MCF vs. The Fog

Have you ever done one of those stretch-yawn combinations as you stood up too quickly, resulting in the blood rushing to your head and the room spinning a little? After lying on the couch for two hours on Friday night watching Terminator: TSCC and Dollhouse, I experienced a particular bad one of those sensations as I got up, and quickly dropped to one knee as my equilibrium and blood pressure evened out. It barely lasted a minute, but I decided to lie down for a short nap. I closed my eyes at 10 PM and opened them four hours later at 2 AM, over three hours longer than I planned to rest.

I suppose it has been kind of a long week. Besides being the first time I'd worked 5 consecutive days in a while between holidays or vacation days, we're in a particular busy time. Each year, we brainstorm new concepts to be rolled out and tested against existing ones over the course of the year. Teams of artists and writers are paired up to present ideas to sort of a “Council of Elders” made up of the highest ranking people in the company. They loved our first idea, but for a different time frame later in the year, and we struggled to come up with another concept that was as good. Since the writer I was working with was going on vacation for a week and I got another assignment tacked on top of my regular workload, we got out of doing a test during this period.

Brainstorming takes more energy than one might realize. I can't obviously get into specifics, but there are certain legal restrictions as to what we can and cannot say, and even to some extent on the appearance of our mailings. There were a few late nights in there and plenty of brick walls. Some of my suggestions wouldn't work for legal or stylistic reasons, while others had been done in the past. After only a year and a half with the company, I'm still learning which things have succeeded or failed historically, and which things they'd be willing to try. Most importantly, the creative process seems to have taken a bit out of me.

I often battle a “fog”, a point in which I'm not thinking clearly. It's almost like sleepwalking. I do my work, put one foot in front of the other, and drive my car well enough, but I'm not fully paying attention to any of it. I can think a few hours ahead, to what I might have for dinner, what might be on television, what DVDs I might watch, and what I might write about at the end of the day, but I can't think about what I'll be doing anywhere from a week to a month from any given point. I rely on my calendar and my checklists to remind me what comes next. Each night, especially if I've worked late on one of these additional projects, I just want to go home and collapse on a couch or in bed. I force myself to pull over at the gym, because I've learned that exercise helps battle the fog.

The gym was insane this week, too. They added a (hopefully) temporary clothing section, and the introduction of merchandise seems to have drawn a larger crowd. Most nights I had to park on the street when the lot was full, and I often ran into inconsiderate people. One woman backed into the portion of the narrow lot leading back behind the building to the exit, blocking me even though I had my directional light on. I saw people park in handicapped spots even though they weren't handicapped, and across diagonal lines that weren't actually parking spots. One night I saw a Humvee sitting on the woodchips amid the bushes behind the sidewalk, although a friend told me that was probably the owner's car.

Even inside it was a mob scene, with most machines occupied. The locker room was a mess. Half the locker doors were left open, and one night I opened five in a row, finding each filled with clothes and gym bags, before I found a vacant one. I check my lock like three times before I go out on the floor, while some people don't even put a lock on. The worst night was the one in which I noticed someone had left their chewed gum on top of the soap dispenser in the shower stall. I guess it would have been worse if it was on the ground and I'd stepped on it, but honestly, what the hell is wrong with people?

Exercise makes the heart pump faster and gets the blood flowing to all parts of the body. So my brain, as tired as my body after a busy day at work, begins working properly after I've run, climbed stairs, skied, or done some other cardiovascular aiding motion. It's just the recharge I need, and another reason why I find my lunch break so important. “You go out for lunch?” asked my writer on that aforementioned test package, “I'm so jealous; I haven't had time for lunch in over seven years!” Now, I understand all too well how a workload will increase the longer person stays with any given company; I've had that experience with more than one job. And I realize that staying late is less of an option when one has a family; this woman probably wanted to see her kids before they went to bed. But my brain is sometimes pudding by noon, and leaving for about an hour, especially if I can go for a walk during that time, is a great reset. I tend to do my best work after 2 PM, and make short work of any challenge that had me staring blankly at my computer screen before I took my break.

I've started napping on weekends again, possibly catching up after some of these hard weeks, possibly catching up from the long term effects from my dad's medical ordeal in January, or possibly just out of boredom. I woke up on Saturday, watched a movie, the latest episodes of Battlestar Galactica and Batman: The Brave and the Bold, and then went back to sleep until it was time for five o'clock mass. I awoke from that nap groggy, grumpy, and disoriented. I felt a little better after dinner, and I really felt like “myself” after I subsequently went out shopping for my dad's upcoming birthday on Monday. Walking around a department store for an hour did more good for me than any of the extra sleep.

If I'm not thinking in complete sentences or five steps ahead, then I might as well not be thinking, because in the fog, I'm not me. I guess, in the end, it's all about finding the balance. You can overdue anything, from work to exercise to rest. The right amounts of each can counter the bad effects of too much of the others, and hopefully lift the fog.