If I were better-educated, or at least better able to pull off the upper-crust affect that would work in this sentence, I'm sure there's some fancy (probably German) word for how these last few days have felt. It's not schadenfreude, it's not angst, it's not ennui (wait, that's French)...but I'm not sure how exactly to describe it.
The examples at work go like this: On returning to the office this morning after a weekend in Vermont, I began making the list of the various projects and due-outs that I need to be on top of. Some of them were pretty darn immediate, like letting Procurement know whether we had any mission-essential contracts before noon. And as I look down the list, there's already a number of tickmarks that I've crossed off.
But the principal ones I'm stuck waiting on someone else before I can do anything. Whether it's data quality validation for a project for the ADD, or data collection for a GAO audit, or the go-ahead for publishing the first-quarter business metrics reports, or the "OK" to use the new briefing materials I produced for outbound SACs, or the "looks fine" on our statement of top Division accomplishments since 2001, I'm left waiting on others inside or outside my Division before I can get anything done. Consequently, I'm left vaguely bored, and having to chew on lower-level projects that frankly I don't wanna do right now, just to kill the rest of the day.
There's a similar something like that happening around the house. I know in four weeks I'll be taking the day off to begin painting my Mom's new assisted-living apartment, and that between now and then there's some work that needs to be done, and certainly from that day out there will be tasks. But right now, it's waiting...it's far too soon to buy paint (it'll separate back out again in a month), we can't arrange phone service until we know her room number. So in anticipation of what will likely be a busy end of March and early April, I can get started on...well, nothing.
So how *do* we describe this feeling? It's not really "boredom," although there's probably an element of it, because there's certainly things that *can* be done, just not the A-level priorities right now. It's not just the cliched "calm before the storm"--there's something a little deeper than that at work. It's not "burnout," because I'm actually looking forward to doing the business metrics and having the outreach paper back to work on it again, and so on.
If only I'd studied German more. I'm sure there's some Freudian word out there for this.
