The Crumber

Remember back in college when all of a sudden everyone was reading the Rabbit books, and you decided that Updike was a genius and you were going to read everything else he ever wrote, and you went to the used book store and found some little old early Updike paperbacks and you started in on them, and ...enh. The prose was still lovely, but they just didn't have the juice?

For me that paperback was The Poorhouse Fair, which I never finished. At the beginning, though, (and I hope I am remembering correctly), is the part where one of the women in the poorhouse reflects endlessly on her contribution to the running of their unconventional household, which is "crumbing" the table after meals. She scrapes and picks and gets all the little food bits off the tablecloth so that it is clean and ready for the next meal. Friends, Jim's mom was our crumber. For three months. And today, as I picked a galaxy of sticky jasmine rice off our tablecloth, well, I missed her a little more than I usually do.

Work is absolutely kicking my ass, if I may say so. As a rule, I am your aggravating coworker, who, when you complain about how much work you have and you can't even believe it, and how do they expect you to get anything done with all these meetings, and so forth, clucks sympathetically and strains all the muscles in her face to keep her eyes from rolling. But now, I am on your side. The work is piling up! It is insane how much we still have to accomplish! I am tripled booked, every other morning, between 9:00 and 12:00, with scrums (for all you Agile development fans), trainings, meetings, and more scrums.

And because everyone is feeling this way, whenever a new task comes up, which it does about fifteen times a day, somehow it's landing on my tablecloth. More things to track. More things to learn. More things to finish up. More things to be responsible for. And although it has me stressed out quite a bit, and feeling equal parts grouch and martyr, there is a part of me that feels a little more alive than usual. So I will continue to gather up these sticky, annoying bits of work, and feel secretly grateful for some external motivation. I knew I had it in me to be more productive!