I am writing this at 6:10 a.m. I have been up since, pardon my French, FOUR FUCKING THIRTY THIS MORNING! I'm tired! There is no earthly good reason why I should wake up so early when I'm this tired! When I don't have to be at work until seven, there's NO need to be up at 4:30!

I am NOT a natural morning person. In any way, shape or form, by genetics and by upbringing (hell, "bedtime" in my house as a little kid was "kinda around elevenish?"). My body freaks the hell out knowing it has to get up early and always has. So the evil trick it plays on me is to just not get any sleep at all. I'm not really an insomniac, but when I have to get up early I often end up not sleeping at all the whole night through. That's on one-time occasions, though. Now that I'm stuck doing this every day, my body has gone berserk.

At first I set my alarm for 6:30. In the dorms I managed to get myself down to a 10-minute out-of-bed-dressed-outta-here kinda thing, so I figured I'd just do that again (I shower at night anyway). Soon after that I find myself waking up at six. Which isn't too bad, at least I can check my e-mail and stuff like that.

Then it went to 5:30. Then 5. Now it's 4:30. You know what this means, folks- pretty soon I might as well just not go to bed Sundays through Thursdays, because I literally cannot rest knowing I have to be up so early.

This sucks ass. And people wonder why I'm cranky, especially when the early thing prevents me from sleeping in much on the few days I CAN sleep in... I'd try taking sleeping pills, but I'd probably sleep on through the alarm if I did that.

I don't know if I'm leaving for my aunt's house for Thanksgiving tonight or tomorrow "morning" (read: late afternoon by the time Mom leaves the house + traffic) yet. I get to have it sprung on me as a surprise at the last minute ("pack your bags, sweetie, we're on the road now"), apparently. Not thrilled about that. I actually don't want to spend the night there because (a) I'd rather get more novel-writing time in, and (b) the whole mess at their house.

My aunt and uncle got a foreign exchange student this year. She's nice, but she's opposite in personality to the rest of them and this is NOT going well in the slightest. My aunt's not into catering to people's differences much. Plus the girl's got issues up the wazoo in general-- and they had it pretty much confirmed a few weeks ago that yes, she is bulimic (which they suspected for months). Girl's mother is in total denial that ANYTHING is wrong, and my aunt, being rather heartless, doesn't want to deal with this and wants the girl out of her house ASAP. Which, unfortunately ... wasn't fast enough to get her out before Thanksgiving. So the poor girl has to spend an eating holiday with a bunch of people who can't stand her and who she can't stand right back (she's not speaking to any of them). That's just sad. So that kinda ruins the holiday, you know? I plan to spend my time there hiding in the corner with a book, as always.

Speaking of the novel, Joanne is apparently addicted to it, which is so totally flattering and shocking to me. I felt blushy, even, when she said that. I'm working on the next chapter as fast as I can, but given the holiday issues that will probably be awhile yet.

Unlike the rest of the world, I don't get Friday off. (Okay, that's the one thing that really sucks about not being in college any more.) We get one "floating" holiday off, and I scheduled mine for Dec. 24. I couldn't have gotten this day off anyway because it's a Friday and I have two pages to lay out (and no way to get them done earlier because people do not cooperate with the regular deadlines all that much, so no use in moving the deadlines up). It will be interesting to see how few people manage to submit a column today with them all having the day off already. I may have a heart attack if everyone does turn it in on time. Nobody's told me one way or the other if they're going to do one or not, so it'll all be a last-minute surprise. Whee.

Anyway, this week at work has been decidedly dull so far. Very little happens during Thanksgiving week (and now that I've said that, let's hope nothing warlike happens). Honestly, I have about one hour's worth of work I can get done today out of eight and I don't have anything else I can work on today to make me look busy. I spent the whole morning yesterday writing up the holiday music review (75 inches, folks) and then had virtually nothing to do until the obits started coming in. What really sucks though is that on Friday I have EVERYTHING going on and am going to be dropping dead from sheer exhaustion by the end of the day. I have interviews going on, one with someone that I suspect is going to be a hard one to get talking and I still don't know what the hell to do about a photo, and then I have two pages to get laid out, which takes me about an hour and a half longer to do (minimum) than if I only had one page.

I really dread Friday.

I have to do a story that I'm not personally comfortable doing. For obvious reasons I'm not going to get into what it is, but I know people are going to be outright pissed at me for writing it, and it goes against stuff I believe in. Now I have had to write stuff about people I wasn't thrilled with before, and came out totally neutral so you couldn't tell, but that was more personal differences (i.e. someone was lying, hiding the truth, or generally being jerky) than anything anyone else would care about. But this, well... it's more than a one-to-one personal difference, and I canNOT be neutral about it as I'd like to be, and I wish I could get away without bylining it or something (given the intention and location of the story, that's a no-no). And no, for various reasons I can't get out of it, and I don't think anyone else is even going to be around at the right time to do it besides me. *sigh* I just don't want people thinking that I personally support this, but that's exactly what they will think. And there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

I just want it all to be over so I can collapse at home, write my novel and attempt to get it up closer to 50,000 words, and SLEEP already.

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