The Longest Day

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The last week of work is done; I'm on vacation! It's Friday evening and I'm writing at Café on the Ave in the University District; I'm at a high little table by the black-framed windows with the colored curtains; the Ave and the U. Bookstore (where I bought a notebook for the trip) are thronged with returning students under a mottled muggy sky. In three days we're off for Hawaii.

The hours at the office seemed doubly leaden today, the fluorescent rooms and ancient cubicles additionally dusty and airless. A crisis arose; I sat in on an emergency meeting; it was already half-meaningless to me. Back at my desk I tried to concentrate on work; I could barely keep my eyes open; my head was sluggish and achy. I took a walk, I took a couple of aspirin, I went out for a coffee -- I used all my workplace drugs. Finally when the big clock hit the last half hour my energy returned in a surge. I wrapped up everything I had to do, shut down my computer, tidied my desk, swung my pack over my shoulder and strode out to the street, free and feeling great. Lately I've had reason to worry about my motivation at work -- the workload has been light but I haven't been assiduous in seeking new tasks; it's a decent enough company but I've been reluctant to mount those steps to the front door every morning -- and I've sought for subconscious blocks or hidden agendas but damn, with the advent of vacation I realize that, really, I'm just seriously burnt out!

This is the first actual vacation I've had since May of 2007. I've already written about what Sara and I have been through since then. I'm the kind of person who doesn't readily admit to burnout -- I tend to disparage the notion of "recharging" in favor of addressing fundamental problems, plotting dramatic changes -- and I'm not saying that I don't have subconscious blocks or real issues to address in my life, but as I sit here sipping my good bitter latté, watching the students come and go outside the café window, feeling for the first time in over three years the bracing security of time off with a job to come back to, and a trip to Hawaii in between, I realize that "recharging" is a valid effect, and I've needed it. I'll be better at even this job when I return.

This post is more like a personal journal entry; I don't know that it holds any interest for the wider world, and in general it isn't the kind of thing I want for the blog. But there will be external scenes soon enough, and the whole point of a travelogue is to intermix the traveller with the destination, so it's only fair to prop up the ash-grey participant for your initial viewing pleasure. He's by no means satisfied with his paper-pushing career; he ever feels its slow mold on the edges of his once-literate mind; he's growing old with no solution in sight for how to give his so-called true calling its due primacy. Perhaps aiming a barely-witnessed blog at an overly-brochured island is a more than forlorn hope for such, and perhaps his vacation shouldn't even be weighted with the attempt, but what the heck, tonight the traveller and the muse are both champing at the bit, and he and she are equally willing martyrs to a faith in the panacea of the new and the inspiration of the natural world. Call him a tourist if you must. But it's time to put on a loud shirt in many ways.

--Matt