we can pack up our old dreams and our old lives

I should be working, but I'm going to go to bed instead (even though it's only 9:30pm) and hope that I can recuperate with nine hours of sleep so that I can go in early tomorrow and slog through a bunch of stuff before an endless round of meetings. The bright spot is that my first class of the quarter is tomorrow night; hopefully it's not as awkward as the first meeting of the writing class that I took last quarter, but even if it is, I shall maintain hope that things will get better once people are more comfortable with each other.

It's end-of-year review season at work, which makes a normally-hectic period even worse than usual. In fact, I'm past due on my own self-assessment, but I'm having a lot of trouble writing it. Granted, I can churn out fluffy corporate-speak like nobody's business, so once I start writing it, it should be easy...it's just that I for some reason detest corporate navel-gazing, even if I do write about myself each and every night on this blog. I mean, here I write things like 'I had sushi tonight' and 'ohmigosh I *hated* this book I read', and not things like, 'Over the past two quarters, I feel that I have improved my project management skills, particularly in the areas of delegation and cross-team communication'. The problem with self-assessments is that you have to have a combination of pride (which I typically don't have, or at least don't like to express, probably because of sadistic teasing from childhood classmates (and some of their mothers) who were annoyed that I was smarter than them) and willingness to improve (which I do have, but most of the things that I can think to write are things that I know that I *should* work on, but that I don't have much interest/ability to do anything about--like I know that I *should* network more and meet people outside my department, but logically I know that I'm going to keep eating at my desk or with close friends because I'm both too shy and too busy to branch out).

So anyway, I'm having problems, but I absolutely have to do it--not that being late has ever hurt me in the past, considering that I've been late on this every single quarter and have still gotten raises and promotions, but still. Tonight, though, I'm going to avoid it and go to bed. But first I'm going to belt out my own personal rendition of Bon Jovi's 'Always' - I've been listening to it on repeat while typing this. Luckily the person living in the apartment that shares a wall with my living room moved out, and so I can sing as loud as I want for a few nights. Yay. Goodnight!