Nothing

27 weeks left
26 weeks completed
2ish weeks left until mid-tour leave
1 pound lost
28 pounds total
12 months until the wedding

This week Sunday night came and went without much notice from me. It was the first Sunday night since J left that I haven’t rushed to my computer to type out the week’s countdown blog .

Part of it, I am sure, had to do with the brain-dead nature of the last week or so of my life. I have literally been walking through my days in a kind of haze, operating on reflex and muscle memory more than from conscious action. Get up. Do yoga. Eat breakfast. Go to work.( Feel slightly uncomfortable.) Do some work. (Feel a little useless.) Dream about new jobs. Talk to J on the phone for three minutes. Do a little more work. (Covertly apply for new jobs.) Help a student or two. Do a little wrap-up work. Come home. Eat dinner. Completely zone out in front of the tv while speaking to no one, doing a couple Sporcle quizzes and then going to bed to stare at the ceiling for a couple of hours before falling asleep. ANNNNND repeat.

Part of this auto-pilot routine, I am sure, is about the fact that I am so anxious to see J right now that I feel like I’ve almost become mean in the waiting. Snapping at people. Having a shorter fuse than normal. Having a little more difficulty mustering a smile on command. I just miss him. And I long to have a conversation where I can see his face…where the story doesn’t get cut off due to bad reception…where we don’t have to struggle through a three second delay when telling each other the simple details of our day (I swear, this last week that has been so bad in that respect. We neither one get to finish a thought before we accidently cut each other off mid-sentence. I must remind myself daily that I am grateful for the phone and the opportunity to hear his voice regularly. Otherwise, it’d be go time with the phone people.)

I suppose that auto-pilot is a little about self-preservation and about me trying really hard not to say something mean to someone by accident. Stick to the routine, and no one gets hurt.

So, first, it feels a lot like I’ve got absolutely nothing of note to say…nothing new to report (and the fact that there is nothing new to report is pretty annoying to me, quite frankly.) And second I feel grumpy and mean and a little misanthropic. This makes for a bad combo really, as I can’t write about *nothing* (a story about nothing…perhaps I could be a writer for Seinfeld?) and I don’t really want to write about being annoyed.

But Sunday is countdown day, and I’ve grown accustomed to starting the week off with writing…by clearing my head for the days to come. To start anew. Getting the ugh out and moving on. So herein lay my writing troubles, and the blank slate come Sunday night.

So, what to talk about? When I sat back and really thought about the last week; things I might write about, things that affected me, stories worth retelling, I realized that it wasn’t that I had absolutely nothing to say…it was that I had absolutely nothing nice to say.

Ok, so that’s not entirely true. I had two really good job leads that I’m cautiously keeping my fingers crossed about. I had a dear friend, while out doing her own job, try to find work for me as well. I had a scholarly conversation for the first time in months that actually made me feel invigorated and smart and useful. I have single digit number of days until I see J again. I got my student evaluations of my teaching back this week and they were really kind. I went dancing with a girlfriend of mine that I don’t play with nearly enough. And man, did we have fun. And I had several really quality phone conversations with people that I love. So ok, some nice moments were in there for sure, but nothing really write-worthy.

Yet on the other side of that coin, I had about four separate, unrelated incidents this week where people were actively rude to me, doing and saying things to be intentionally hurtful to my face, behind my back, and just loud enough to be able to say they didn’t know I was listening, yet totally knew I was listening. (What, are we in junior high?) I sat through what was probably the most awkward and uncomfortable meeting of my life where the future of my job was openly discussed by about 30 different people. (Seriously, I was like “Um, you guys…I can *hear* you. I’m sitting right here.) I had several people who, even though they weren’t really saying anything negative per se, choose to engage in that conversation about me, not in their own offices, or over coffee in another building, but rather about 3 steps from my open office door. Not TO me, or WITH me, but rather about me.

It’s often easier to think about these latter, uncomfortable events than the former, good ones. But when I sat down to recap my week, to think about what I would write about as my week began, it was only the latter that came to mind. I was hopping mad, and I was going to talk about it right here for all the world to read (or, ok, you know, the 26 of you who read this thing…)

But then, that wouldn’t make me any better than the people I was complaining about, would it? Passive-aggressively talking about others in a big public forum that was not to their face, but rather about them to others in an attempt to be hurtful? In fact, it would make me ONE of those guys. I don’t want to be one of THOSE guys. Those guys are mean.

My academic advisor in graduate school (my mentor, my former boss, and my dear, dear friend) had quite a way with words. He could spin a phrase like no one I have ever met. I used to keep a list of his “-isms”, little gems that only he could come up with and get away with saying. And he said these things with a slow and steady southern drawl that made my little heart happy every time he spoke. It was his voice this week in my head, with one of the his custom one-liners that helped me refocus my energies. “You know, it’s not knowing the right words to say to the jackasses…it’s being smart enough to know when to shut the hell up and walk away.”

Or in other words, if you can’t say something nice, maybe don’t say anything at all. (Maybe all I ever needed to know I really *DID* learn in kindergarten.)

Perhaps even in mentioning all this I haven’t quite succeeded in “shutting the hell up and walking away.” But I sure could have done and said so much worse (there are three other versions of this week’s blog in the trash can to prove that fact.) But I did not. And man am I glad I didn’t, because no good comes from perpetuating that cycle.

I am going to try desperately to focus on the positive. And one of the first steps in that, and I’m looking at YOU trash-talkers, well, I’ll not be listening to you anymore. I find that you bother me much less when I can’t hear you. I’ll just remember to keep my office door closed, my head down, and focus solely on my work and the things I can control. Because that’s all I can do. There are some people who are always gonna wanna keep talking when they should , in the immortal words of my mentor, “shut the hell up and walk away.” And the only thing I can control is that I’ll not be one of them.

It has been said that diplomacy is the art of thinking twice before saying nothing. Truer words were never spoken. And in that vein I shall end this post. Because I’m happy to report, I’ve got nothing to say.