Category Archives: Meditations on work

my old design was all right but the sea was so tight, it broke away broke away 4

10520023

So yes, I’ve moved to another look and feel. I rather like this one. I was able to implement this really cool album art “recently listened to” thing. It’s a beta version, so it doesn’t have the option to grab the most listened to for the current week, but I’m pretty sure he will update it. For the geeks in the crowd, it built entirely with jQuery, an extensible javascript library. (mouse over it for a cool effect)

I got a ton done today. I went to sleep early at about midnight, then got up and packed a bunch of boxes of books. I ran out of tape, so I headed down to the store. I also hit the grocery store and on a lark got some goat milk. I had some cereal with it this afternoon and don’t feel ill, so that’s pretty cool. I can finally make recipes that call for milk without the odd things that sometimes happen when I substitute soymilk.

I talked a lot with Amanda today about what it means to be honest on our blogs. Unfortunately, the consensus seems to be that people can’t handle unadulterated truth.

Of course, that got me started on how my favorite blogger stopped writing. I mean, I’m happy for him… but the reasons that he gave for stopping were stupid. Even if you just post a few pictures and say what you did during the week, it’s better than completely shuttering your blog and hiding your archives.

I haven’t heard from Andrew since Tuesday… the bulletproof excuse of dropping his phone in a glass of water in my presence is wearing thin. It’s just the same old pattern.

My Friday was a really good day for some odd reason… probably because I volunteered to redesign the web site for my company’s other magazine. Had dinner at Crepeville, got some coffee at Peet’s and dug into The Myth of Sisyphus. It’s didactic and difficult to read. I wished I had one of my other novels to alternate between.

It’s kind of depressing to look at my new archives page. The month I had the most posts was December 2003 (gee, I wonder why) and I averaged about 30, now I’m lucky if I get in 10-15 posts per month. I guess I just don’t have as strong feelings as I once did…or perhaps it has more to do with my flaky-as-hell voice-recognition that barely ever works now (I’m typing 50% or more of this post).

When I get paid on Thursday, I’m buying a state-of-the-art super-noise-canceling headset. The shitty thing about most headsets are that they aren’t stereo. I don’t care if I have to duct tape normal headphones onto it, I’m getting a headset that works.

I refuse to dwindle away to a few posts a month. Not writing is death.

That’s what this redesign is about.

Categories: Ennui,Meditations on work

Published:
January 3, 2009 – 8:44 pm
Author:
By A.

fly away to a better place 1

> Chromeo – Me and My Man
> Daft Punk – Voyager
> Propellerheads – Winning Style

Whoa. I just finished reading Ender’s Game. Fucking incredible. And even though years ago I had been told the surprise ending, it didn’t dawn on me until the very last second. I started reading it yesterday night and continued after work to read it until like 4 a.m. Oh god, the work thing yesterday. I don’t even want to talk about that. But I must.

7:50: I drove up to my second job, and the building was empty and dark. I remembered that someone was telling me that the job was going to end sometime soon, but I thought there was still a few weeks left. Obviously, since there was no one there, the job was over. So I went home.

9:10: I hear my cell phone ringing in the other room, so I go in there and checked my messages. Sure enough, they were trying to get ahold of me. As I learned later, the guys at the factory are now getting there about 40 minutes later. It would be nice if someone had told me. In my haste I very nearly got into an accident on the drive back up there. I can’t believe it. I didn’t stop at a stop sign. I can’t understand why I would do such a thing. Stupid. Getting in an accident to go to a job I hate for people who don’t appreciate my work. That’s some cosmic irony for you.

9:30: I get there and start downloading my files to process, and everything seems to be running smoothly. Except for this one file. I couldn’t get it to do anything. I tried every trick I know, but that stubborn G3 that runs all the machines just wouldn’t take it. It took two hours to get that file to work. Two hours where all of the factory employees were standing around doing nothing while collecting overtime. I felt mildly culpable, because I had the page for 45 minutes or so while I was fiddling with it where I should have been on the phone with the people that sent it, but the blame is really with them because it was a problem on their end. I know it. All of the other files worked flawlessly, why the problem with this one? it’s all the same fonts and images. Anyway, I was very until around 2:45 in the morning, ravenously hungry because in my haste I’d forgotten to grab a snack. That was the night from hell.

Okay, back to the book: it was fucking incredible. The plausibility was perfect, even though I think it was written a while ago. The references to Russia made me seem like it was written in the middle of the Cold War, but that might have just been a coincidence. The narrative voice was impeccable, unlike the rampant clumsiness, unimaginative settings, and murky point of view of Neuromancer. The author did have a bit of a penchant for unnecessarily jumping into other point of view characters, but it seemed to flow well anyway. Wow. I can’t even think about how amazing that was. It totally blew my mind, I’ll need a few days to recover. I really don’t want to go to work tomorrow. To deal with my asshole boss. To pretend like I care. Fuck.

Some random guy from Klamath Falls wanted to be my friend on MySpace, and as I was looking over his profile I saw a “Which Queer as Folk Character Are You?” quiz.


You are Ted.

Which Queer As Folk Character Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

My first reaction was how depressing the result was, but now that I think about it, I’m not like any of the other characters. Perhaps that’s why I don’t really like that show much, I can’t associate with these flippant, superficial people. They remind me too much of the people I see every day.

I was sort of down in the dumps earlier this week, but now I’m wearing an expression of quiet optimism, which it is advisable to wear while facing the telescreen. That quote came back to me in the shower this morning, mild Darius points if you can identify it.

I just don’t know what I’m living for right now. I sort of want to throw caution to the wind and drive to Sacramento on the 19th to go see that Nine Inch Nails concert with Kelly, but it’s probably going to cost at least $200. And no matter how much it sickens me, I would rather have a 23″ Apple Cinema Display than be with the people I love most. How hideous have I become? I can’t even conceive of being with these people that I adore so much from so far away, that the only thing I can really count on is the comfort of technology. I feel like I won’t ever be able to move away from that until I leave this town. And that reminds me: the only way I can leave is by finishing my math. And I’m two chapters behind.

I must destroy the math before it kills me.

PS: this is the cutest/wierdest thing ever.

Categories: Epiphanies,Meditations on work,Melancholy

Published:
October 30, 2005 – 10:27 pm
Author:
By A.

estoy cansado 0

This morning the power went off 10 minutes before I was supposed to get up. I woke up anyway and halfway through my morning routine, the power had come back on. So of course I got in my car and drove to work. Big mistake. The power was out all over Crescent City and there was absolutely nothing to be done at my job since everything is produced on our computers. I waited around for 20 minutes or so listening to the Insipid Coworker of Doom complain about how no one wanted to come to her Halloween party that she had planned. If I had a costume, I would’ve planned to make an appearance. Possibly. But of course just to mentally mock her. Anyway, I went home, caught up on my blogs, watched some Sean Cody, worked on my painting, etc. By now it’s around two o’clock and I woke up at eleven. I called the office at 2:30 to make sure they weren’t back up and nobody picked up, so with nothing else to do I watched an episode of Star Trek. Around 4 p.m. they called to say that the power was back on. Unfortunately, everything was working but the Internet. We use it for everything…it was such an infuriating day. It’s nice to work in an office where you can curse to your heart’s content. Well, I didn’t do any cursing, but my coworkers articulated my feelings very well. There’s something about being on hold for two hours that will make anyone snap.

Well, long story short, it was very hectic but I got everything done and ended up driving the pages on CD-ROM up to the factory in Smith River (due to the lack of Net). It was actually sort of fun and am glad it happened on a day where I didn’t have anything else to do. I’m really glad I have the Internet at my house though. I don’t know what I would do. Well, I would be writing this… but I wouldn’t be able to post it. And that would be a hollow blogging victory.

Ben was online when I got home, he instant messaged me and said that he had seen me driving the on my trip to Smith River. He didn’t have anything to talk about and from the incredibly long pauses between his responses, it was obvious that either he didn’t care about the convo or was talking to 20 different people. Probably both. I got angry when he gave me this bullshit four minutes into the convo about having to work on his halloween costume, and blocked him. However, I didn’t really block him; I just hit delete because I wasn’t really thinking straight. So I accomplished nothing. As usual.

So here I am back at my house with power, the Internet and television but nothing to do with any of them. I would go work on my painting again, but I already did stuff do it today and it would be a bit of overkill to work on it twice in one day. There’s really not much else I can tweak. I just have to let this layer dry before I can put the second part on it. Perhaps I should start Ender’s Game.

Oh yeah, I really wanted to talk a bit more about how that last novel I read and that movie I saw last night. *spoiler alert* so okay, in the end of the Neuromancer novel you have the protagonist Case (the Neo character), Molly (the Trinity character) and Malecum (the egregiously flat character that is the pilot of this their ship). They are on this giant orbital space station called Straylight which was made by this corporation called Tessier-Ashpool. This company made artificial intelligences to protect their data, and one of the members of the family that controlled the company created two artificial intelligences who she wanted to make sentient, Neuromancer and Wintermute. Wintermute has been behind the scenes the entire book, guiding the characters into this whole situation, but Neuromancer is like, the personality of the AI. They are both engineered so they can never know the other one’s name, except for if it is spoken into this crystalline head in the center of the Straylight station which Wintermute thought would erase his program.

So eventually Wintermute and Neuromancer get into some sort of fight in the Matrix while Case (Neo) is trying to steal something from the Tessier-Ashpool corporate network, and they mesh with this Chinese virus and Case’s (Neo’s) construct to become a whole sentient artificial being. In the end, Case (Neo) sees the new AI and talks to it, and it says that it isn’t in the matrix anymore, that it is the matrix. It’s an interesting ending, especially because you end up seeing that the AI looks exactly like Case. It also says that it has been communicating with another artificial intelligence in another galaxy, which would make an interesting (albeit totally lame) continuance for the matrix trilogy. I’m sure in 2032 they will remake all of them with new special effects a la Star Wars.

I have much less to say about that movie The Dreamers. It starts as a classic bildungsroman, with the hackneyed plot of the American student in France who ends up learning all sorts of things about life. But the thing I found so disappointing about this movie was that the characters don’t learn any lessons. They don’t really even get a chance to. They live in this apartment for a month and get all incredibly intimate and such, but right when it seems like something’s going to change and the characters are going to have to face all their problems, the movie just ends with this shot of policemen running in to fight this mob of Communist protesters. And that’s it. We never learn what happens. It seems like it was the beginning of a movie that was three times as long…and the characters never really changed. The beginning half (where it seemed like there might actually be some drama) was good though.

Well, I’d better go look for something to do. I hope Misty calls me. I’ve got her hooked on this delicous cherry brandy. Well, the discovery of the wonders of cherry brandy is actually quite a funny anecdote. I’m lying, but it’s an anecdote about me and Joe so I’m going to play it up as much as I want. We were hanging out at my house, desperately wanting some alcohol (we were such lushes) when we came upon this half empty bottle of cherry brandy that I had bought years ago to make a Black Forest cake. After much careful deliberation, we decided unanimously to make it into screwdrivers. It was SOOO delicous. Cherry and orange. Heavenly. So last time we were at Safeway, I told Misty about how good it was then of course she had to try it. And now she loves it. Do I have good taste or what?

I’ve been meaning to read the Wikipedia entry on the different types of alcohol and how they are all produced and what the differences are (sherry vs brandy vs cognac, etc.) I feel like a fool not knowing such things and being a guy. I think another part of it stems from me just not being a beer person. Beer bores me. Maybe I just haven’t had anything that was so good, but I don’t see what all the fuss is about. When I want to get drunk, I don’t want to have to go through a bunch of beers. Just take a few shots of hard alcohol and you’re buzzed. It’s all about saving time. And then you can get back to the glory that is moments like these.

Categories: Lethargy,Meditations on work

Published:
October 28, 2005 – 8:55 pm
Author:
By A.

parties and work 0

I voice-chatted with Josh until like 5 a.m. I was bored. And I wasn’t sleepy at all. Must have been the hot chocolate. I woke up around 5 p.m. and I immediately showered and got ready for Kat’s party, since I wanted optimal hangout time before I had to go to work. I got to the parking lot at 6:58, but stayed in my car until 7:01, when I walked over. I’m usually always fashionably late, but contrary to my own lateness philosophy, I was totally on time and the only one there. So me and Kat hung out, ate chile and listened to Ella Fitzgerald (name might not be correct), this cool jazz singer lady from the forties. We had a great conversation, and it was really cool to hang out one on one. Then the Insipid Coworker of Doom arrived, repeating like a ventriloquist’s dummy “I made five loaves of banana bread!” seventy fucking times. The banana bread was incredibly delicious though, I had to give her that.

It was about 7:45 by the time everybody else showed up, including about five twenty-something guys that I didn’t know at all but everybody else seemed to know, so I was a bit frazzled (as I am introverted around strangers) and was unable to come up with anything cool to say. But Matt and a bunch of the others that I knew had shown up too, so it was ok, we talked a bit about the Bill Stamps Jr. stuff before I had to go. Matt was all “you have no excuse not to come back [after work], it’s on your way home.” It’s really not on my way home, but I’m going to go back over there after my work is done here. And oddly, things have been going really fast and I just might get out of here way before I usually do. I only need two more pages.

I shaved off the little beard-ish thing I had been growing, now I feel like a twelve-year-old. I should have kept the stubble.

Anyway, I learned earlier today that my iPod is being shipped ground from Hong Kong. Okay guys, riddle me this. How is “ground” shipping between countries separated by an ocean possible? I’d better get it by the end of the week, or I will be very annoyed.

Well, my luck officially ran out. Something just broke on the press, and someone from Brookings has to come fix it. And the fixing process should take 45 minutes. Fun fun. I’d better go read some blogs.

Categories: Gossip,Meditations on work

Published:
September 24, 2005 – 10:30 pm
Author:
By A.

eat my ass and learn Latin, barbarians of Brittania 2

> Peaches – aa xxx
> Golden Boy & Miss Kittin – Nix

I just played Caesar III (the best game ever) for like three hours. I kicked some major barbarian ass. It was great. I am the uberRoman. It is sad that my relatives come from southern Italy, not from Rome. I’m still a Roman though by proxy. Anyway, I checked my e-mail and had a buttload of comments. It was pretty cool.

I rescheduled my backups to run in the afternoon when I’m not home. I had set them to run at 11:30 p.m., but the last two days when that time rolled around all of a sudden my system would go incredibly slow for like a half hour. I can’t stand that.

Today was incredibly stressful, so I was very glad to retreat into the Roman Empire for a few hours. I took the math placement test in Brookings this morning, and tested into elementary algebra. I was so late though because of all the road construction. By the time I got back to Crescent City, I was 25 minutes late for work and in an incredibly bad mood. But work was OK. This guy came in from the head office of our company to give a seminar on this program that we use a lot, and he was a very bad speaker. It wasn’t really much I didn’t already know, Adobe Creative Suite is my god. He passed around this portfolio of his photography work, and it was incredibly insipid. It was all of these nature photos with these clichéd titles. I mean, it was obvious he put a lot of effort into them… but that’s all they were. Nature photos. Uberyawn.

And after I got home I helped my mother rework this incredibly bad paper. It was SO draining to put all of my effort into painstakingly rewording and reworking sentence after sentence. But I think that we succeeded. My mother is supposedly graduating magna cum laude and she’s going to get this medal with her diploma. She said that she wouldn’t have gotten it if I wouldn’t have helped her on her papers. I’m not sure if that’s true, but its cool to think that she values my input that much.

She’s paying me handsomely to do it as well. I get paid tomorrow. I’ve worked the most in the last two weeks that I have in my entire life, so this should be the biggest check I have ever gotten. Friday I’m going to register for Elementary Algebra ($280ish…ouch!) and I should totally have enough to get the new system of my dreams. However, I’m a bit reluctant to get it. DDR2 (the new generation of memory) is just beginning to get into this speeds where it beats normal 400MHz DDR1, and I don’t want to buy slow memory modules if in a few months Corsair comes out with DDR2 800 with 3-3-3 timings. They already have DDR2 577 with 3-3-2 timings. Eh, fuck a new system. I want an iPod Nano. I’m totally going to buy one on the Apple Store and get the $20 student discount. I can’t wait until tomorrow. I should go to sleep.

Oh, PS: to all the “anonymous” commenters, my server logs your IP address, hostname, and all sorts of other fun little things about you. It’s funny that all the anonymous comments were posted from computers at CR. In a word: pathetic.

Categories: Happiness,Meditations on work

Published:
September 15, 2005 – 2:11 am
Author:
By A.

ennui, lifelong loans, text messages, Caterine Vaubaun, racism, survival, and dead jokes. 0

> Felix da Housecat – Walk With Me
> Propellerheads – Better?
> Felix da Housecat – Glitz Rock [download it! now!]
> Kraftwerk – Das Modell
> Miss Kittin and Goldenboy – Nix

This is the first time in a very long time that I have been truly bored. Before, I had friends to do stuff with. Me and Joe would go all around Crescent City hanging out and eating sushi and talking about the future. Or me and Selena and Misty and Ben would hang out and watch cool movies. But no. I can do none of those things now. Ben won’t return my phone calls. I don’t know why. So I’ve been reduced to this life of exercising obsessively and eating very little because I feel that I’m fat and ugly because that guy blocked me and I never see my friends.

I have been wholeheartedly devoted myself to excercising myself to a bag of bones and my endless work. Ihave nothing else to do. All I can do is surf the Web looking at things I want to buy as if that will make my life better. That new sound card will improve my voice recognition, but what is the point? I have nothing to say anymore. I feel like my life is wasted.

Today I paid my dad the first installment of the $50 a month for the rest of my life for my transmission. I really can’t afford to drive my car anymore. I can afford to pay insurance on it and pay my dad, but not much else. I didn’t ride my bike to work today because my legs were killing me, but I’m going to attempt to do it tomorrow. Even if it’s raining. My MP3 player broke again but last night I got out the soldering gun and the superglue and fixed it. It took almost an hour for me to find that soldering gun. I even found a handgun my dad had cleverly hidden in the kitchen somewhere before I found the soldering gun. Well, at least I know what to do if there’s a burglar. I wonder if it’s loaded. Hmm.

I should instant message Amanda. She sent me the cutest text message ever and it totally made my day. Usually I only get text messages when I’ve used up all of my free minutes and so when I checked it I was definitely pleasantly surprised.

I have been staying at work a lot more lately since the semester started, which is a bit strange. Now I hang around until five o’clock or so where the work shifts back into low gear and we have all sorts of political conversations in the office. It’s a really great to work with college-educated people who know how to logically support their premises and that understand that a debate is different from an argument.

I, of course, take the completely jaded and cynical Caterine Vauban perspective, mostly for comic relief. Sometimes I fear that my coworkers think that I’m being serious when I’m being sarcastic. Today one of my favorite coworkers was talking about the failure of the FEMA after hurricane Katrina, while in the last disaster in Florida everyone seemed to have been rescued in a very timely fashion. The difference in her mind (and, of course, in my mind) is that this time the victims are mostly black. So of course I quipped “Well, Kat, I think that we really should follow Bush administration policy on this one: black people just aren’t important.”

I love bringing racial issues right into glaring focus. It’s probably just the endless rhetoric of the uberleft that makes me feel this way, but as a white guy I always have this sneaking suspicion that since I live in this highly insulated white culture, I might be somehow subconsiously a racist. But I really doubt it. It’s all just subjective anyway. Someone could say that when me and my cousin say “What’s up in the hood” for comic relief, that we’re being racists in our own politically correct American way. But I wholeheartedly disagree. I object to what passes for black “culture” just as much as I object to what passes for white “culture.” All the crap about rappers is just as vanilla in the scheme of race relations as the last Jessica Simpson album. Real black people don’t act like those imbeciles on television gloating over their cars and diamonds, nor do I regurgitate the platitudes of Jessica Simpson. But I still feel like I can’t escape our societal bias. I was riding my bike today and rode past a black person. And I was all, “whoa, a black person in Crescent City.” And I wasn’t really sure if it was a “Whoa, that’s cool” reaction or a “Hmm, things are changing” reaction. Well, I guess having a neutral reaction is the best way to respect people for individuals, but I have a hard time doing that for the inbred Crescent City scum I have to deal with on an all too regular basis. I guess I would think that way about any minority Crescent City. I don’t know. I guess I have a unique perspective on things because I view the white population in Crescent City as the biggest problem.

A lot of people give lip service to “diversity,” but I feel like the sad truth is that what passes for American culture (a conglomeration of five or six media companies) doesn’t want a world of individuals, it wants a nation of blacks and whites and latinos and gays and Muslims and more and more groups to fight amongst each other so the Republican power elite can steal our money and outsource our jobs to China. But I guess that’s the future. Once we don’t have skin color to fight about anymore, what will we dream up next?

I read this really depressing study one time about a classroom where children were divided up by eye color and by the end of a certain amount of time the groups of one eye color would fight groups of a different eye color. Oh well.

I just have to keep living. That’s my one imperative. This six months of my life will be wasted. This year will be wasted. The best years of my life will be wasted. For what? The only reason I can think of to live is to buy new technology as to better separate myself from my empty life. God, this post is incredibly long. I should stop this.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again. I need a personal Jesus. (That’s a Depeche Mode homage, for the culturally illiterate.)

I never blog this much when I have friends to talk to. I’ve probably said ten or twenty sentences this whole day. That’s it. And they were all work related. I can can only pick out five or six sentences I said today that weren’t work related. And now Amanda signed off. I’m alone forever. In a cold room. Lol. Me and Kelly would joke last time I was down in Sacramento about melodramatic darkies (“goths”) talking about their life as being like a cold dark room. It’s sad how jokes will slowly morph into reality. And then they’re not funny anymore.

Categories: jamais vu,Meditations on work,Melancholy

Published:
September 7, 2005 – 8:49 pm
Author:
By A.

exhaustion 0

I’m sorta done with the work here, I’m just waiting for the presses to start up. It is a miracle I woke up on time after accidentally setting my alarm for 6 p.m. instead of a.m. Luckily my internal alarm clock woke me. For someone with three hours of sleep, I’m functioning okay. There were catastrophic font problems earlier in the day, but I don’t want to talk about that. Ah, I hear the press going. I must go.

Categories: Meditations on work

Published:
September 5, 2005 – 10:13 am
Author:
By A.

venting and eternal damnation 1

You know, it’s really depressing when you work all day long thinking “when I get off work, I’m going to go have fun with a friend.” And then it doesn’t happen. It happened three times this week. And I am totally sick of it.

But anyway, on to my crap about work. I started writing obituaries, and I only written one or two. And of course my boss gives me a big lecture about how I’m doing such a shoddy job both times he has proofread them.

I feel like saying “Okay, I volunteered to help out. I’m not a motherfucking reporter. This is the obituary that you get for $7.75 an hour. It’s not perfect. And it’s definitely not going to be perfect on the second try. I think that vindictive, judgmental people are attracted to positions of power (like positions in the editorial process) because they can arbitrarily condemn something as being shit to massage their own pathetic egos. I feel like saying to him, “You’re going to die in a few years, old man. And I’ll still be alive. La la la la la la. And all of your stupid archaic ideas will die with you. I fixed your computer four times today. Without me, you wouldn’t be sitting there with that smirk on your face picking apart every last misplaced comma and AP style deviation.”

Ok, I’ve vented.

I found out today the church that the Insipid Coworker of Doom goes to. And the thought flashed through my head that if the most inexorably annoying imbecile I know was going to be vindicated and loved by some supreme being, that I definitely wanted to be condemned and hated by that same being.

But of course, the concept of “god” is totally ridiculous and I don’t entertain such notions except for comic relief.

I’m bored. I think I’m going to try out that RAID hack for Windows XP. I could get my drive as early as tomorrow!

Categories: Meditations on work,Vitriol

Published:
September 2, 2005 – 6:58 pm
Author:
By A.

work 0

I can’t believe I got up at 6 a.m. to go to this job. I’m actually awake. It’s eerie.

I’m hungry and tired. And my neck is KILLING ME from tossing and turning last night. And the NyQuil made me have these fucking insane dreams, one of which was about people doing all these intravenous drugs and threatening to poke me with the needles.

I just finished doing all the pages and fighting with the image setter, so I just have to wait until they burn the plates and then I can get out of here and go to my other job. Woo!

I need to get a life.

and I am.

In 24 days.

Categories: Meditations on work

Published:
August 29, 2005 – 9:28 am
Author:
By A.

we’re so full of hope and so full of shit 2

Today was the shittiest day I’ve had in months.

And the bad ones always just sneak up on you. It wasn’t the day where I drank the night before and got like six hours of sleep (yesterday), it was today when I got almost 11 hours of sleep. Okay. The shit started when I had to take my cat to the vet this morning to have his sutures removed. Getting him into the cat carrier took 45 bloodcurdling, frenzied, INCREDIBLY ANGRY MINUTES. By the end of it I didn’t really care at all. I just wanted to leave him outside to die. Through the blood rushing in my head, I kept thinking of the protagonist of Poe’s “The Black Cat.” If you’ve read the story, you get my drift. I wanted/still want to kill that cat SOOOO much. I haven’t been that angry in probably a year. Here’s the mess in the spare bedroom that I have to clean up later today:

ANGER

Reason #1 for shitty day: 45 minutes catching my cat.

I was so angry at that motherfucking cat I flipped the bed over when he tried to run under it. I ended up breaking two flourescent bulbs in the scuffle, not to mention overturning both beds. *deep breath*

So I was ten minutes late to work in dropping that furry bastard off in Brookings. Obviously, I wasn’t in the cheeriest of moods. So I thought to myself, okay: You’re at work. Just put on the happy face for three more hours and get the fuck out of here. That worked fine, except for I broke down and did something to increase a coworker’s productivity that I had been saying I would do for like ever. But later in the day I actually had to work with her on something and I couldn’t demonize her. I guess it’s easier to think of people as totally worthless and inept than just flawed.

I left work for a while because someone I needed to work with was gone and went over to the movie theater to play some dance revolution. My knees have been feeling like shit lately so I haven’t been playing. I totally fucking rocked. And I went over to Ray’s to get a blueberry IZZE (my soma*) and I was refreshed. Went back to work to do my new odious task, and it wasn’t so bad at all, except for it turned out that the client didn’t want the free incarnation of what I was doing, so I went to the paid part and asked for a price (from a different department) and then like twenty minutes later my boss chewed me out for talking to the other department. I was just trying to be helpful. The moment he finished his first sentence, I already understood that he didn’t want me talking to the other department under any circumstances. However, he kept going and after sentence number ten I involuntarily assumed my “you continuing to talk is wasting my time and the time of the company” expression. How many fucking times do I have to nod and say “I get it” before you will shut up? Huh? I’m not stupid. It only takes a few sentences to convey whatever you need to say. Asshole.

So the client that I had been talking to earlier called me back because I said I was going to call her and didn’t (because of the boss chew-out). I gave her the estimate (since it was on my desk) and told them to talk to the other department and that they handle those things. Then when I leave I get chewed out a second time for talking to her. What am I supposed to do? Hang up on her? I told her to contact the other department. Motherfuck.

Reason #2 for a shitty day: chewed out by my boss for trying to be helpful while doing a task I’d never done before.

I guess earlier I had involuntarily rolled my eyes at him. I wanted to be truthful and say, I only rolled my eyes at you because you say in twelve sentences what I say in a few words. And then he started going into this shit about me “not having a background [in the type of work we do].” That was the last straw. I don’t have any experience? I did the job that we do at my job with two people (Molly and myself). I guess I’m just too fucking inept to grasp the concept of our work. Fuck him. How dare him. I just hate old people. I’m sorry, but they are just fucking stupid and will never shut the fuck up.

So of course I kept mulling this shit over and over and over in my head as I walked over to the car repair place to see if my car was done. They said it would be done at 5 p.m., and it was about 4:40 p.m., so I decided to go over to Ray’s and get another IZZE. As I quenched my thirst with the deliciousness of the Grapefruit IZZE, I was totally refreshed and all the hatred and bullshit and duplicity just melted away. It felt good. I went over to the theater and played a few more games of dance revolution after I finished my soda. Then I went over to check on my car. Unfortunately, it’s not going to be done until tomorrow. That made me sad, but at least it will be done early in the morning so I will be able to drive home and drive to Brookings to pick up my cat. I hope they don’t charge me some outrageous fee for keeping him overnight. And he’d better not open that wound up again or I’m going to fucking kill him myself.

All the vitriol is officially gone. That’s a nice feeling. I need to start packing up my books. And cleaning up that hella mess of a guest room. Some motherfucker is coming to look at the house tomorrow. The whole thing with the eye roll really surprised me, usually I keep my body language in check to the enth degree, but I guess with my extreme certainty of moving, I just don’t care. That’s a bad thing, but I can’t help it. I hate my job now, even though almost all days I love it. I realized today that I need a bad job. A bad job would have made me feel horrible about taking a semester off of school. Oh well. What’s done is done. I’d better find a good job in Sac. Or a bad job. I don’t really care. All I want is hella hours. And I’m willing to work my ass off for them. I guess that’s all that matters.

I told Ripley a few days ago that I’m moving away. He seemed really bummed, but I don’t really know why. It’s not like we were ever going to hang out again. Not with his creepy boyfriend-roomate lurking around in the picture. I sort of agreed to watch this movie that I rented from Netflix that he said was good (Brokedown Palace) before I leave. I rented it ages ago, and I still kept it on my hard drive until now in hopes that someday we’d end up watching it. How pathetic is that?

Well, I should get started on that room. I might have to keep Sukiaki in there for a few more days and it will suck if he has to step in that broken bulb glass. And I need to remove the hard drives from all the derelict computers in that room. I’m sure there are some useful data on some of those drives. Eventually I will get an external IDE-USB drive enclosure and attempt data recovery on those drives. One of them could have priceless relics from me and Kelly’s childhood (it came from Grammie’s old comp.) But anyway, must go.

*In my vernacular, all references to soma are of the Brave New World-ian variety

Categories: Meditations on work,Melancholy,Vitriol

Published:
August 23, 2005 – 5:55 pm
Author:
By A.