Countdown: 10 days until November 1 or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being Tired

Yeah, it's ten days BEFORE NaPlWriMo, and I'm already tired.

Today I ended up working a 12 hour day and I will work 3 more eight hour shifts before I am off on Sunday. I have homework, writing, crocheting of a baby blanket for Ruby due in November (not my child, because REALLY, all that would be even more insane), my fiance's job search, and my duties here And a 55 hour work week. I already said that. I'm tired.

Anyway, apologies for the rambling. The point is to not have a contest about who has more to do (like I did with some of my co-workers today), or make people feel bad for doing or not doing things, or to scare anyone off. The point is, I have grown to LOVE my life busy like this.

Ever since I started at a community college in 1996 until I graduated from the University of Iowa in 2005, through working a full time job and working at Comedy Sportz Quad Cities, all while being an improv newbie, through being cast in a play and working the current full time job, up until just about a couple weeks ago, I've been insanely busy. It seems I'm not happy unless I have about 85 things I love to do at a time.

Plus, being tired weirdly makes me feel like I'm alive.

Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones and The Long Quiet Highway, among others, says in The Long Quiet Highway:

"Recently I dorve alone from Minneapolis to New Mexico in late December, the darkest time of the year. I had to cross the souther border of Minnesota, drive straight through Iowa, across Kansas, into Oklahoma and Texas...The half moon and one evening star were directly in front of me. A train roared by on my right. The moment was over and I was tired, puling into a Best Western at ten P.M. in the town of Liberty on the Oklahoma border. What I wanted was to love all of this: my weariness, the wind lifting as I got out of the car at the Texaco....Every moment is enormous, and it is all we have...There is not a short cut from Minneapolis to New Mexico. My car had to cover every mile. We learn with every cell and with time, care, pain, and love....We all must go down that highway. Our life is the path of learning, to wake up before we die... (xii-xiii)."

Tired reminds me that I'm alive, that everything I'm doing, every moment is all I have. And being tired from doing things I love--that's the best.

So don't be afraid of being tired in November, even with a pile a mile high of everything you have in your life, plus writing a play. It will be worth it. I promise.