Parental Issues

After yesterday's interesting and generally ranty theological debate, on to my personal life.

I want to throttle the Chief Editor here. I mean, he's a nice enough guy, but his organisational skills would shame a stoned budgerigar. He's only in once a week (and has been in India for three weeks, having only just returned in time for the Christmas lunch before swanning off for the holiday break) and so he passes along the decisions he wants me to dole out to hopeful authors by copy/pasting all my e-mails outlining the decisions he needs to make into a Word document, making a lot of notes and then typing out the e-mails he wants me to send in the same document. Generally without deleting my old e-mail text and the notes, and not really making it easy to differentiate between the two. He left for the holiday break and left me a document to look at, and the decisions under "Decisions" for all the papers I've labouriously collected referees' comments for? NOT DONE. There are notes, comments between him and the Associate Editor, but no e-mails outlining decisions. I've had to e-mail him saying, "Sorry, but after page 4 of your document, there's noplace where you've actually told me to do anything, so could you kindly clarify this?" Not to mention the fact that he's spending most of his time and energy getting me to chase up something he could have had settled weeks ago if he'd only paid enough attention to actually attach the document he wanted to send out to the e-mail he sent me before buggering off to India. *sigh*

I like the Associate Editor. She's so organised and polite and appreciative of my efforts. She dictates the longer decision letters and faxes me with the name of the draft e-mail she wants sent along with any text she wants me to add to it for shorter ones. Her handwriting is legible and her punctuation doesn't make me want to cry. (No, our Chief Editor cannot punctuate. He ends statements with question marks, questions with full stops and puts commas in the text pretty much randomly. It makes me want to throttle him even more than I already do.) I would gladly be her personal secretary. But no, I have Mr Disorganised, who seems to expect me to get things done when he can't even get himself together enough to tell me what needs doing on even an approximate level.

dodgyhoodoo is off visiting his mother this weekend; he'll be back Saturday night so he can have some relaxy time before Mage. It's going to be lonely, even with the cat, but it's only overnight so I think I'll survive. I'm only less than sure because looming over me like a cloud of infinite dread is the date I've made for a quick drink with Mum tomorrow afternoon. It's the first time I've seen her in about a year and a half and already I feel horrible about myself. She's promised to stay away from topics that will cause arguments, and that's well enough as far as it goes, but it doesn't really address the main problem. It certainly doesn't touch on the fact that my stepfather told me quite candidly that Mum pinned all her expectations on me and was horribly disappointed ... and probably still is. It doesn't help the fact that I know she thinks I'm too fat and badly-dressed to be accepted by society at large (I'm not even really paraphrasing, by the way -- I've been told that if I don't lose weight and dress better, I won't be accepted by anyone). And it doesn't change the fact that knowing that she thinks I'm this fat, ugly, disappointment makes me feel like a fat, ugly disappointment who's of no use to anyone. I don't even know why the hell she wants to see me at all at this point, but I assume it's some unholy cross between irresistable maternal instinct and not wanting to admit that she's been a completely sucky mother and lost her daughter through completely shrivelling said daughter's self-esteem.

Sorry about the whinge. I'm not really allowed to bring any of this up tomorrow by the terms under which Mum and I agreed to meet, and I'll probably never mention it to her again because honestly, I don't think she cares what she did to my self-perception and she thinks I should be completely over it by now. I just need to get it off my chest. I'm not going to be able to take tomorrow otherwise.

...

It's quiet. The cat is behaving, no one requires my attention, and I'm totally on my own to do what I like.

...So now what do I do?

Gods, I'm bored. I will cook dinner and find something DVDish to watch. I guess.

Yeesh. Live with someone for eight months and suddenly solitude is a burden.