I'm Between Projects Right Now

I'm a deadline whore.

Without them, I kinda go to pieces.

I don't understand how the typical office worker operates. Mostly because I have almost never been hired by any organization that has requirements beyond possessing a pulse. I'm not sure why. Even temp agencies have refused to take me on. A company that lets you pay them to pick up people junk refused to work with me.

So I sometimes have a difficult time picturing the routine day of Joe Office. I know that they have big projects and deadlines of their own, but there must some time between major presentations when they sit in their cubicles for eight hours a day and do what they were hired for in the first place.

Loyal readers of this blog may remember that I had jury duty a little while back. It was the first time in a long time that I was on someone else's time. I basically sat there, looking at the clock, waiting for lunch. And then, after lunch, I waited to go home. It's a little bit what jail must be like. Sure, I brought my laptop and did a bunch of my writing work, but being on someone else's schedule was quite a bit different from my daily routine of... well, my standard routine free day.

Do I talk about my schedule a lot? Hmm. Perhaps I do.

When I don't have a looming deadline, my life becomes completely without any structure what-so-ever. My fiancee does her thing and I spend time with her when she's free. My cat gets fed every night at 10 PM. He's on a diet. The schedule is part of it. Imagine if you wanted to lose weight and someone said, "Great! I'll allow you food once a day." I suppose that maybe if you're a movie star and you have a full time nutritionist it must be like that. In fact, I bet movie stars and my cat have a lot in common. I'm going to bring that up during my next celebrity stalking night during the Film Festival at Bistro 990.

No deadlines means no money, but that never really worries me. I'm not one of those people who comes to the end of a contract and freaks out. It takes a little hustle sometimes to pick up the next gig, but something will come through.

I guess it comes down to two possibilities. One, I'm an adrenaline junkie, addicted to the pressure of deadlines. And without them, I'm suffering a form of withdrawal. The other is that the pressure of deadlines only serves to mask the basic fact that I'm stone cold crazy. And without them, I'm just being normal.

I'm trying to decide which of those two options is the "half full" one.

And another thing, he said, blowing past the obvious button to the post, will we stop obsessing about this fucking glass and go get some more water from the tap, for chrissake? We're not living in some poverty stricken desert where we have to walk for miles to get some more water. If that's all the water you had to drink, then maybe it would make sense to fret over your perception of it. But I don't want to hear about that damned glass, ever again.

Between deadlines I get cranky.