Life in the Cheese Drawer

i have an eyetwitch. i think i’ve had it for about a month or so, maybe two. last time i had an eyetwitch was during the website move back in 2017, and that was a legit reason to have an eyetwitch. now? i’m not sure. but here’s the rub: i seem to get it mostly around my officemate.

so i am trying to unpack what is going on that is causing my eye to twitch. he thought it was because he was negative there for a while, but i don’t think that’s it, because i’m negative a lot of the time too. then i wondered if it was because he does bring up the same thing quite a bit (emails for prospective students hahaha) and he’s just preaching to the choir, which might be a little bit of it. then it’s bad news that he points out – he thought that was it today and thought just keeping me out of the loop was a good idea, but no! i want to know!

then i thought about this bad news (or rather, frustrating news is more like it). i don’t think it was the fact that it was frustrating, or the news itself, or what it pertained to. i think it was because i read the same exact email a couple days ago and didn’t even register it. his level of paying attention to minutiae on the everyday things we deal with is overwhelming sometimes, and it makes me feel idiotic that i didn’t notice (which is ridiculous because i have a million other things to think about at work). he just pays attention to different things than i do, and i have to realize that hey, that’s ok.

(seriously, my eye is twitching right now just writing this down.)

generally speaking, i’m not the big ideas person at work. i’m not the person who has amazing thoughts about a subject or comes up with the funnest thing ever (i have had two moments, but other than that, nada). i am the details person. this is happening, how are we getting it done? my followthrough is stupid fast and sometimes too fast because the thing just isn’t going to happen (i’ve gotten ahead of myself).

so when officemate finds these things that are big things that i’ve glossed over, yeah. i feel kinda dumb for missing them. or dismissing them. (or sometimes i just don’t care about them. yeah, i said it!) plus he’s a whiz at a bunch of digital stuff that i a) don’t want to really learn about cuz it’s not on my plate and b) sometimes also don’t care about, even though i should. (there’s the kicker.) so when he talks to me about these, my eye twitches. because, well, i’ve got stuff to do and i want to get on with it.

BUT I SHOULD CARE ABOUT IT AND THAT’S WHAT MAKES MY EYE TWITCH SERIOUSLY I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

also, there’s a small sense of the stuff i care about isn’t that important in the long run, but what he cares about affects the college in a bigger way.

so maybe a feeling of what i care about is inadequate compared to what he cares about (not that it’s bad to deal with different things; it’s just annoying to myself that i don’t see the problems and frustrating that i should care about them more than i do).

i think i need to come to terms that we see our work through completely different lenses and that’s ultimately a good thing because we notice more as a department (yes, we are a department of 2). i don’t have to do everything! my type A really can be annoying a lot of the time. rrrrr.

i don’t have any solutions right now, just ramblings and a pretty twitchy eye. maybe yoga over my lunch break will help.