a salary blur

Even after I started my second job this week, it took me a few days to realize that I take the same streetcar to the same subway to the same transfer station to the same second subway train to get to each job. The only difference is that at the bottom of one escalator, I turn left to take the westbound U1 to the new job, or I turn right to take the southbound U1 to my other job, which is itself only slightly less new for me. I'm sure that sometime soon, I'll make the wrong turn and be well into my first hour at the wrong job before I notice my mistake.

And to paraphrase what I told my students this morning (after being delayed by a once-in-a-blue-moon instance of late Vienna public transport), I'm very sorry that I'm late in posting to you, my perhaps still-existent readers. If it happens again, I will give myself a reduced grade for this course.

I know that having too much work is what we call a quality problem, but frankly, I'm a little woozy. My duties and tasks and firm, knowledgeable answers to various questions from co-workers, clients, students, newspapermen, daughters and wives are stacking up, blurring and bleeding through my circumstances. Last night, after both hassling with and helping people all day, and mostly loving the tussle, I came home and airlifted Adinah into the bathtub, but because she had broken a promise to Anette, I found myself telling her the story of the boy who cried wolf. I wanted too impress upon her the importance of being straight up. But. She's. Four. So I don't even know if that bit of sermonology was appropriate, too little or too late.

After she was asleep, and Anette had gone to her yoga class and I was all alone in the apartment, I had a minor breakdown. A 'Question Authority' moment. I was alla sudden so tired of being The Man. It was 8:45 pm, and I knew I still had another couple of hours of work to do in preparation for today's slog, and I just couldn't do it.

So I sat down and watched an episode of the Simpsons. The one where Ned Flanders opens the Leftorium.

Mmmh, left-a-licious.

Then I did two more hours of work, went to bed, woke up this morning, and did the whole thing all over again.