I can't seem to keep it all straight

I seem to have trouble remembering how much time has gone by and what the date is and all of that. Not that I literally don't know what the date is, as I see it all the time on the computer. But I keep thinking that I should do something by a certain time, after I get something else done, and the getting stuff done takes longer than I thought. And then I realize that it is probably too late to do whatever it was I was going to do, so I probably end up not doing it. I'm not planning very well, or at least, I don't seem able to focus and do whatever it is that I have planned to do.

Like I had thought that I should get a job for Christmas. And Christmas itself seems still a ways off. But if you want a Christmas job, you need to get it in November. And it's November now, but I still wasn't getting it that if I wanted a job I needed to drop what I was doing and go get one. I think that most places that hire holiday help would like to have the new people trained and ready to go at least a week before Thanksgiving, so that they can work on Black Friday without any major problems.

So I just realized Wednesday that I'd missed it. Unless I went out on Wednesday and got a job and got all trained and such on Thursday, it was really too late to do that. Thanksgiving is next week, so there isn't a week left. So I was thinking that on Wednesday, and of course on Wednesday I was sneezing and coughing and such, and even if I had a plan for getting a job it just wasn't the day to go and do anything about it.

It just somehow hadn't occurred to me before then that Thanksgiving was next week. But I was looking at the grocery ads, and I went out to buy a cheap turkey. And then I realized that I should have skipped the whole Tulsa thing and done something about it then, if not a lot sooner.

The more rational part of my brain tells me that it wouldn't have made that much difference, since most of the week I was at Tulsa I had a cold, and I'm sure that I didn't look like someone that a potential employer would want to hire anyway. And if I had gotten a job before that week, I might have lost it when I either called in sick or showed up for work on several days that I really wasn't up to doing anything.

So I realize that even with better planning, I would probably still have gotten sick and probably still not have a job. On the other hand I should have tried, and I might have gotten lucky and had a boss who would have told me to go home and get some rest, that they really didn't need me that much until after Thanksgiving anyway.

It's not a done deal that I cannot get a temp job, since other temp people do not work out or quit or whatever, or they might need more people than they had first thought they should hire.

And of course there are still jobs out there that are not really supposed to be seasonal, and they are hiring all the time. But after Christmas there will not be as much to do and you either get laid off or you work one day a week or something like that.

And then there is always McDonald's.

So it isn't like getting a job before Christmas is totally out, just that I think my chances of getting a job at any place that I would have preferred to work for the season are slim now. Anyway, I still have a few days of stuff left to do at school, so I had better get on with that and quit worrying about jobs that I don't have.

Anyway, there's other stuff that seems to get away from me. So in an attempt to sort of get rid of things in my life that I really don't need and such, I have this plan of the tuned down holidays. Last month I did not go all out for Halloween, and that seemed to go okay. Not my favorite year, but not a year that I spent months of my time planning for one or two evenings either, so I think that it was for the best. So now we will have a rather small Thanksgiving, and after that I will try to cut back on all the Christmas spending and such.

But trying to cut back on Christmas stuff isn't the same as skipping it altogether, and here again it hasn't quite gotten through my head what that means and that I should already be doing stuff. I finished most of a scarf that will go to a friend when we exchange gifts about a week before Christmas. But that is about all that I have done yet, and originally the plan was to get almost everything done before this week, so that all that I have to do after Thanksgiving is buy one or two gifts and then think if I'm going to participate in the charity stuff. I probably won't this year, but we will see. My plan is that this year is probably the last year I will exchange gifts with one particular group of friends. Either that, or maybe we will draw names instead of buying everyone in the group a gift, or else we will set a very low price limit on the gifts, or something like that. Of the other main group of people that I exchange gifts with, we have already decided to draw names and set a price limit. Except that it is now the week before Thanksgiving, and we haven't drawn names yet, and I don't yet know what the price limit is.

Anyway, this year is sort of take it down a notch Christmas part one, and then if that goes well next year I'll try to take it down another notch. I'm sure that it will not be as great as before, and it will take some getting used to, but hopefully in a few years this will lead to me being a happier person.

And hopefully this will also lead to me having less stuff, and being about spend more time enjoying the stuff that I do have.

So that is all very good to plan, except that actually getting up and doing what I plan is somehow different. My brain seems all fuzzy. I get up and don't really know what day it is. Okay, I know what day it is, but I don't know right away what it is that I'm supposed to be doing in order to get on with any of my plans. But after sitting here for a while I've figured out that it is Monday, and that I should go to school in about an hour. After that, I'm not sure. It is still a bit fuzzy. But at least it is a school day, and I have that much of it figured out.