Slouching Towards Vacation

The last two weeks I've been having a hard time giving a damn about work. I'm as present and available to my clients as ever, and all my deadlines are being met. But you know it's time for a break when nothing about any of it is interesting anymore. It's like going through the motions in the perfect marriage - any guy with an ounce of self-awareness should take a moment and be jarred by the ungratefulness of it.

And take a vacation.

Outside of the holidays you get here and there, I haven't taken a real vacation from work in a long, long time. I don't really count the Christmas-New Year's corridor much, because it's always a giant intercontinental corrida in the midst of the entire world also traveling. Nearly every year out of the past five I've gone to Paris, and all but once I was accompanied by others. And the last two Carnivals, I've been in New York with Vini.

I had fun on all these trips, including the jaunt to Manhattan last February (my most recent pleasure trip on a plane). But rarely was I not working on those trips. We always had to have a high-speed internet connection. I always had to have my cell phone on. So they weren't really vacations.

See, when you run a consulting company, a real vacation entails you sending out an email a few weeks in advance to advise your clients that you're really going to be on vacation -- i.e., you will not be available. You cannot be reached. They should not expect you to work. You know, vacation. You have to tell them it's for real, and to leave you the fuck alone.

I haven't done that since 2005.

So, while I one-finger-typed my way, somewhat sag-eyed and bored, through writing a proposal for perhaps the most exciting contract I've ever had the chance to get in six years of consulting, I realized something was really fucked up with me. And it was time.

So I'll be on vacation starting July 26th. And I've decided that I will rack up seven days of the most irresponsible, self-centered, wild-child behavior I can conceive. It will be a week unlike anything since I quit my job in 2002, sold my Dupont Circle condo, moved to SoLo Piazza and went on a three month bender of parties, shopping and dilettanting.

I'm 40 years old. Time and gravity are about 15 minutes away from taking their terminal toll on me. And I have tremendous opportunities sitting in front of me professionally in the next few months. If I don't zap myself into shape soon, and get back to being the boisterous and undying me, there will be unanswered prayers to cry over for a lifetime.

And for those of you who know me, and remember what this blog was like a couple years ago, you can be sure that I'll take you along for the whirl.