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"Volcanic" is the word that keeps popping into my head these days, with all of the ash filling Southern California's atmosphere. It all reminds me of the city of Herculaneum being buried by the ash of Mt. Vesuvius' erruption. Wow! I think I may have learned something in college!
hack! cough!
I want to lie down, curl up into a little ball, and sink below the carpeting.
I took my cactus home over the weekend. It's been cloudy for the past couple of weeks, and I feared for its life. Not only is my cactus dropping far more than ever before, but it was looking, well...ashen, I suppose. I'm not sure plants can properly look ashen, but them's the breaks.
I actually did something this weekend! On Sunday Ani & her boyfriend, Noah, (who is visiting from NYC until Tuesday) attended a matinee in LA with me. The show was two plays by teenagers produced by The Blank Theatre Company. It's a program to give teenage playwrites a chance to have their work staged and performed by professionals. And I think pro writers also use the company to workshop their stuff. Danny Strong, from Buffy was in the first play. So I had to go.
The cat's depressed. My brother has 3 different part-time jobs currently (only two soon, though), and the cat misses him 'causes he's never home to spend quality time sitting on the couch watching TV with her any more. The chicken I gave her on Saturday made her puke, too. Then our parents went out of town this weekend, and I was in LA yesterday and didn't get home until 6:30p. I found her standing next to her water dish. And not moving. I'm a little worried she might try to drown herself in it while I'm at the office today.
Cats are supposed to be low-maintainence! Dogs need oodles of attention, not cats. I refuse to hire a pet-pyschologist.
"Morning" and "Warning" sound very similar; especially when I'm sleepy.
I think my stuff is what's making me unhappy. Either that, or the idea of having so much stuff. That would be difficult to tell one way or the other. I don't think its the stuff as such that's the trouble, but circumstances around the stuff. For instance, I can't just get up and take off, because I have all of this stuff that I wouldn't want to leave behind. The lovely idea of running away is about getting away from the unhappiness in my head and start anew. But with my stuff. I think I'm psychologically incapable of packing light. Pack Rat! Pack Rat!
Some claim that stuff itself makes people unhappy, in a spiritual way. "Imagine no possessions..." Y'know, how people can strive so hard to get money to get more consumer goods, but the earning of the money and the goods themselves don't make those people happy. I'm not usually so happy while earning money, but I'm usually not depressed, either. Makes me feel a bit accomplished, though. But my stuff does make me happy. That may not be psychologically healthy, but I think it's true. I like to collect. When I finally get the last piece in a set, I feel fulfilled. That stuff-sized hole in me gets filled-in. Plus, listening to music and watching movies and reading books and all is fun!
Then we go back to all of these smart people whose work I admire who claim that stuff not only doesn't make you happy, it makes you unhappy. Based on these ideas, I question the apparent happiness caused by my stuff. I feel content. Is that a good thing? Perhaps I should not feel content. Perhaps I should feel guilty for feeling content. Contentment is for the brainwashed masses of suburbia who never question the status quo and are barrelling headlong towards the inevitable fall of their cozy way of life. Right? Yep, sounds like me. I do question a bit, but I don't actually fight the system. Not really. Buying CDs used will not in fact bring the RIAA crashing down. It'll just leave me more room on my Visa for something else to purchase.
So: Is it really my stuff that makes me unhappy? OR: Is it the fact that I can't afford a place of my own in which all of my stuff will fit that makes me unhappy? OR: Have I, under the sway of anti-stuff intellectuals, decided that I'm not allowed to enjoy my stuff and therefore find less enjoyment in it?
What the hell does this have to do with anything?
Oh, yeah. General suburban cubicle slave malaise, right? Exactly!
I work as adminstrative support between two departments that are full of people who are on the phone all day. One of my tasks is to manage the headsets used in both departments. Whenever a headset is returned, such as when an employee leaves, or gets to use a brand new fancy headset, I have to clean the old headset and prepare it for use by whomever else might need it.
The whole headset cleaning operation is rather icky, what with the smell of rubbing alcohol and the general state of used telephone headsets. It's especially bad when the user wore lots of make up and/or hair product. Eww!
At some point while rubbing old concealer off with an alcohol-soaked paper towel, a small smile inevitably spreads across my face. I always get reminded of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, in which telephone cleaners are amongst those sent to their death due to uselessness. And then the humanoid population of the planet that sent the useless people away dies of a disease transmitted via dirty telephone receivers (if memory serves).
I get paid to clean phones.
; )
I've seen far too many people injured in automotive collisions lately. It makes me weepy just thinking about it. And then I had a dream last night about a pedestrian getting hit in a crosswalk. I'm really starting to hate car culture in general. But Radiohead was in the dream, so that was...um, interesting. Not the whole band, though. I don't know where Colin and Phil were. Plus, they were playing at a big stadium and not the Hollywood Bowl, which is where I'll be seeing them later this month.
Oh! The silliest memory just popped into my head! When Neil Gaiman signed my American Gods paperback at Comic Con this year, he wrote "Dream!" in it.
I haven't enjoyed many of my dreams lately and feel I should maybe start holding a grudge or something. Not that I ever really could, what with my inability to go a day without checking Neil's blog and all...
Mounting stress due to the new KUCI quarter starting in less than a month, and my department scarcely on top of the matter. I just hope our programming software doesn't crap out on me. I shudder to think of what could happen...
I spend more of my time reading these days, and so have less time to write, but then my life generally isn't interesting enough to write about. Hence previous posts about the difficulties of other lives that I've witnessed. But here are the fun things I've been reading:
Ever since becoming a fan of Neil Gaiman (about a year ago), I'm far more prone to walking around the office with a big stupid grin on my face, trying not to laugh. Today is one of those days. : D
That Eyore beanie does belong to the gal in the next cube over! He has returned to his home computer monitor. Eyore's owner is planning to send out an e-mail. Messing with people's plush cube decor is not cool. I worry for my own anthropomorphized "Der Wienerschnitznel" hamburger! and I don't even want to think about arriving at my desk and finding my Pee-wee bobble head missing. It's a cube terrorist! How can such people live with themselves?!?
My co-worker has again taken my cactus into her custody. She says she'll just put it in the window for a little while. It has been drooping lately. My fears realized!
Oddly, when I returned from a restroom break, I found an Eyore (Pooh donkey character) beanie perched atop the computer's monitor. I don't know how he got there, and he looks a bit too cheerful from this angle. Eyore isn't allowed to look so cheerful. I should feel sorry for him and say, "Oooh, poor Eyore!" I suspect that he might be the possession of the co-worker just across the way, who had already left for the day prior to Eyore's appearance in my gray cube. Having not paid all that much attention to the contents of her gray cube, though, I'm not certain if it's actually her Eyore now perched atop the computer's monitor (mild 'Poe' feeling). I've decided to leave him there until someone else moves him. Years ago, in theatre, I learned: "If it's not your prop, don't touch it!", and I'm sticking to it.
