In which there are observations.
Apparently the method for both sleeping all night and — bonus — waking up a couple of minutes before your alarm goes off is to stop at Embo’s house on the way home from work and get drunk and then go home and put yourself to bed by nine-thirty without any dinner.
This morning I rode to work in 27° freezing fog. It was foggy. And freezing.
In which I blog.
What’s going on? Well, not much, really. Workin’ my 40-a-week, trying to get projects done but feeling scattered because every time I get into a groove — which in itself is a feat because this shit is soooo tedious — my phone rings and there’s some human being saying incomprehensible shit to me and expecting me to be both psychic and telekinetic.
I have customers call me up and say literally nothing at all intelligible and I’m supposed to somehow know that they’re having trouble sending email? It’s bizarre. And I’m not saying they don’t know computer jargon; I mean they don’t know how to communicate information in their native language. I’ve been doing support long enough that I can parse ‘letter’ for ‘email,’ or ‘router’ for ‘modem.’ What I cannot parse is sentences such as, “Well your status is wrong because it says all systems are operational but they’re not because mine won’t show the thing it just sits there!”
Your what won’t show what? The fuck, people. I NEED SOME FUCKING NOUNS. Are you trying to tell me your monitor is broken? That you can’t load a web page? That your email client has crashed? MINE WON’T SHOW THE THING is a fucking useless string of words. Some of these people literally blow my fucking mind. Like, just this morning a man called me and said his device was broken, but after about ten minutes of listening to him drone on and on about literally nothing I finally came to understand that he had called simply because his connection had dropped and he was too stupid to click Connect again.
I mean, for fuck’s sake, how am I supposed to fix that kind of stupid? You get online, you switch to your browser, you write an email, and perhaps your connection drops AS THEY SOMETIMES DO, you click Send, and you get an error. If you are not fucking bright enough to switch back to your connection management software and click the big giant goddamned Connect button on your own, WHAT THE FUCK CAN I POSSIBLY DO ABOUT IT? This is not tech support, people, it’s HOW DO YOU NOT DROWN IN THE SHOWER.
My Flickr stream lately is all office self-portraits and food. This is not because I never do anything fun — I mean, I even went flash caroling last week with a big group of people and had an absolute riot of a fun time — but because my phone sucks at low-light images and it’s pretty much always dark when I’m not at work. The self-portraits are for my various stalkers (the notes I get on those pics are pretty amusing, usually, along the lines of “uh, this particular surveillance cam image makes me wanna bang you for some reason,” which is both gratifying and creepy). The food isn’t up to bento par, but I’m doing some modified Atkins to drop some inches I don’t want, so I’m mostly just diarying.
There are some Xmas pictures. I never really got into the Christmas spirit this year, to be quite frank. I’m grateful the weather is still above freezing, but I’m getting tired of the constant grey and I’m still not doing well with my 8 o’clock starting-work time because I simply cannot adjust to getting out of bed when it’s still dark out. (I’m also waking up in the middle of the night pretty much every night now; I still get eight or more hours of sleep but now it’s in two sessions, which bugs me endlessly.)
Eh. Enough bitching. Suffice it to say that it’s dark all the time, I’m fairly bored with my life as a whole because it’s so terrifyingly static, and I really need a vacation. (This year I hope to take two: a week to see Amma, of course, and another to just go somewhere and be a tourist.)
Yes, hello, winter blahs here. Heh. Let me say at least one nice thing, which is that pesto scrambled eggs with brie — which is what I made myself for breakfast this morning — is fucking delicious.
In which I’m looking forward to the weekend.
Work’s been slow lately. I’ve been stymied trying to migrate websites from one server to another because my fucking end users can’t update their DNS; it’s beyond rocket surgery to these people.
“But… but… why can’t you do it?” they whine. “Because I DON’T HOST YOUR FUCKING SHIT!” I say. I have sites I’ve been trying to upgrade since August. Literally. It takes people that long to login to GoDaddy or what the fuck ever and click the Edit button.
My gig-free month ends today. Tomorrow night I’ll be with the Kings in Richland; looking forward to performing, yeah, but not so much the driving and loading in and setting up and tearing down and driving.
Sunday afternoon I have a date with g’ma. We’re going for pedicures. Taking a pedi with your g’ma on a Sunday afternoon is a wonderful thing, by the way.
I started going to yoga again, and I’m here to say fuck chiropractic, really. I realize Westernized yoga is categorically and emphatically not yoga, but it does provide the best spine health ever ever ever. (I hadn’t even realized how locked up my lower back was until walking out of the studio Wednesday night.) Also, in partially related revelations: I have short arms and long shins, so certain poses are, like, impossible for me.
I got paid yesterday and promptly spent all but a couple hundred bucks of it. I bought stuff for Xmas gifts, I sent my dentist a payment on my root canal, I paid for the DSL, I paid my absurd fucking cell phone bill, I paid my housing donation, and I bought about $100 worth of assorted clothes for myself — mostly bras and undies and socks but also a pair of jeans and a jacket. (I found myself wearing panties the other day that were literally sagging off my butt. Unfortunately I was half-naked in TinyChat at the time, so, yeah, that was awkward and caused an immediate NOTE TO SELF TO BUY SOME GODDAMNED UNDERWEAR and full-on follow through.)
I’ve been rockin’ the jazz Christmas carols up in the office this week. I should put some Christmas lights up around the door, too. I love Christmas lights.
In other news, riding one’s bike to and from work in freezing fog in the dark is FUCKING COLD. Just FYI.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s my lunch hour and I’m going to the post office now.
In which I blog more because it’s time than because I have anything to say.
I got my hair cut and colored after work Thursday night. It’s got honey blonde highlights and medium brown lowlights and it’s been cut into layers and it feels great. I also got the shit waxed out of what had become some truly gigantic unruly eyebrows and look like a girl again. The experience cost $102 plus tip, and was worth every. single. cent. My stylist had discovered The Secret in the past year so there was some “the world is as you are” midst the gossip, which was good because it reminded me it always starts somewhere, even though to be honest The Secret is really baby tier spirituality about getting desires fulfilled more than anything else.
Then I went to Marcy’s and drank my dinner so yeah, Friday morning sucked ass, but I had fun and got to see Kimi whom I’d been missing, so: totally worth it.
I’ve been weirder and more emotional and internal than I’ve been in a loooong time. It feels like some important evolutionary phase, somehow, but I have to be honest that the mood swings are so bad they’re almost hilarious. I’d suspect perimenopause except I’m ovulating like clockwork so it’s more likely I’m just being crazy (although what with last month’s loooooong term bout of The Dread and now this… hmm. yeah. beginning of the end, probably). These unexpected bouts of, like, heartbreaking existential loneliness have been bizarre. All kinds of midlife-crisis loops playing in my head (WHERE IS MY BEAUTIFUL HOUSE etc), plus the short days and the fucking rain and overcast skies and glacier-paced days at work and, as usual, knowing basically no one my own age and, well, I can go days without even really talking to anyone that isn’t a customer. Oh, the human condition: you’re just so funny. None of this matters, except oh holy shit it fucking matters. Gah. (tl;dr The panic has passed and now I think I’m a little depressed.)
Since my last post I’ve actually managed to sleep a lot, hit up Goodwill for some jeans and tops, sign up for a yoga class, buy groceries, make Egyptian and Turkish dishes, and take a bubble bath. For someone who never does anything I’m pretty good at crossing items off of to-do lists.
The Internet crush, surprisingly, continues apace. It’s pretty cool. There may be plane tickets at some point.
I’ve now been employed again for long enough that I’m living for weekends. Damn you, 40-hour work week: damn you and your soul-killing length.
In other news, Barnes & Noble bought Fictionwise awhile back and now, of course, they’re closing it. I received an email inviting me to transfer all my Fictionwise books — many many hundreds I’ve purchased over the past 8 years or so — to a Nook account. There was no way to bulk-download my purchases, nor any easy way to download the DRM’d items in multiple formats. I’ve basically lost access to a bunch of shit I OWN because I happened to buy a Kindle instead of a Nook. Good job, the publishing industry: you suck at internet.
In which I bitch.
Fuck yeah weekends.
Work changed my schedule three weeks ago when someone quit without notice; I’m now working 8 – 5 instead of 9 – 6. Adjusting my schedule by a single hour in the month of October literally kicked my ass and yes, I still loathe waking up before full light. Wednesday was the first day I woke up before my alarm, but I still stayed in bed too long to eat breakfast and had to take it with me to work and eat it cold because FUCK IT, IT’S STILL DARK OUT, I AM NOT GETTING UP YET. I kept going to bed early and waking up at five and then not being able to get back to sleep and blah blah blah REM cycles all fucked up and it sucked and now the clocks are going to change and I’ll be readjusting right back to where I started. So fuck DST.
The weather has turned cold and grey and rainy. Being cold makes me grumpy and inward. I hadn’t been to the bar in a couple of weeks before Thursday night because when I get off work all I want to do is get home before it gets any darker and colder. I spend my nights in my room drinking too much wine and either marathoning original ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ episodes or fucking off in IRC with a bunch of people half my age. Bitches have no idea how many millions of keystrokes I dump into multiplayer notepad every week. I will never finish any of my knitting projects.
Oh, yeah, and speaking of IRC, I’ll just go strait into shameless full-disclosure mode and admit that I have a brutal and enthralling internet crush on a 28-year-old IT guy from the east coast and yeah, perhaps I should grow up but fuck it he’s entirely too awesome. I mean, what’s wrong with being attracted to an agile intellect that isn’t also some Dawkins-worshipping pseudo-eurofag nihilist, I ask you. Such a beast is rare, no matter its chronological age. My friends are all giving me shit about my ‘irc bf’ because I actually check my phone now to see if he’s texted, which means they could actually get a response out of me in under 30 hours if they wanted, but none of them have wanted because I see zero texts from anybody that isn’t either sweet IRC bf or my debit card company. So keep on teasin’ me, assholes: at least I’m having more fun than you!
I have no gigs for the entire month of November and I cannot even begin to explain to you how happy that makes me so I will use bold for emphasis.
I need to get my hair done. I need to get my eyebrows waxed. The worst vanity of my life has set in now that my facial skin is losing its elasticity and I look fucking old in the mirror in the morning. (Midlife crisis crush, anyone?) (Hey, fuck you, man, I had no idea how old he was. It’s a text-only medium, your IRC chat room. Sheesh.)
My three week long panic attack seems to have abated, finally, the motherfucker. I have no idea what happened; I haven’t had symptoms like that in years. I just couldn’t calm the fuck down and was so adrenaline-saturated that I was having multiple PVCs per hour, which of course would feed my panic which would cause more adrenaline… it’s so weird witnessing yourself being utterly fucking crazy. Yesterday was nearly normal and today so far I feel mellow, so here’s hoping I’m out the other side of that bullshit, because smelling like stress-sweat all day for weeks on end gets old.
This weekend I intend to do laundry and buy groceries and cook Egyptian and Turkish recipes. There may also be wine and brie. I may nap a lot. Perhaps I will watch a movie or three. Perhaps I will go out and patronize live music instead of making it. Perhaps I will go eat chile rellenos at Rosita’s for the first time in a year. Perhaps I will take a bubble bath or go buy jeans at Goodwill. WHO KNOWS.
Like I said, fuck yeah freetime weekends.
In which there are quotes from some favorite non-fiction in my library.
The truth is that we are all inclined to flatter ourselves – despite our daily experience to the contrary – that we spend our time thinking logical, consecutive thoughts. In fact, most of us do no such thing. Consecutive thought about any one problem occupies a very small proportion of our waking hours. More usually, we are in a state of reverie — a mental fog of disconnected sense-impressions, irrelevant memories, nonsensical scraps of sentences from books and newspapers, little darting fears and resentments, physical sensations of discomfort, excitement or ease.
The mind seems to be intelligent and conscious. Yoga philosophy teaches that it is not. It has only a borrowed intelligence. The Atman is intelligence itself, is pure consciousness. The mind merely reflects that consciousness and so appears to be conscious.
The external world, even in its most beautiful appearances and noblest manifestations, is still superficial and transient. It is not the basic Reality. We must look through it, not at it, in order to see the Atman.
How to Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali
by Swami Prabhavananda, Christopher Isherwood, Patanjali
In which I have too much shit again.
It has come to my attention that I do not like to own too many things. It just bugs me when I have more stuff than I can interact with in any given year.
This may be my real nature, or it may be the result of having over the years lost entire households worth of stuff and realizing that stuff always, in one way or another, equals work and woe; but either way I just feel claustrophobic when my belongings start leaking out of cupboards and off of shelves, or when in order to find something I have to dig through six other things I haven’t used in three years.
When I moved into the upstairs bedroom five years ago, I had exactly one jeepful of belongings. I moved 80% of it into my room, and the other 20% — household items I had no need of here in this fully-furnished home — into the attic.
That perfectly adequate amount of stuff has bloated. There are no empty spaces on my shelves; the floor of my closet is packed with shit; my stash has quadrupled (I have boxes of yarn) and I no longer seem to knit very much anyway.
G’ma and I dropped the equivalent of ten lawn bags off at Goodwill last month, but I still have too much shit. It’s hard to get rid of excess stuff. I know most people just throw it out, but that’s not my way. I want it re-purposed, donated, or recycled, and that takes effort and time. The idea of putting perfectly useful items into a landfill because you’re too lazy to get it to where it should be offends me, but man sometimes I just want to fill up the dumpster and call it a day just to get this shit out of my closet so I can find my Polaroid cameras!
Do not even get me started on the multiple computer and monitor carcasses my family members have given me ‘just in case you can use it!’ that are heavy as fuck and have to somehow get to e-cycle.
The day after the Goodwill run I filled two more bags with clothes. I barely even buy clothes and I’m still getting rid of stuff my aunt gave me when I first moved here, stuff I’ve literally never worn. As for the rest of it, I have no idea where all this stuff even comes from.
Why do I have these stacks of CDs? Why do I have so much defunct electronic equipment? What do all these adapters go to? What’s all this miscellaneous crap in this basket? Did these jeans ever fit anyone? How did I get so many film cameras? Why do I have a trapeze dress for a rhinoceros? What am I supposed to do with these posters? Why do I have to keep so many pieces of paper? Am I required to keep these well-intentioned but useless Christmas gifts?
Gah! Clutter! I hate it! I don’t want to own this crap. I don’t want to be surrounded by things. I want air and light and space. I want the things I own to be things I need and use, and not tchotchkes and clutter that engender guilt each time they’re encountered.
It’s amazing how much shit one acquires with no effort, though. Nature really does hate a vacuum.
In which I write a post about fucking JARS because clearly I want to die alone.
I’m sure you’ve heard me praise the cuppow, which is merely a piece of plastic that turns a jar into a go-cup:
And you’ve probably seen my Mason jar pinterest board (which exists because I’m a fucking ‘tard).
I even backed a Kickstarter because who wouldn’t want a leather Mason jar cozy?
Then there’s the mayonnaise jar, which isn’t a Mason jar but which does have the same mouth and threading as a Mason jar:
You can even put food in jars, did you know this?
So basically there’s a pantry full of jars in the basement that I ignored for four years, then I found this little hipster-made piece of plastic and now I want to make Mason jar lamps and candles and shit.
But I probably won’t.
#dumbest_post_ever
In which I’m glad to be back at work where it’s quiet.
On Friday, my maternal grandmother turned 90. The entire family descended upon the house to celebrate. This is many, but by no means all, of them:
(I appear to be related to a bunch of white people.) (This never ceases to surprise me, for some reason, even though I’ve always been related to them.)
Friday night I drank heavily with my brother. (What.) (It’s a Morgan family tradition.) Saturday there was a 4-hour party at the museum and I think there must have been 80 guests. Saturday night there was a family-only function at the house; I declined the champagne and went to bed as early as I could. Sunday morning there was a brunch and family picture shoot.
By Sunday afternoon I was so exhausted I retreated to my room and knit quietly in between taking out garbage, doing dishes, cooking, and in general trying to be helpful while not getting sucked into any even remotely political discussion (most of my relatives are conservatives).
All that aside, I know a lot of people who don’t have much family. I’m blessed and I know it, although I was pretty grateful to bail out of there this morning and come to work where it’s quiet!
In which there’s sunshine and horse chestnuts in the alley behind the house.
The full saddlebags make my bike’s shadow look like a monster! Rrrrrr!
