PSYCHOTIC, BUT IN A GOOD WAY

I have often pondered the nature of sanity, both in myself and the world at large, so that perhaps I will recognize it if I should ever happen to encounter it. Thus far, sanity and I have had few dealings with one another…

The notion of sanity versus insanity is certainly culturally dictated and motivated – one culture’s schizophrenics are another culture’s prophets.

But I must say, in my own certainly biased and subjective opinion, that I am certainly and utterly mad, and my recent actions should surely prove it.

As is apparent, this has been the month of November. That, in and of itself, should not have any effect upon my sanity one way or the other. However, November is also NaNoWriMo month, and that often does effect my sanity to some degree. It is crazy enough, perhaps, to endeavor to write an entire 50,000 word manuscript in thirty days, but what I have just done goes well beyond the pale.

See, I was cursed. By my partner, no less. Way back around the fifth of the month or so, he heard me lamenting that I was “falling behind” in my word count goals (I hadn’t even started yet) and that with the changes going on around us I feared I might not be able to reach the ultimate end of the month goal. He scoffed at my concerns, saying “You could wait until after Thanksgiving to start and you would still be able to finish on time.”

I wasn’t sure at the time whether or not I believed his exaggerated faith in my ability. Though it is true that I can write very fast, an entire manuscript in three days seemed a bit much to attempt, even for me.

At the beginning of the same said insane month of November, there was a drastic change in my job. After hemming and hawing for months over the viability of the new technology which kept promising to be released upon us, suddenly, we were going live. With no warning, I might add. One day it was business as usual, the next we received phone calls informing us that we should make the switch – now.

This whole process, which appeared hair-brained to me at best, actually went a whole lot worse than even I and my bad attitude had anticipated. The new software had apparently been designed by small, furry woodland animals on crystal meth who had obviously never actually done the job for which the software was ostensibly designed, and who perhaps didn’t even possess a rudimentary understanding of thumbs, or any knowledge whatsoever of human anatomy.

I went from loving my job to hating it, literally overnight. For one part of our job, of which I do very little, the new machines worked great; no problem. For the other part of it, of which I do a tremendous amount, they worked about as well as a submarine made out of sugar.

Suddenly, what used to take fifteen minutes now took forty, and what used to take three hours now took nine. And, unfortunately, it wasn’t a matter of familiarity – this would not go faster as I got used to the equipment. No, it was slow because the design made absolutely no sense whatsoever for the job which it was intended to do, and unless a miracle occurred, the raccoons on the design team were fired, and Windows no longer reigned supreme, I was going to be stuck with the stupid technology from now on.

I nearly quit. Twice, in fact. Suddenly, I had no free time. I went from a part time job to working overtime instantaneously, as did my partner. We have, since, found ways to make it more bearable and have decided that the best alternative for the almost immediate future is to get rid of more of our field work and just plan to keep the work at home, which now constitutes a full work load. Though the technology bugs the *#%$! out of me, a job consisting primarily of hanging out with my sweetie might just make up for it.

So there I was for the month of November, piled up to my ears in useless technology. There were many other things going on… life changes, rearrangements, holiday travels and the like. And then suddenly I realized with horror… November was nearly over, and I hadn’t written a thing.

That’s not entirely true. Near the beginning of the month, there were a couple of times that I woke up ridiculously early and decided to use the time to write a few pages. I figured if I could do that throughout the month, I might get somewhere close to finished. Unfortunately, that happened exactly twice – the rest of the time I would have spent writing was suddenly consumed by my job.

So there I was, the day after Thanksgiving, with way fewer than ten thousand words to show for the month of November. Of course, nothing terrible or humiliating would happen to me if I didn’t cross the 50,000 word mark. Twenty thousand people had signed up to try to do it, and the vast majority of them do not make it across the finish line.

Still, I loved the rush. I had enjoyed doing it so much last year that I had been counting down the months ever since, waiting with bated breath until November rolled around again and I had an excuse to write like a lunatic.

I also knew, with the mounting resentment that had been building toward my place of employment over the past few weeks, that if my stupid job actually got in the way of me doing something which was A LOT more important to me… well, I might start stealing the paper clips. I already had enough negative feelings toward my job, and having it take precedence over my writing would just not have been good for my happiness or general well-being.

My partner and I figured out exactly how much work we had left to do before Monday December 1st at eight a.m., then divvied it up accordingly. If we both worked from morning until late at night – he on our job, me primarily on the writing – they we could get everything done. Even with the modified arrangement, I would still have overtime hours for this week, and enough was enough.

So I set to work. At first, I wasn’t at all sure that what I was undertaking was at all possible, but by Friday night when I went to bed, I had racked up 17,000 more words. By Saturday night I had passed the 42,000 mark, and by this afternoon around one I passed the 50,000 word point.

I couldn’t believe it. My fingers feel swollen, tired and like they just don’t want to move anymore, but I did it. In a way, it’s crazy – it’s not like I “get” anything for completing this, other than the satisfaction that I did it. But for some reason, I get some sort of strange high from writing like that – I love the pressure, I love the pace, I love the rush.

So I guess that my partner was right, though I’ll thank him very much to refrain from cursing me so in the future. Now it’s time to put away my writing fingers and put on my finishing my job on that stupid machine fingers. Sure, I’ll be up until nearly daylight tonight working on my job, entering numbers and balancing figures that I don’t care one lick about. But, I’ll be with my sweetie, we’ll be getting paid and I can coast on my buzz of a much more meaningful job well, quickly and neurotically done.

I’m already anticipating next November – Only three hundred and thirty-five days until the madness starts again…