In such a world, what we have is not communication, but contamination of a viral type; everything spreads from one person to another in an immediate fashion. The term ‘promiscuity’ describes the same process: things are there immediately, without distance and without charm. And without genuine pleasure.

–Jean Barudrillard, Passwords

Genuine pleasure. Now that was what I was missing.

My cousins Alexis and Nicholas went to the beach with us today and we had a wonderful time playing in the water. When we got back, Alexis was playing with my Bluetooth keyboard and I was teaching her how to make smiley faces and such…cute memories since it seems like she was born yesterday.

Before I turn around, she’s going to be a teenager and will be in her own little world. I wish I was here to counteract the propaganda about “god” they’re feeding her, and to be kind of an older brother figure to them.

We went to Dearborn Farms, this kind of indie Whole Foods. It’s like a supermarket…but they grow most of the produce on-site. We got some plants in the nursery and took cute pictures.

But the thing is…

I can’t sleep because I have to sleep on this damn couch. Back at my mom’s place, I have a pullout bed that’s very comfortable…I just have a hard time sleeping, it’s not my bed.

I haven’t had sex in three weeks, and have no privacy here.

It’s great visiting, but I think that if anything, I’m going to have to live on-campus if I go to Parsons. Fuck this shit of having implicit rules on your behavior. I can deal with these restrictions while I’m here, but the last week is always a struggle to maintain my game face.

Spending time with my cousins is great and I wish I could do it more often, but I want to be able to do it on my time, the way I want. I want to be able to have a boyfriend and not be in the closet (everyone knows except my grandma…my mother doesn’t tell her “because she will be so afraid of me getting AIDS.”) Yeah…it ain’t just a river in Egypt.

My life is in California, until I can afford a job to support me and these astronomical rents in this area. The area where my aunt lives in South Jersey (it’s more like the upper middle, but anywhere outside the “suburbs” (the area within commuting distance to New York City) is South Jersey. We were taking the back roads to the beach, and I could have sworn I was in New England. Huge, sprawling houses that were incredibly old. Rumson, one of the little towns we passed through (it’s this endless forest dotted with mansions) was settled in 1662.

Just back from Wikipedia, apparently Rumson is one of the wealthiest towns in New Jersey, with a fast commuter ferry to downtown Manhattan. The beach that we went to, Sea Bright, if you walk up to the north end, you can see the skyscrapers of Manhattan on a clear day (which we could today without even walking north).

I’m just blown away by the size and grandiose nature of the houses. This is where the people that milked millions out of Bear Stearns live. It’s so insane. It just kind of dawned on me…if you start a war in the Middle East to pad your stock portfolio…you never see it. You stay in your beautiful house surrounded by 200 other beautiful homes, and never have any contact with the real world.

These houses are California’s wet dream of what it could become…there were some new homes, and they looked horribly out of place. This place just exuded money and privelege…it was like driving through a museum.

Very surreal.

But yeah…this no sex thing just isn’t cutting it. In many ways, I can’t wait for my trip home. I’m going to be crying on the drive to the airport, but come on…sex is awesome!

God, I had to explain to my mom what a “twink” was when we were shopping at the Garden State Plaza.

*shudder*

My wrists are killing me but the braces are in the car…I want to txt or call people, but I accidentally left my phone in Alexis’s room when I was reading her a story…so I’m fucked. I’m going to lie back on this fucking uncomfortable couch and try, try, try to get to sleep.

Even though the kids woke me up at 8 am this morning, still can’t sleep. Curse you, whoever made this lumpy piece of shit couch that probably cost an obscene amount of money (my uncle used to work on the NY Stock Exchange).

This is like a kind of live-in vacation, learning the cultures of another, foreign land of money and privilege through condescending tirades about the evils of the pretentious rich people that live around here (voiced by my aunt, of course). I like her so much more since they fell off their high horse and had to deal with not having much money.

There was this scene a few years ago where we were driving around looking for the perfect shades for her incredibly expensive dining room (which is never used now, by the way, with its immaculately upholstered chairs and dusty linen tablecloth sitting behind the aforementioned shades in darkness). We hit like three different drape stores while my aunt Gail waxed poetic about the perfect dining room, while I tried to explain what the passage of the Patriot Act meant for civil liberties. She wouldn’t believe me.

My, how times have changed.

Thank the gods. And thank the gods that it’s Wednesday (it’s 12:28 a.m. and everyone else in the house is asleep). Only three more days to go. I leave super early on Sunday so that doesn’t really count as a day.

I’m so torn between my California life and a life here…my mom is very optimistic I’ll get into Parsons…I’m more skeptical. I’m going to hone my portfolio with the Academy of Art advisers before I submit it to Parsons in September.

I was talking to Josh, and he gave me this huge song and dance about how San Francisco is a cesspool of drug addicts, homeless, and HIV positive people. I am sure that’s true (as it is with every major city), but it made me very apprehensive about living in SF (a city I’ve despised for a long time). But if it has to be done, I’ll do it. Take one for the team, right?

But if I do get into Parsons, it’s going to be incredible. There were so. many. hot. guys. just hanging around the Union Square area in NY, ’cause there’s like four colleges in a 10-block area. They probably all have HIV though. So depressing. The barista in the Union Square Starbucks hit on me though, which was encouraging.

I don’t know, some days I feel like my entire life is this elaborate game to avoid getting HIV. Heck, look at my domain name. Retroviruses, see also: HIV. That’s why I picked it.

Well, all the heavy stuff aside, I should try to get to sleep. fucking lumpy couch…a pox on your house, Jennifer Convertibles / Ashley HomeStore / Lay-Z-Boy / Pottery Barn.

We went into the city for the information session at Parsons, which was very informative.

There was a farmers’ market going on in Union Square, with all sorts of organic bread, goat cheese, vegetables, etc. from upstate New York. We had a snack at the Starbucks, and walked across the plaza to this enormous, five-floor Barnes and Noble.

I found two novellas/essays by my Jean Baudrillard, who I adore and can never find anything by him in regular bookstores. I got Passwords and Cool Memories V. I also picked up Albert Camus’ The Fall. I always wanted to read it, but I have so much respect for Camus that I’m almost hesitant to read any more of his essays/novels. I wish they would have had The Myth of Sisyphus, but I didn’t see it.

I completely identify with Baudrillard’s view of society as an empty exchange of symbols removed from any meaningful context. His views of consumerism really jive with Jean-Paul Sartre’s ideas in Nausea (in fact, he mentions Nausea in Passwords) about the equivalence of existence consumer objects claim versus our own personal existences.

Tonight (actually, in a few minutes), we’re leaving for my aunt Gail’s house about an hour south. New Jersey Turnpike, here I come. It was so great being back in New York, taking the subway. I rode the Q train for the first time :)

I hope to blow through those two novellas on the car ride down…or hopefully they’ll be too abstruse…it’s Baudrillard’s specialty.

Here’s the PDF, if you’d like to check it out.

If it looks weird, I’m not sure if I imbedded the fonts or not. It’s 2 a.m. Sleep time.

Reenacted with out-of-work extras.

I wish I currently enjoyed the luxury of having someone to cuddle with.

One more week on my vacation…it’s going to be bittersweet…and I always feel horribly ambivalent about leaving.

I need to sleep. Tomorrow I’m putting the finishing touches on my portfolio site.

Been working on a few new designs for the site, this one I came up with today.

I’m kind of obsessed with the look of this font, cmx10, that’s used in typesetting. It looks deliciously retro. I want to go for some kind of old-fashioned typed letter look, but that’s very very difficult using CSS.

I’m not sure if this one is a dead end…but I like the typography.

I need to find a really good icon set to use for the links to the wiki and all the other stuff.

So yeah. I felt like I needed a less cluttered blog.

I was supposed to accomplish so much tonight…fix the work site that’s broken, create a Wordpress theme using a complicated beta software…make my portfolio site look perfect. I did succeed on the portfolio site, I think it looks much better (notice the icons and the new graphic on the philosophy page), but I need more content.

I need to actually design a theme from the ground up. I want to start with this blank theme to remind me that I need to actually design things or I’m never going to get into Parsons. Or, well, anywhere.

It’s 2 a.m. and I have absolutely no time to work on the work site. I think there’s a way I could quickly fix everything, but if it backfires, there’s no way I can stay up later and work on it. Fuck it, I’ll just try it.

Wow…it worked. I am a mySQL god! Of course, it only worked because I made a backup before I tried it. Without the backup, it would have asploded.

I don’t know how to feel about being here…the newness has worn off and now I’m starting to get a tiny bit annoyed about the quirks of this house (the soap is never out, it’s in the cabinet, the toaster is never out, it’s in the cabinet…)

My mom and I went out shopping and doing errands in Edgewater today. It’s so weird to have a shopping center that’s right across the river from Manhattan. There’s a cute little riverside walking path that you can enjoy the Hudson from.

Driving back from Wildwood, we saw this black-silhouetted outline of the Manhattan skyline as we got on the Turnpike that looked like a poorly painted Hollywood set stripped of its extras.

I’m liking A Confederacy of Dunces…I wish I could have read it tonight, but I left it on the kitchen table and it disappeared (my grandma Jean is a bit—shall we say—neurotic about home cleanliness).

We’ve settled into a routine…today we did a bunch of errands, including a stop at Barnes and Noble where I got my first Moleskine sketch book. I’m going to design my new WP theme on those cream-colored pages, but I’ve been so busy that I have only written my name in it.

All right, work site fixed, cleaner homepage, check.

I’m thinking of making www.retroviral.net load my blog immediately without the splash page. What do you think? It’d save a click, splash pages are kind of pointless these days.

And this is far from a finished design. I plan to make it awesome and build something customized from the ground up. Or not. But I think this is a good way to achieve some focus by giving myself a blank canvas, so to speak, to start from.

Oh, PS, I also got my awesome t-shirt today! I’m totally wearing it to Parsons.

I found a bookstore on the boardwalk and picked up A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera

We had a sun-drenched week at the Shore, it’s time to go home :(

Thunderstorm today, no beach time, but we did go to the Lobster House in Cape May with my aunt Anna and cousin Patty. I love Anna, she’s so cool. She’s 95 this year.

She was telling me about how she used to go to this one beach in Fort Lee and then they all found out they were building the George Washington Bridge right on their little beach! Isn’t that crazy?

She was also telling me that somebody told her to buy some lots in Fort Lee (right over the G.W. Bridge), which was mostly forest back then as an investment? Guess how much? $28!

Anyway, I need to head to bed. I need to post pics and videos. Tomorrow is supposed to be stormy, so that should be the time for that.

I had to come all the way back to the hotel room and miss a good 30 minutes of beach time because of you. I hope the lens works really great on your date with the Pacific,

–A. R.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=339ixMtHrVk

Been eating plums out of the downstairs refrigerator.

Workin’ on my wiki. I need to redesign my blog to feature it more prominently.

Aaron

Johnny

Brian

Drew

I found a bunch more schools, I widened my search from just Manhattan. The New York Institute of Technology in Long Island looks good, and it’s only like 45 mins away. There’s that one in Syracuse, but that’s the boonies.

People need to wake the fuck up…I think Shop Rite opens at 7 a.m. and they like to get there incredibly early.

I’m sorry about the site crashing people’s browsers…that’s so odd. I was futzing around with the permalinks when I was doing that book project. I’m glad to say that as of tonight, the site is fully XHTML compliant.

There were so many geese…I even saw three or four dinner-plate sized turtles!

More geese.

Today, my aunt Gail arrived with the kids, and they’ve been keeping us busy.

Gail, my cousin Nicholas, and my mom

After they went to sleep, my mom had to feed her karaoke addiction, so we went to this place called Cheeseburger in Paradise and my mom watched people do karaoke. It was a bit of a young scene, not quite her style, but it was fun to go.

Here’s my aunt Gail making a silly pose with this huge drunk she got:

She’s so New Jersey, I love being around her.

I hadn’t uploaded my photos in a while…here’s some from the plane trip:

San Francisco.

Newark Airport.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eoshtr4SsN8

Music is “18 Ghosts II” by Nine Inch Nails, from Ghosts. He licenses his music as Creative Commons so I can use it for cool stuff :)

Man, my battery kind of…uh, sucks. It estimates I’ll only have four hours. Laaame.

It’s weird…the whole plane thing seems this big farce. I guess my brain just has some kind of problem believing in flight. Intellectually, I know I’m flying at 10,000 feet going 600 miles an hour, but every moment I expect to look out the window and see people shaking tin foil and refilling fog machines.

I think it’s my Ballardesque notion that everything is just a glamourous commercial filmed in Shepperton.

It’s odd, I’m in the first seat in coach, facing the wall. I was counting on stuffing my suitcase under the seat…but no seat. Thanks for that mundane curveball, existence. Apparently it’s in first class.

I work all year for this. Feeling that lightness as I leave the ground, knowing I’ll soon be with my real family on the East Coast.

I want to spend as much time with my grandma Jean before…well…you know. She’s so amazing, I love her. She has such a great sense of humor, and she is such an in-your-face get-things-done kind of person. It’s the mentality there.

After this afteroon, I just had so much fun I want to like live it over again. It’s like I’d forgot what hanging out with people who aren’t soulless assholes is like, and I’m very happy about it.

When The Fragile stars making more and more sense, you know some big change is happening. And I choose to stay away from people who make me feel less like a human. There are many Marios in this world, unfortunately.

So tired, yet I just want to write. I want to leap for joy…I won’t be leaping if I don’t get any sleep tonight.

But this is what I’ve worked so hard all these months for. free.

free.

Free.

FREE

FRRREEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Of everything.

Not of the people I love, but of those who bring me down.

I thank the gods for these trips. They give me such perspective. I am so lucky to have everything I have. Actually, I’m just lucky to have my mom.

She’s the reason I’m not like, dead in a gutter somewhere.

Mmmm…airline peanuts.

I feel like I should be documenting these flights in every way possible, because my kids are totally not going to believe that these things existed.

Must listen to more Jesus and Mary Chain, but can’t download music ’cause I’m in the air.

I want to watch a movie, but there’s a sleeping little girl in the next seat…I looked through every single movie I have on my computer, and (aside from Labyrinth, possibly) there isn’t a one that doesn’t have something objectionable. Weird.

Fuck it, I’m watching the Goldfrapp tour DVD. The one with just the Felt Mountain stuff on it.

That’s better.

I think I’m just having emotional overload these last two days. It’s 10 minutes until the end of August 1.

These days I’ll never get back. I guess that’s ok.

I just used this time to make my portfolio again…I had the .css file, I guess that would have been harder to recreate. I’ll upload it when I get back to connectivity.

Well, it’s 11:50 p.m., so I’m going to put my MacBook away and try to get some sleep.

*plays Poe on his N95, snuggles up under his jacket*

You thought you could keep me from loving
You thought you could feed on my soul
But while you were busy destroying my life
What was half in me has become whole

We met at Powell Station and walked down to Yerba Buena park, took in the fresh air, and jumped on the Muni headed to Ocean Beach. It was so beautiful out that day. While we were going up to the Powell station, this guy snatched someone’s purse and was running full speed down Market…a bunch of people ran and biked to track him down, and they arrested him…it was super dramatic.

Our Muni train on the way back broke, so we had to switch and stand there for ever. He was so cute! It was an awesome surprise. Very affable and easygoing…I had a great time.

My back was killing me from carrying my laptop in my backpack, so I had to lighten the load in there and get some Advil liqui-gels. I’m running solely on Advil and Vitamin Energy…I should probably see if I can find a decongestant before they start boarding…I only have like 20 minutes. And pick up extra snacks…I never sleep on the red-eye and they don’t feed you.

Even though some shitty things have been happening, I had SO much fun today. I just called Christen and she had this INCREDIBLE date with this guy she’s known forever. He loves Interpol, is getting his doctorate in New York and studies music. So. Fucking. Hot. Pretty much anyone obsessed with Interpol I want to put it in.

Today I’m listening to the self-titled Santogold…I only liked the first track on the first listen to it, but it’s a very versatile record…very dub-influenced.

Freaking out! I’d better see which bus to catch.

Shit…I need to be there at noon. Best idea is to just not sleep at all. But I will sleep.

I hung out with Adrian tonight…I know, crazy, right? While I was driving through the parking lot I had no idea why I was doing it, but we settled right in on our old conversations, it was really fun hanging out with him. Time heals all wounds.

My wrists are killing me, so I’ve got to sleep. More details while I’m on the plane/train tomorrow.

July 29, 2008.

The first day of the rest of your life.

Fuck this shit.

My phone is cooing at me to recharge it. Switch to offline mode. It’s incredible how long a phone can stay alive when the radio is turned off. Same with people.

I’ve put off washing my clothes for like two weeks… today was the day I had to break down… out of socks.

I went to Arden fair today to find some kind of a backpack thing to take with me on my trip. I got a Puma bag. I mean, it wasn’t the super stylish one I wanted, but the super stylish one would have required a whole new outfit to pull off carrying it.

It’s weird… I’ve been talking to Drew a lot the past few days. I got really trashed at Christen’s and ended up instant messaging him… and then he ended up talking to me like last night while he was totally trashed. I don’t know what it is about that guy… he makes me feel very strong positive and negative feelings.

It sucks I blew my chance with him, but I just didn’t awaken the same kind of feelings he made me feel. That and I’m impatient as fuck, duplicitous, and mainly concerned with my own happiness.

Most of the time I feel like I’m waiting for Vaughan and the car-crash that I am inevitably moving towards with every day.

“The car-crash was the first real thing that had happened to me in years.”

I know day in about 20 years that will be so true. Just working this month full-time I feel completely and utterly exhausted. If I was doing something that I actually liked all that time, maybe it would be okay… but that’s such a tall order. when I’ve been doing web design for like four days in a row I want a change and to write something… and then three days into writing things my brain is mush and I can’t crank anything out anymore.

Doing the exact same thing for eight hours every day… it seems like a fate worse than death. I’m going to do the college thing, get my degree in the thing that I want, and try to get a job at it. If that doesn’t work out, I can always be an organic farmer in upstate New York, I guess.

I’m in the car outside my house. It’s my only place I can do voice-recognition. I only have 14% battery.

This MacBook is a year old, and I used to go through at least two charge cycles a day.

The people next door to turn on their light. I wonder if they can hear me.

Keith brags about all this insanely good sex he’s having. What do I have to show for anything?

But then again, Keith has an insatiable sex drive. I’d probably have AIDS by now if I was him.

I’m so sick of living here. I’m so sick of all my friends.

I wasn’t writing because I wanted to keep it all inside… to pretend that everything was okay. As soon as I touch pen to paper… my mouth to a microphone… everything goes to shit.

I can’t keep it inside. I don’t know whether that makes me weaker or stronger than everyone else. I used to have a short list of people who if they called me and asked me to run away with them that I would.

Christen would talk about how depressed she was, and in the back of my mind I knew if she called me and told me she was going to kill herself I would quit my job and we would go on some kind of insane road trip (this was pre-$4/gallon gas).

Now I have no idea what would make her happy. While I was at the mall I ran into Maria (whom I LOVE!), one of Christen’s old coworkers, and talked old times.

I just wish I could make her happy somehow… but it all has to come from within. She needs to be Marla again. she was just so incredible… she had all of her loves…zombies… Sylvia Plath… Bjork…and then it all got thrown out the window with Allen.

One of the main reasons that she stopped talking to me was she thought that I thought she was lame. I must admit, when I think back on it, I scoffed at her plans to live in a shipping container…and many other HorseCow-esque things. I scoffed at those things because those weren’t Christen things. Those were HorseCow things. She talks about how insincere and unfriendly the people are to her there now that she’s not with Allen (they’re kinda sorta halfway back together), and I want to say “Um…that’s exactly how I felt every time I came over and you weren’t around. Like I was a stranger trespassing somewhere.

I know I’m digging up old shit, but you can’t just build a skyscraper over landfill. I want us to be okay with things, because no matter what’s going on, the neon light is on in the most abandoned storeroom in the back of my mind.

“WHEN IS SHE GOING TO IGNORE YOU AGAIN”

I don’t mean this to be an indictment of you at all, Christen, because I love you dearly, I’m just trying to flush out any demons. Not talking about things is how this whole mess started. I want you to be happy.

So, the short list, in no particular order.

1) Patrick.

I love Patrick. And no matter how often he’s fucking his boyfriend that he’s been with for a year or so, I still am totally head over heels in love with him. But..let’s face facts. He wouldn’t move to Sacramento to be with me, and I wasn’t willing to move to Oklahoma. He helped me get over Adrian, which was the crisis of my life, and I am eternally in debt to him. He’s got the heart strings tied up in bows.

2) Drew.

I don’t know what it is about the guy, but he just gives me that funny feeling in your chest where you just want to hug them and grit your teeth at a faux pas of theirs at the same time. If he showed up at my house breathless, splattered in blood, and packing a handgun, I’d throw the MacBook in a duffel bag and follow him to the ends of the earth.

3) Terry.

This one is more hard to pin down…I remember distinctly the weeks after the breakup, the hurried lunches at the Downtown Plaza where I was fighting with myself tooth and nail to not hold him and kiss him. But now that seems but a dream. We are argumentative, and although we are compatible in other ways, his chameleon-ness and the way he jumps from “friend” to “friend” scares me.

4) By now I’ve nearly forgotten about Alex. I’m sure he’s forgotten about me. He moved away from San Francisco. My dreams of a sunlit Ocean Beach love affair are gone.

5) I felt “in love” with Zero for about a week. After that, it was just a rush to keep up appearances and hope that the feeling would return.

6) The last person I can really think of is Adrian…and I have to say, time mends all wounds. We were talking last week and I was thinking to myself “oh, I’m bored, we should hang out” and then the whole relationship like flashed back through my head. Eh, maybe not. But we do have a staggering amount of interests in common.

Oh yeah,

7) Andrew.

I’ve been resisting my impulse to call him for…well…ever since I stopped talking to him. It wasn’t intentional, I just didn’t have anything to say, and then it became a week, a month…

Despite all my posturing, all we have in common is that puppy love feeling I get when I’m around him. And, of course, I refuse to admit that his beard was a really big turnoff.

It seems I used to have all these deep-seated issues regarding my exes and nowadays it seems like it’s all burned off or has sunk imperceptibly below the surface. The thing I feel most bad about is my not feeling anything.

I desperately wanted to talk on the phone today, but I couldn’t really think of anyone to call other than my mom. That doesn’t mean I didn’t call everyone anyway.

I hate being the needy friend who has nothing to talk about but ennui. I actually did have a few conversation topics, but not ones that really involve anyone else.

Got a new backpack for my trip at Puma, scored a FireWave (that I’ve been wanting forever), they’re phasing it out so I got the $99 device for $20 including shipping. It’ll allow me to use my Mac for surround sound through my speakers.

Which I am getting back before I leave. Or else.

I feel like I’m in this incestuous circle of friends where all of my friends are my exes and they’re all fucking each other.

Christen says I should cut them all off…but what good would that do? Go from a few insincere friends to no friends at all? I can’t be dependent on her to be my only friend, that’s weird and selfish.

And Chris is moving to L.A.

The only person I could trust for advice.

It’s a good thing I’m leaving.

Some days I wish it was forever. Unfortunately, I’m too poor to satiate my every unhappiness with money.

If I could, I’d be far, far away. Or so I think.

Watched The Last Starfighter tonight for the first time. It was ok.

Read about Eugene Ionesco, transgressive fiction, Grove Press, obscenity trials. I want to read a thousand novels. Maybe I should do that.

I need something insane to happen…a zombie attack, a nuclear bomb blast…I feel like I’m becoming complacent, comfortable, stupid, and empty.

I bought my Cut Copy / Presets tickets today. That’s one reason to live, right? Man, it’s 1 a.m.

My wrists are killing me, I have to sleep. They’ll be killing me all day tomorrow. Hello, full-time employment.

I can’t concentrate for 8 hours. I can’t write constantly for 8 hours. This is insane. No wonder we’re the least productive country in terms of how much time we spend at work. If I could just leave after I was finished with my work and get paid the same amount of money, I would have an incentive to finish things.

But I have no incentive. My brain is mush…my best ideas were last thought hours upon hours ago. Basically, I’m just waiting for the day to be over.

This is why I can’t be a writer. I can’t write bullshit news crap all day. It kills me. There are never prices…there are never informative websites…and even after I write up all the easy stuff…there’s more…there’s a whole stack of shit that will NEVER FUCKING TURN INTO A NEWS ARTICLE either the company’s gone or bankrupt or the event is over, but they still float around and around around.

Shit from like 2004 and we’re supposed to still cover it. Are you kidding me?

Also, I’m sick as hell today. I need to go home. But I have to stay here, or I get no money. If I had to do this for the rest of my life, I’d kill myself.

Sure, I have money, but it’s not worth living like this. It’s two more days I have to work, but it feels like a fucking century. Please let it be over. Christ.