Morning Rush, Afternoon Crushed 💔 (Part One)
Time crashing, crawling, then vanishing: just another Wednesday in the city
For readers who wish to avoid sensitive content: This essay contains a story about drug abuse.
✍️ Wednesday, August 2
My hair is disheveled and I haven’t showered.
I was in bed for thirteen-and-a-half (!) hours, asleep for 10.5 of them, probably fighting off a cold. Ironic, given the recent heat waves. The coterie of fans blowing dust and dog dander throughout the house isn’t helping.
I don’t even rouse myself from bed or wipe the sleep from my eyes before firing up the Kindle app on my iPad to prepare for today’s podcast guest, brightness dimmer set as low as it goes.
I try not to save things for the last minute, especially out of respect for my guests, but sometimes I screw up.
I also refuse to be one of the podcasters (by whom I’ve been interviewed many times) who don’t bother to read their guest’s book. Those interviews start with mundane questions like, “So what inspired you to write this?” or “Can you outline the four-step Pivot Method” …for the two-hundredth time?
“I miss you,” Michael said to me the night prior, when I headed to bed absurdly early. He was sad at me, as we sometimes say.
I miss me too.
“I’m working twice the time for half as much,” I reminded him, a (hopefully) short-term consequence of losing The Big Client. “I’m doing everything I can to get us out of this pickle we’re in.”
It’s a twist on my orienting inquiry that I created in my earliest days of self-employment to remind me of what’s most important:
How can we earn twice as much in half the time,
with joy and ease, while serving the highest good?
I’m in a summer scramble, as you know well by now here at D🤦🏻♀️h HQ.
I temporarily filled the corporate cashflow vacuum by adding more and smaller work. It’s catch-as-catch-can when the household enters emergency mode.
The Free Time inquiry above is a thought exercise. It doesn’t mean we have to optimize into infinity until we remove every shred of humanity.
I woke up to 37 new unread text messages, who knows how many new emails.
I edited a ‘doh post instead of responding.
Right or wrong choice?
Who knows.
As I’m preparing to leave the house at nine-thirty to head to the podcast studio, Michael comes downstairs from sleep just long enough for me to give him a kiss and hear a five-minute summary of his plans for the day, while typing out a response on my phone to my team member as she finishes the details of a book order for a virtual speaking client, one that I gratefully accepted at one-third of my normal rate.
I haven’t taken Ryder out, and I have only finished reading one of two books for today’s guests, ones I only started the evening prior.
I pry one open in my hands as I walk toward the subway, underlining with shaky penmanship.
I miss the train pulling into the station so I can greet one of my favorite neighborhood fellas, Clarence. He has no teeth, yet he always smiles and makes a joke when our paths cross.
On the train, I’m doing what they say not to: multitasking, as I invite a new friend to coffee while underlining the intro and conclusion of my guest’s book on mentoring.
My eye catches a section on how he lives for the future, about how he isn’t present. Coincidentally, the other book is about workism, making a case for good enough jobs so work doesn’t consume our identity and cannibalize the rest of our lives.
I exit the subway at 40th and Seventh, having done a little bit of everything.
“Don’t ever go to the gym!” shouts a guy selling weed in front of Smoker’s World as I round the corner past my favorite pizza shop, followed by cheers from his friends. “You’re perfect!”
I keep walking as I pass, while typing the initial sparks of this essay on my phone. “Thank you!” I respond, turning my head as I call back. There’s a day those catcalls will stop, so I don’t mind appreciating them while they’re here.
Then I turn their compliment over in my mind. Was it back-handed? (Pun not intended) “Don’t ever go to the gym!” Does that mean I look fat and unathletic in my current state?
If it did, they wouldn’t be wrong.
Cat-calling men have told me I’m “healthy” or “thick” my whole adult life, and my once-taut yoga and Pilates-infused muscles have turned increasingly to dough these last few years.1
I haven’t even stolen the few seconds it takes to fix my hair today, bun only halfway in place after sleeping on it. This one gives disheveled more than “messy-in-a-cute-sophisticated-Instagrammable way.”
To fuel my oat latte fix, I stop in at The Drama Book Shop, knowing it means arriving late to my recording session. At $50/hour for the room, that means burning an extra $10 on top of the $7 at the register. A $17 oat latte.
It also means only twenty minutes to set up my mic and laptop, then digitize my notes.
I arrive at the studio, set my things down, then set a timer on my Apple watch for fifteen minutes.
I take a deep breath.
I have arrived.
There’s not much time to enjoy it.
Moments later, I start scrambling again, racing against the clock to capture my notes. Suddenly my wrist vibrates, letting me know I have five minutes to go to the bathroom before I need to be back in place, ready to greet my guest and hit record.
I grab my phone to check my calendar on my way to the loo.
I rub my eyes. Am I reading this correctly?
My interview actually starts in thirty-five minutes. Hallelujah! Now I can actually breathe and collect myself before it begins, a half-hour portal opening up before me.
The conversation went well. I think. See also: The Awkward Show™.
I lay flat on the floor of the studio for twenty minutes until the next one starts.
The good news is that everything I described above revolves around activities I love.
The doh’y news is that there are a lot of them. More than usual as I continue trying to back-fill and front-fill the dearth of corporate work.
Note to self: Stop pretending like corporate gigs are going to come back any day now. Even if they do, it won’t be any time soon. And they might distract from this delightful new direction.
“Survive ‘til ‘25”
That’s a line my brother heard on a real estate investing podcast the other day, and he paid it forward as we caught up on life and work.
I love this mantra. It means we have a year and a half to stay scrappy, stay in business, do whatever it takes. It means no suddenly-booming economy is coming to save us, at least not yet. It means continuing to get creative.
The best news: Today I cleared the September mortgage, HOA, and health insurance. August will get debited in a few days. The credit cards are mostly paid, as is the margin loan I took from my stock portfolio, and I gave a bonus to my team member who joyfully doubled down this month without me asking, putting in extra hours to meet the increased workload for a special one-off client.
Thankfully my guests seemed none the wiser regarding today’s frazzled state (and hair). One even offered an “example of effective validation when mentoring.”
He modeled this skill for me with the following reflection (emphasis mine):
“There is something I see in you, Jenny, as a very unique superpower. You have a sense of calm about you that allows me to look smarter. The cadence, the tone, your inflection, your diction, the speed at which you ask your questions, your ability to pull back and let me share really sets me up for success.”
“Unique sense of calm.” Hah! On today of all days—if only he knew about my morning scramble.
Famished after my recording session ended at 2:30 (because of course, I forgot to bring lunch today), I rewarded myself with a dollar slice on my way to the subway.
With the grease-stained paper plate balancing atop my backpack on the front of my body, I blissed out at that first bite of hot, gooey, fresh-out-of-the-oven perfection.
A day well done, despite the chaos.
Time well (enough) spent.
“Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent.
To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring—it was peace.”
—Milan Kundera via The Unbearable Lightness of Being
On the walk back to my apartment, I passed Clarence again. He was passing time while sitting on someone else’s stoop.
“You’re a happy-go-lucky person, like me,” he said. He asked how long I’d been married. “Trust in God, and your relationship with your husband will go far.”
He told me about his wife, who he spent decades with, passing away recently, and how nothing and no one could replace her and that sense of companionship.
I retrieve Ryder from home, then head right back out to the park, heart hurting for Clarence but happy for the passing conversation.
As we plopped down in the grass at the back corner, I sigh in relief as my whole body relaxes. I made it through the morning rush, now I was ready for our daily zen of people-, bird-, and squirrel-watching.
Except suddenly I see a commotion ahead.
Somebody isn’t doing well, possibly dying, if not already dead.
For a few moments, he was.
As EMTs arrive, the scene comes further into focus.
One of them walks past us. With a flat, official, and officially unbothered tone, she says into her phone, “Hi Doug, sorry can’t talk—we’re on an overdose right now.”
An ambulance and fire truck pull up.
I’m amazed at how many people came to help this one person: at least ten by my count, not including the firefighters and ambulance drivers in their cars, and his friend who seemed to have called it in (far left in the photo below; the overdosing man is on the ground beneath the bench).
The man is sitting up now. He seems to have come to after vomiting.
They saved his life.
I have the sudden urge to cry for him, and to clap for all of the responders.
But nobody clapped. Nobody said thank you.
The paramedics started walking back to their cars, several of them carrying the man on a stretcher. This is just a routine part of their day.
I walked over to the ones who lingered behind, so at least I could say thank you. One asked to take a photo of Ryder, and of course, I obliged.
Then I turned to say thank you to the man’s friend.
He risked his own freedom going to authorities, as some states are now prosecuting friends who supply each other with fentanyl on murder charges, even if one is trying to do the right thing by seeking medical attention for the other.
Turns out, these two had never met.
Even though he could have gotten in trouble for being high himself, he walked over to the EMT vehicle parked around the corner to seek help.
I couldn’t believe what he said next.
