In which there’s a sterotypical Monday goddamned morning.

My alarm goes off when it’s still full dark outside so I push snooze at least three times because fuck getting out of bed before the sun’s up if you’re not about to get on a plane and go somewhere.

Roll out at the last possible minute, go to the dark kitchen and start a pot of coffee. Walk through the dark house. Take a shower. Walk back through the house opening drapes: day is breaking, but it’s dismal and overcast and still raining.

Dry hair, dress–at least I did laundry yesterday so all my clothes are clean–cook, pour coffee. Eye the rain through the kitchen window. Put on another layer of clothes: immediately begin to overheat. Push my glasses up and the left hinge breaks. Strip off my layers and go see if it can be fixed: no, it can’t be fixed. Go to the front bathroom and put in my contacts. Now I’m late to work.

Suit back up. Ride to work in the goddamned rain. The sky is grey and it’s so wet my brakes barely work.

My first caller of the day required me to spell vzam.net several times and he still had it wrong at the end of the call. I don’t know how to be more clear than spelling it phonetically for you SEVEN FUCKING TIMES: “Listen, listen, it’s v like victor, z like zulu, a like alpha, m like mike, dot november echo tango.” I cannot try any fucking harder, people.

My second, fifth, and eighth calls were some old dude who has basically never used a computer before and who requires me to dictate support steps so he can write them down and who also insists on talking instead of listening. Why do so many people not observe the social covenant that indicates the questioner should SHUT THE FUCK UP AFTER ASKING A QUESTION so that the answerer may answer?

Taking first tier dial-up calls in the morning makes me really mad sometimes; I know I should be beyond it but there’s a part of me that really is a snob: if you cannot follow basic, simple, direct, clear instructions, your stupidity makes me mad. IT JUST DOES.

Welcome to (the first) Monday (of the year).

In which there’s a small party.

My soft plan for Monday night’s festivities was to get off work, go home, take a disco nap, bathe, dress, and then wander down to Marcy’s for the midnight champagne. Instead I left work and rode straight to Mark & Embo’s house and never left.

We had Thai carry-out, a fire, music, and many beverages. Three awesome girls showed up around eleven. At midnight we drank champagne and said cheers and kissed. By two I was asleep on the futon next to Kimi.

Next morning there was lounging about, eggs, a couple of bloody marys, and a Harry Potter movie. I went home and went to bed around two o’clock.

Fun times!

Wishes that everyone has a wonderful 2013.

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 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 an 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 fun. 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 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?)

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 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.