For the first time in what I think is years, Frankly Curious went a whole day without anything being posted. There was no big reason for this. I didn’t go to the hospital. I didn’t get fired. But I’ll explain how it happened.

On Wednesday, I logged 10.5 hours at my day job. That’s a huge amount of work. Most people think that 10.5 hours is a long time to work in a day. But I don’t think they really understand. At a normal job, it’s different. There are breaks and there is lots of time that isn’t productive. But I keep close track of my billing hours — down to the minute, although I bill in five minute increments. So I ended up working until almost 3:00 in the morning. And it was good. I got a lot done.

Cuteness of Babies

On Thursday, I was going down to my niece’s place to meet my great-nephew, Hector. So I got up a bit before 7:00 so that I could work two more hours before leaving. I didn’t manage that; I got 95 minutes logged. It was a fine day, however. My sister had told me that she could spend the whole day watching Hector sleep. I privately scoffed at that. Yet when I got there, I found that I felt the same.

I know it’s all evolutionary. If we weren’t coded to find babies adorable, we would certainly kill them all. But it still seems weird to me. One of the main things that preoccupies me is the scientific fact that we humans don’t have the control that we think we do. And while it may not be a scientific fact, free will is also a delusion. But to have these facts staring at me in my life always bothers me — probably because, for me, there’s a very clear distinction between my intellectual life and my regular life.

The Long, Long Drive

Regardless, I didn’t get back home until after 6:00 (over three hours on the road because the Bay Area may not be Los Angeles, but it’s still a major California urban area). And I was exhausted. I did manage to log a couple of hours of work and then I collapsed. I would have thought that would have been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

The next morning — Friday — I woke up at 7:00 and did what I do every morning: I check my email to see if there were any calamity that I had to deal with. There was not. That’s been interesting. This last week, my workers don’t seem to have been doing that much work. Or maybe it’s just me. I’ve been so focused on a new part of my job that managing the old part of my job seems easy.

Not Getting Fired

Actually, I’m really unhappy with this new part of my job. I just see it very differently than my boss does and I wish that he would find someone else to do it. And I’ve been doing everything I can to get him to relieve me of this work without firing me altogether. But I’m not very good at balancing these kinds of things. So when Toni (who is certainly above me and who I rely on greatly, but who no longer seems like my boss) said she wanted to talk, I said that was fine as long as I wasn’t going to get fired — I wasn’t up for that at the moment. She replied, “Fire you? Pft. You wish.”

Well, she has that kind of right. I think I would like to be fired. But just for a month or two. That would be awesome! But it would require being fired from Frankly Curious too.

Anyway, I did almost nothing productive yesterday. I was still very tired. But more than that, I was mentally tired. I couldn’t face doing any work. I spent most of the day laying on the couch watching movies. I did think of a lot of things to do, but I just couldn’t manage to get up and actually do anything. But I’m back at it now. I guess.

I do plan to finally write an article that has been sitting around for two weeks. No, it’s not politics. More grammar. Although in this case, it’s more “elementary writing.”