Firing On All Cylinders

"Burnout" is such a strong word. That's why I'm not going to use it.

For that matter, neither am I going to tell you how my week has gone so far. I'm not going to tell you about all the service issues that suddenly cropped out of nowhere to land on my desk. I'm not going to tell you about all the rinky-dink seminars being given by other departments in the same building at the same time (which nevertheless all come with a free lunch). I'm not going to tell you about the split-second projects that people suddenly decided to dump on my shoulders. I'm not going to tell you about the fact that I ran through about twenty meetings, got yelled at by fifteen different clients, answered about two hundred e-mail messages, and the fact that the week isn't over yet.

Heck, I'm not going to tell you about my splitting headache at the moment. I'm not going to tell you about the bags under my eyes, or the three-hour sleep sessions. I'm not going to tell you that I barely have time to do anything else, much less the stuff that I've been forced to put on hold for a while: Writing. Plotting. Going out. Playing around. Taking baths. Changing my underwear.

I'm not going to tell you that I feel tired right now. I'm not going to tell you that sometimes I fear falling asleep into my keyboard. I'm not going to tell you that sometimes I walk around the office floor with a plastic cup of water in my hand and wonder if I should dump it over my head.

I'm not going to tell you that my dreams have been strangely empty as of late, and I'm not going to tell you that I can't seem to remember which words rhyme with each other. I'm not going to tell you that I suddenly don't know what the capital of Iceland is, and I'm not going to tell you that I've forgotten what fettuccine carbonara tastes like. I'm not going to tell you that I haven't even so much as checked the newspaper in the last week, and I'm not going to tell you that I can't find my little cast of stuffed toys for some reason. (It's probably wash day or something.)

But I am going to tell you that I'm still up and about. You'll know that I'm starting to wind down when the smoke starts coming out of my ears, when my breath starts coming in ragged smoker-rasps, and when I start spouting inappropriate random words in five-second bursts.

When I do, the instructions are simple: Just lean me over my desk, look for the rotator keys in the three slots somewhere along the small of my back, and wind each of them up. One key controls my thoughts, one key controls my speech, and one key controls my actions. (I grant bonus points to anyone who somehow gets the literary reference.)

Did I say that "burnout" was such a strong word? I'll say it again, then: "Burnout" is such a strong word. It feels good to resist the temptation to use it, I suppose.