one of these days, i will learn....

...how to relax.

one would think that relaxing is not hard to do, but for me... oi.

i have this amazing knack for getting involved in way more things than most sane people would tackle at once.

this is easy to do since i don't have what one would call a "typical" job. i am a grad student. what's more, i'm a 4th year graduate student, and i've finished ALL my class requirements. all that's left between me and my degree is writing a thesis. so i don't work 9-5, or have anything remotely close to a "normal" schedule. my life is more or less a giant to do list, and i can work whenever and whereever i want as long as i meet periodic deadlines and don't miss lunch meetings i'm expected to be at.

sooo, besides my research (which is already more or less a full time job), the past week (for example), has included:

(1) a two hour lunch meeting with two dozen other grad students and faculty who have the same bonus fellowship i do this year to discuss why students cheat and what to do about it
(2) lunch at a fancy women's club in princeton to meet with people from an organization that gave me another grant this year
(3) reading and reviewing 50 of the nearly 200 REU applications we have for the summer research program i help run
(4) telemarketing on behalf of my undergraduate university
(5) substitute teaching for my housemate leigh (who is at a conference in france for the MONTH of february) all day yesterday, and THEN spending 3 hours grading quizzes from all 100 of her students

i'm generally very good at being busy and keeping people in all 50 million aspects of my professional life happy. then there comes weeks like this one. where, on top of the list above, i
(1) end up fighting a cold and going through 3 boxes of tissues in 4 days and dealing with intense sinus pressure
(2) lose my voice and keep up with my usual schedule and more anyways (i seriously taught leigh's 3 classes worth of precalculus yesterday while sounding like a very quiet frog because that's the only noise i could get out of my throat)

when i woke up today (my 5th consecutive day of being sick) with a headache, i physically needed a dead day to not do anything. what's more, the whole "my life is a giant to do list without a concrete timeline" gig, gives me the freedom to totally not do anything all day if i don't want to. there's no one to call in sick to and no one wonders what's up. it's totally just me being accountable to myself.

and that's totally what i did (a lot of sitting around and a bit of typing on my laptop while curled up in a recliner), but nonetheless, i felt incredibly lazy about it, and feeling lazy makes me mad. it was a huge mental battle most of the day to convince myself that i was doing a good thing by not physically pushing myself to the limit for another day in a row. i felt like i should be somewhere doing something productive.

one would think that most people are totally happy for the freedom to veg out for a day. not me. don't get me wrong. like the month of may, where i PLAN to relax, i'm fantastic for taking a break from work, and reading lots of fiction and doing a bit of travelling. but that's scheduled relax time. taking time to chill out because i physically need it when i still have lots on my immediate to do list. soooo hard.

end of essay..... does anyone else have this problem? or have i officially classified myself as a workaholic? 1,2,3,...react. :P