talk is cold and burns like the sun

So the first 18 hours of today were pretty miserable; I was still at work at almost 1am last night, came home, got around five hours of sleep, and was back in the office around 8am. Then, I sat in meetings all day, and for most of them I was projecting from my laptop, which meant I couldn't IM with anyone without it being seen by everyone in the meeting.

Strangely enough, after 6pm, things suddenly got much, much better. This week has been extremely stressful at work for a multitude of reasons, and by this evening I was feeling somewhat downtrodden about everything. Not in an overwhelming way, but definitely not good either. However, I swung by one of our directors' offices to say hi, and ended up spending an hour and a half making crafts and talking to her. She has all sorts of craft-making supplies in her office - cool paper, ribbons, special cutting tools, lots of pre-scored ready-to-make stuff, etc. And she seems to genuinely care about what I'm doing, how I'm feeling, and what can be done to better support my team, which is great. She's pretty new to my organization, but she has tons of industry experience. She also assured me that I'm in no danger of getting fired (not that I really thought I was, but it's nice to hear), and she said lots of nice things about my performance so far.

One interesting side piece is that I asked her briefly about business school, and she thought that it would be redundant for me, at least for now. I think I agree with her - I can't imagine being in any other organization of this level of influence and scope where I would be allowed to do the job I'm doing now with less than four years of experience and no advanced degree. She said as much herself, and said that in most other organizations I probably wouldn't even get the chance to talk to her at all, let alone spend an hour and a half with her. That being said, a vacation from work would be nice, and I guess that's what I see business school as - although that would be an extremely expensive vacation, and I could probably live someplace for a couple of years for the same price and have more fun.

Anyway, I was going to go home, but when I went back to my office, Gyre and Matt were waiting for me - even though it was 7:30, they were hanging out because Gyre had come up with a great idea to help me out, and they were trying to cheer me up. So we talked about work for a little while, and then went to the room across the hall from mine, where they've installed a flatscreen tv and a Wii. I mainly watched them play, but I did try boxing, and it was a lot of fun. I had intended to stay longer and work, but Claudia and Vidya made contact with me around 9pm, and we ended up going to Peter's Cafe so that we could all hang out while I had dinner. I still can't believe that Claude's leaving in a month - she's one of my absolute closest friends at this point, despite the original wariness that we had toward each other when I saw her as some weird urban goth girl and she saw me as some hick from the backwoods. But hanging out tonight was nice, and definitely left me feeling more relaxed.

Now it's time for bed - I'm going to sleep without setting an alarm, since whenever I get up, I need to go to work and plow through the 134 unread work-related emails that came in over the last 10 hours. Yay. I hope you all have more exciting weekends than I will!