Open the vents.

You wake up at the butt crack of dawn, but not even because the sun won't be up for another two hours. You swill your coffee, go through your routine and go to work. It's a damn good job, too. Sure, a lot of the people that you work with are totally nuts and some of them should probably seek out counseling, but what you're doing is making a difference in a very tangible way and also, you really love it. It is regimented, it has protocols that you follow, each cause has its own effect. There is a very black and white meaning there. And it fits you. It feels familiar in a way that nothing really has before.

But the thing is that it's really draining. Especially now because you still don't know exactly what you're doing. Keeping all the dashes and dots together in your mind to form a coherent overall picture takes up a lot of your brain's CPU, which in turn takes up a lot of your energy. The day is long and you don't really get any breaks. Which is fine, it's great, it's kind of relieving to always be counted on, but it is tiring.

Eight hours are over and it's time to go home, except you're not, you're going to your second job. This one is a bit more frenetic. This one is like the opposite of the first one, there's no structure, your supervisor is a very loosely woven group of loosely put together people, and they've not given you a very good sense of what your responsibilities are. They seem to change every day, and as the paperwork that you were told wasn't yours to work on piles up, the stories change, job functions shift. It makes you crazy and you want to rip out your hair and throw things.

And by this point you have no brain capacity left anyway. You're tired, your face feels all oily and you are fucking hungry. Your eyes burn. You want to go home and watch tv or read or do abso-fucking-lutely nothing, but you can't. You will be here trying to connect invisible dots until after the sun goes back down. You don't even get to see your husband all that much, let alone do anything as novel as cooking.

And then you find yourself hoping that a permanent slot opens up in your first job, by hook or by crook, that you can fill. And you hold onto that hope like all those times you prayed to God that so-and-so would have a crush on you back in grade school. Even if it means that someone else would be fired. And you look at your shoes and you don't know what to think. Did something on the inside change?

People, I am burning at both ends right now.