A friend posted as a Facebook status on Friday something along the lines of this "When people ask me what I'm doing this weekend and I say 'Nothing.' They immediately start suggesting things I could do and I say, 'You don't understand. My plans are to actually do nothing."
Seriously. This is the first time in at LEAST four weekends that I have been pretty much completely booked on a weekend. Granted, I have a rehearsal tomorrow night for Shrek, which opens in a couple of weeks, but other than that...nothing. And here's the thing: I am a-okay with that. It's not that I don't like to do things, because I really, really do. But sometimes, not having things is okay, too. I mean, over the last three weekends, I've had performances of Into the Woods, Shrek rehearsals, the MS Walk in Philadelphia, Mother's Day, Easter (okay that was four weekends ago) which was combined with the first tech rehearsal for ITW, plus in the last two weeks, Charlie finally had his big "I am no longer a man" surgery, which meant extra time dealing with doggy stuff and three out of three cars have needed trips for their check-ups and none of this includes the MAJOR work that's been happening around here--including replacing all the wood railings and benches on the deck, repainting two of the bathrooms, major landscaping stuff and an unexpected visit from the piano tuner. And not long before all of THAT was a trip to Walt Disney World and getting ready for a major work related thing that happened while I was at WDW. So a weekend where I didn't have to do anything specific until 4 p.m. on Sunday? Right up my alley.
The problem is that my friend had a point. People cannot STAND the fact that you don't want to do things. Someone I know came by the house to pick something up and said, "What are you doing tonight?" And when I said, "I'm staying in and not doing anything"--which technically, means, "I'm CONTINUING to stay in and do some stuff that allows me to not have to change out of an old sorority t-shirt and yoga pants while halfway watching Return of the Jedi for something like the third time in two weeks, mainly because that's the DVD in the player and I don't feel like changing it." Her knee-jerk response was, "Oh, you should go out." And I know that she's the sweetest person alive and she certainly means well, but, my Lord...no.
Now there are some salient facts that go along with my "doing nothing" statement. First, starting on Thursday night I plowed through the ENORMOUS pile of laundry that had accumulated and found that the sweater that I thought I had left at some theater/rehearsal facility or the other never to be seen again was actually just hidden in said gargantuan laundry pile. Second, I managed to completely pack up my fall/winter clothes and get out ALL of my spring/summer wardrobe--a process that had been happening in drips and drabs for the last month and a half. Also, I collected a garbage bag of stuff to donate to Goodwill. Organized the in-season clothes including going through the 2 tubs labeled "Size 2 and small 4", which still doesn't fit, although it's getting closer, and sorted them so that all the shorts/skirts/dresses or whatever are folded and together. I left the house this evening for the first time in 24+ hours to make a Starbucks run and I also ran in ShopRite and made a salad at the salad bar. I talked to my parents on the phone. So, in truth, I did stuff. But it wasn't like I had anything where I said, "I'm going to go through these boxes at 9 a.m. and iron these things at 10:30." In fact, I kind of drifted from project to project working on one for a while and then another for another while. And since I didn't feel pressured to finish anything by X hour, I really accomplished WAY more than I expected.
I even had an organizational miracle! When I was in the storage room, I opened this box which had a bunch of my miscellaneous stuff in it--some picture frames I got to put Disney pictures in (from my trip in 2011, not the two since then), some travel mugs, a few of my nice reusable shopping bags--and since I usually just skim past that particular plastic box, I figured in for a penny, in for a pound and I took it out and realized the box UNDER it which I thought was not MY stuff, actually was. It filled with t-shirts that I have but don't wear--you know the kind? The ones that you SWEAR you're making into a t-shirt quilt, but keep shoving somewhere, because in real life you, OBVIOUSLY, don't have time for that kind of craziness? Anyway, I decided to pull that out, too, because I had a few more shirts to add in and lo, here cometh the miracle. I have spent the last two years looking for several pairs of pants that had gone missing. These are some of my favorites--loose, linen-y cargo-esque pants, some from Target and one from Anthropologie--and last summer, I finally decided that they must have gotten mixed in with stuff that I gave away and made my peace with it. When in truth, what had happened was I was an unorganized mess who started to put them up after my Fall '11 Disney trip and ended up with them in the bottom of the box while I threw a bunch of t-shirts on top of them.
So while I wasn't technically doing things (there were several specific things I could have done), I was doing things.
And you know what? I feel better. I think that I didn't realize HOW MUCH I needed a mental health day, as it were. I don't even know if it's a mental health day. I don't THINK that I've been stressed (although it's entirely possible. I'm usually pretty bad at recognizing these things, at least in myself.). Maybe what I needed was a minor life reboot. You know how when an electronic-type thing is going wonky and you turn it off, count to 30 and when you turn it back on, it's working fine again? Maybe today and the bulk of tomorrow are the 30 seconds where nothing happens and everything works better afterwards.
I know that at 4 tomorrow, the world of rehearsing starts back. And I know that at 7:30 on Monday morning, I have to be at an appointment for work. But the approximately 48 hours of no commitments that have happened makes it seem not that bad.
