The year and a half of my discontent

The alarm went off this morning, and I hit snooze from 5:56 to 6:16am. Really. Why even bother? Well, I work out in the morning, and I just don’t feel normal unless I get up and move a fair amount before my day starts. I laid there for a while, at first barely awake and then mostly awake, and thought about all kinds of things, none of which involved getting up, working out, or work itself. I finally remembered (with help from a “MROWR!” from Maddy) that I needed to get moving so I could start my day on a decent note, so I finally scraped out of bed, changed into my gym clothes, and did some yoga and weights for about 35 or 40 minutes.

Thing is, I’m not historically like this. For most of my life, I’ve never hit the snooze button more than once. That’s right; I’m a morning person. Feel free to hate me. I’m generally the person whose body springs them out of bed at or before sunrise and set me in perpetual motion. Even weirder is that perpetual motion very very rarely needs a nap during the day. But I’ve noticed that ever since my Wheatlands project ended about 18 months ago, it’s taken everything I have to get out of bed and get moving. I’ve usually had things to do, but they weren’t all that major, and they weren’t really mine. I knew that whatever I was doing was temporary—I was not going to be THE architect for MHRC or this or that hospital, the project I was working on was for a few weeks or even less, and so on. I’ve started a fair amount of my days wondering what I’d be doing when I got to my desk, or if my desk would even be mine anymore towards the end of 2008.

It’s been a shiftless, tepid existence. I’ve had to find writing projects to absorb some of the energy being flung off the coils of my hyperdrive—one project I’m doing with Dame Judith, and the other I’m doing for myself. Commenter 2H challenged me to start sharing some of my sketches, which thrilled me until I realized how little I’ve been sketching in the past, well, several years. I used to do a lot more drawing and sketching, but it would seem that the dailiness of architecture has worn me down to just toting a digital camera everywhere, which is no way to be. The way I’ve been living, especially the past three or four years, appears to have worn me down into something less than whole and interesting. Hell, I haven’t posted a Detail of the Week in months, probably over a year.

Funny thing is, I see lots of cool and interesting stuff out there, and then I blow it off. I go home, flip through a Crate & Barrel catalog, and go to bed. I should find stuff that’s interesting and meaningful to talk about and to blog about, lest all seven of my readers abandon me to watch videos of skateboarding dogs on YouTube. Yet when I sit down to write or think about what to say, I feel exhausted. So I feel stuck: I know I need to blog about architecture and educate my peeps, yet I suddenly keep finding myself with nothing interesting to say, or whatever I think of to say exhausts me to even think about writing about.

Anyway. I want to thank everyone for sticking with WAD and me while I ride out the crappy economy and finally find something to do as well as find the energy to drop some knowledge on my playaz out there. I’ll eventually come up with some unsolipsistic tripe to entertain and inspire, or at least not annoy.