people, right?" he asked. "Well, yeah, based on questionnaires and personality tests and stuff, but, you know, bad matches are still going to slip through; some people are just freaks, and some people might just be doing that kind of shit as a joke, not taking it seriously, saying stupid stuff about themselves," I told him.

"Um, Sadie," he said, "I think if they matched you with freaks, it's probably because, well, you're a freak yourself. Well, hey, you think Jesse James is hot, so what am saying; you ARE a freak." Amy nodded her tinfoiled head in agreement.

I'd call Jeff a freak himself, in his own way. Which makes me wonder; if he thinks I'M a freak, then what the hell ... when it comes to men and sex, maybe I am.