De-energizing the bunny

When I was in school, I used to get into fights with my parents because they didn’t believe me when I said I didn’t have time to clean my room or do the dishes, I was “busy.”

(Note: I seemed to get a bit of a break last semester, when my mom would say good night to me at 11 p.m., and when she got up at 4 a.m. to let the dog out, or 6 a.m. to kick my brother off to school, there I was, in the same position as she’d left me, working on whatever essay or assignment I had. What she didn’t see was that I had gotten about two hours of sleep, usually between about 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. It’s amazing how long you can actually function on two hours of sleep – I think I did it for most of October and part of November.)

One of my friends, on Day 3 of her new job, tweeted today: “I forget that working isn't like classwork; you don't need to be an Energizer bunny to get things done. So now I wait.”

It’s something that has been a hard lesson for me to learn. Learning it during my first internship was torture; it was hard to take an hour for lunch during my second internship because I didn’t know what to do with myself; and even working now, I have to plan things out not so I don’t get caught behind deadline, but so that I have enough to do until deadline.

Although that might have less to do with keeping busy and more to do with the fact that after being an EIC and being the person everyone had to wait for, I hate being the person everyone has to wait for.

And I get that everyone else has their own stuff to do, so I don’t want to be the person that is constantly – “OK, what can I do now? How about now? Got anything else I can help you with?”

Not living like a student – it's strange. Honestly, I think I've been juggling so many things for so long I actually prefer being busy, though I've also seen the flip side, when it's frustrating that you can't get really good at something – the jazz history class I took as one of my electives and working the sound board – because you don't have the time to devote to it.

It's also probably a little frustrating to others around you – I'm thinking specifically of the second year who had to chase me down the hall to talk about one of his stories because I was going from Point A to B and didn't have time to stop. Said second year also has a cane and a limp. Sorry about that.

But I’m glad I’m not the only one who has to learn to take out the batteries from the bunny and slow down a bit.