The Banzai Chronicles

It's been nice not to have any commitments on the calendar yesterday and today—we've been booked fairly solidly of late, and with only a couple of free days next week, a break is good.

Nick & Anne's wedding was Thursday evening, and since then I've been processing some stuff and seeing things in myself that can hopefully be useful and good. The stimulus wasn't the wedding itself, but the reception—after a while, I found myself antsy and ready to head out. Part of that reaction was just my being tired (the ceremony was at 17:00, and Thursday is the end of my work week and thus, often my most hectic day anyway), and of course, some of it was my being an introvert, but I had trouble putting my finger on the rest. We were celebrating with friends, and I had no work in the morning, so what was my problem? As I grumbled inside, we opted to stay to clean up afterward. But once the reception was over and the cleanup began, my disposition grew much, much better.

So what's the deal? A couple of factors are probably in play:

• I like knowing when I'll be done. Not sure why it's taken me so long to realize this, but it's totally true. It doesn't have to be a specific time; it can be a project or series of tasks, too. Without that, my tendency is to be done whenever I like, which is often sooner than most, especially with social stuff (maybe related to the introversion thing). With it, almost anything is much easier and more comfortable for me.
  
• I like having something to do. Definitely a related factor to the above. I'm regularly asking, "Why am I here?", and when there's no longer a good answer in my head, I'm ready to move on. Celebration and being social is certainly a great reason for being somewhere, but on its own, that will usually only carry for a maximum of a couple of hours for me.

Staying to clean up was great thing that I probably wouldn't have done without barlow_girl's urging. God uses her to bring out better things in me. Left to my own devices, I would have assumed that there were plenty of volunteers to help, but when the time came, that turned out to be far from true (other than the families, there were only six of us). We were needed and useful, and it would have sucked all around to miss that. I'm thankful.