you try to tell yourself the things you try to tell yourself to make yourself forget

Despite all the lessons that I learned about balance and finding my inner peace and all that crap this year, today was a complete failure in my workaholic recovery process. I had meetings straight from 8am to 4:30pm, answered email for an hour, had dinner with Terry from 5:30 to 6:45, and then had a meeting with someone in India from 7pm to 7:30pm. Since I have another meeting with India at 7:30am tomorrow, I really want to go to bed.

I really wish that I could completely stop caring about my job -- it would make my quest for balance easier. But while I've 'recovered' in the sense that I no longer work weekends and I rarely work nights, I still care waaaaaay too much, so that I spend much of my commute stewing about stuff. This might be good in some ways, since it gives me a chance to 'detoxify my left-hand column', to use the language of the management coaching firm we paid an obscene amount of money to teach us common-sense stuff wrapped up in more interesting words. Detoxifying my left-hand column involves transitioning stuff that belongs in the left-hand column of my darkest feelings and emotions into positive, action-oriented language that I can share externally in my right-hand column. So where my left-hand inner monologue may be "I hate you and this entire project," my right-hand outer dialogue might start with "This is an interesting approach, but have you considered x?" Too bad my left-hand column is way more entertaining than my right-hand column -- but my left-hand column also begrudgingly accepts the need for a paycheck and so defers to the right-hand column. But if I ever stop getting paid, watch out!

Anyway, I'm looking forward to Christmas and to a two-week period of detoxifying my left-hand column while eating a lot, hanging out with my family, and hopefully catching up on reading and starting to brainstorm Book Two. It will be an interesting experiment to see if my left-hand column becomes more or less toxic under the influence of an Iowa winter, since it was apparently ~7 degrees today. Ugh.

Okay, I could rant some more, but as I found out yesterday, apparently Katrina and Vidya both read every detail of my mundane "this is what I ate/bought/did today" posts, but skim my brooding "this is how I feel about life" posts. So in the interest of keeping up my readership, it's time for bed!