Again, again, again…

For a while, things go well. I find little things worth my time and worth looking forward to, especially if I shut up, stop making excuses, and actively trust the people I care about/who care about me. I have a momentary glimmer of pride in myself that I haven’t felt in more than five years.

And I ignore the feeling of dread that accompanies those good times - the cold heavy feeling in my stomach - because it can ruin the fun and because it’s stupid to always expect the other shoe to drop, right? That doesn’t always happen. No. Sometimes, you just get to enjoy life and that’s that - there’s no hostage trade-off.

But then there was this (legitimate) email I got yesterday regarding one of the shitty financial matters I’ve been working hard at resolving since April of 2005… the email contains problematic words and phrases that make it sound like I’ve just started working on this particular financial issue recently and implies that there’s a problem. I have 30 months’ worth of statements … and I was actually going to make some phone calls about later this week because this obligation should be just about finished up. I was thinking, triumphantly, that I’d be able to cross one HUGE thing off my list. So I HOPE this email is an error of some kind. I’ll be taking some time in the morning to make a phone call and try to stay calm and get to the bottom of things.

Right now, though, my head is pounding and my stomach is knotted and cold and sick. I don’t know how I’m going to get to sleep. I’m afraid to take sleeping pills when this sort of stress is keeping me up. I actually looked to see whether I had any Percocet left over from my wrist surgery… I don’t, and I kind of wish I did. That’s also a bit scary, but it’s a really effective “off” switch.

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So I did some stuff…

Saturday was a trip to the Woodbury Commons and then the Storm King Art Center. I will need to go back to Storm King since I was there a bit too close to closing time and didn’t get to walk around as much as I would’ve liked (but there are 500 acres to explore, so I think an entire day would probably be appropriate). I didn’t take many pictures at all since I was walking around and took the tram ride to see the highlights, but I did get one decent photo in the bunch - this one of Free Ride Home by Kenneth Snelson.

I’d like to go back on an overcast day… and with my regular “old ” SLR camera (yes, I’ve got one of those - a Canon EOS Rebel 2000 which I’ve sadly underused and should really study up on and get the magic of it) instead of the point-and-shoot digital.

Yesterday was fun with the family and today was fun with friends. And then guilt with family and now sitting here debating whether or not I want to open up the DVDs I bought today. An entertainment store near where my friends’ live was having a sale on “TV on DVD” boxed sets — “The X-Files” were included in this promotion.

After several aborted/thwarted attempts at acquiring the Asian boxed sets of the complete 9 seasons of that show, I’d just about given up on ever owning any of them. The show has some good sentimental value - it takes me back to sort of pleasant memories of high school and college: a time when the theme music by Mark Snow was still kind of cool and eerie instead of hokey and played out and an inside joke with friends (because we’re nerds like that). And how an FBI agent found my “Trust No One” t-shirt amusing when we were making small talk during a real-life encounter (I wasn’t smart enough to be the one in trouble). Ah, memories of the late 90s.

Back to DVDs. Here they were — $25 a season. Cheaper than Amazon. I’m not rich (or even what I’d consider happily financially solvent), but I figured I could treat myself to two seasons and spend the $50 since I haven’t touched my work bonus yet and didn’t buy anything at the Commons on Saturday and the only thing I got this weekend otherwise was gas for the car. So I bought them. And now I’m feeling some minor buyer’s remorse since I haven’t really been buying anything for myself lately (other than the odd book or two once a month - and I don’t consider those to be as much of a luxury, though I know they are), and consequently have been broken of the habit a little and feel kind of guilty. I’m not the kind of person who experiences buyer’s remorse, so this is deeply disturbing on many levels.

Is this just a phase or maybe a complete change in lifestyle and philosophy? Is this stemming from my new eating habits and just sort of paring down on all kinds of “unnecessary consumption”? Having only what is needed of anything (food, material things) and not concerning myself with the rest?

I won’t open them tonight in any event, and I’ll (briefly) sleep on it since the sleep situation is as crappy as ever. I’ll probably be up at 4:45 again (that seems to be the magic number). Grrr. Back to work tomorrow… but it’s a four-day work week, so it will be blissfully full of work to keep me nice and busy (I’m not being facetious) and zip by. I am hating all these empty hours of non-work life, so I don’t know what I’d do if my work time started to be empty, too. Thankfully, that hasn’t been a problem.

Still, just way too much time on my hands.

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It’s OK. Don’t be horrified. That was intentionally bad.
As is this, to hilarious effect.
I give you “Frodo” - my favorite moment is at 1:42.
The finger wave.

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I’m only six books away from having 1,000 books cataloged on LibraryThing.

Maybe I’ll set aside some time this long Labor Day weekend to get behind the primary rows of books on my bookshelves and catalog those that hide behind the rest. That will easily bring me up over 1,000 and then I can throw myself a truly nerdy little party. I’ll put on my “Reading is Sexy” t-shirt, drink some tea, and flip through my copy of Candida Hofer’s Libraries.

There was a fairly entertaining post about the book on the nonist some months ago, entitled “Hot Library Smut” - aw, yeah.

They don’t solve life’s problems, but I do enjoy my books.
Also, my friends. They’re quite enjoyable.

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Despite the incredibly oppressive humidity yesterday (my glasses and even my iPod were steaming up when I was walking out of air-conditioned buildings and getting back into the car) I managed to have a good time with friends.

We wandered around an unnecessarily large shopping center for several hours and didn’t really purchase anything, had some lunch, walked around more, and then met up with another friend of mine for coffee/gelato and conversation (which was probably responsible for keeping our half of the café empty).

Since the night was still young, I ended up watching the newest David Lynch, “Inland Empire” with my friend - my Polish language skills came in handy a bit, though it didn’t make the movie any clearer. Apparently, it gels a bit more upon a second viewing and the pieces start to fall into place - so I’ll have to set aside another three hours for that in the future.

It was somewhat comforting that I wasn’t completely lost; but it follows very much in the Mulholland Drive vein, so I had some sense of what I was going to be getting. A sense - no idea.

I got home at about 2:30 in the morning and fell asleep about an hour later, and still I awoke at 7:20. My body is just not digging the sleep. It will hit me tomorrow, so I need to get some sleep tonight or else I’ll be crying on the train, feeling all exhausted.

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After work on Monday, my friend met me at the train station where I proceeded to spend a solid hour in my car crying to her because I’ve been feeling utterly hopeless and sick of myself lately. In the olden days, they’d have called it a “nervous breakdown.” An hour of crying and being able to get it out of my head was necessary, and to hear someone who cares about me and who I care about say “here are some things we’re going to plan to do together in the coming months” was great and gave me some things to look forward to and smile about. Otherwise, there’d really be nothing.

I’m sleeping far too little and have far too many waking hours to occupy, and those hours go by so slowly. I look at the clock wanting it to be 10 or 11 so I can head to bed, but find that it’s only 8 or 9. I go to bed and can’t fall asleep until midnight or 1 a.m. then wake up before the alarm as if someone’s shaken me awake… and it’s only 5 a.m. I’m exhausted, but I can’t go back to sleep. And I lay there for another hour or two because I’d rather lay in bed and listen to the radio or a CD or read; the alternative is being totally awake and aware and miserable… two hours earlier than usual.

So my days are four or five hours longer than they need to be. And I hate it.

And I had the “You need to take some vacation time” conversation with my boss. I have 13 vacation days just sitting there, and I need to use them up before the end of the year. But I have no desire to take them. They’ll just depress me. I can’t afford (financially or conscientiously) to go anywhere or do anything, so if I take those days off to sit at home, I’ll just get bummed out because I’ll be doing exactly what I do on the weekends… sitting around, reading books, watching movies, running errands, doing chores, and trying to distract myself from my thoughts. If I had anything better to do with my time, maybe I’d look forward to vacation days or days off… but I don’t. I’m happier being at work and doing something productive because at least then I’m not focused on what’s going on inside my head.

I might just take Fridays off in September and October or something like that. It won’t be any better than my boring weekend, but since it’s a weekday, I can schedule medical appointments and my upcoming 7500 mile maintenance visit on the car. You know… fun vacation activities.

Addendum: One thing I can do with a vacation day or two is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while: tear down the site and rebuild in a much simpler fashion. Three or four pages, blog-style, that’s it.

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I had some Malaysian food with my brother and his girlfriend late this afternoon once I was done petsitting, and I haven’t been feeling particularly hot ever since. Noodles are relatively inoffensive, as are bamboo shoots and bean sprouts and such, so maybe it was the shrimp. I just feel “off.”

And I’m really tired. I was up at 6 today after falling asleep at 1, and I’ve been waking up that early every day for the last week. It’s really unnerving because I am not a morning person–and I HATE having this many hours in my day. It’s too much time to fill. It’s bad enough that I can’t fall asleep at night and need to find ways to fill that span of time so I can escape being alone with my brain, but now I have 3 or 4 more hours to contend with because I can’t even fall back asleep once I get up at 6.

So it could be bad shrimp, it could be crankiness, it could be “grande ennui”… because, damn, I’m bored by all of it. At least the weekend was a nice change because I could take the dog out, be in the park, play with her, and enjoy some of those simpler things for a while.

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And I’m pet sitting until Sunday afternoon, so I don’t want to take the dog out until it’s not raining quite as hard. It’s also thundering and there’s been some lightning, and while I’m not scared of those in and of themselves, there’s a park and there are trees and I do not wish to die a terrible death under a charred tree and bring the dog along with me.

Earlier this week, I received my copy of a delightful book I’d ordered - a coffee table book of photos of libraries around the world. It’s called “Libraries.” The photographer is Candida Hofer and the foreword is by Umberto Eco; the book was published by Thames and Hudson, and it’s intermittently available from Amazon. I ended up ordering it from a local bookseller via Abebooks. Just because. Local business. I spent about an hour flipping through it and planning an imaginary tour of some of the world’s libraries. Well, imaginary for now, anyway. Maybe some day.

I don’t have the book with me since it’s a bit large and unwieldy to carry along for weekend reading, but I did bring along another item I ordered (though this time, from Amazon): the long-awaited DVD release of Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet.”

242 minutes long. The entire text of Hamlet, in film form. I saw it in high school, and remember the boys getting all loud and obnoxious when Ophelia (played by Kate Winslet) is hosed down while wearing something white and diaphanous. I think the rest of the tragedy that is Ophelia’s story was lost on them.

But I might also just be weird; I actually ENJOY reading and watching “Hamlet.” Maybe I’ve written too many papers about the play. Maybe I sort of relate to some of the things Hamlet himself “says”, specifically about words and the meaningless and useless insufficient nature of words (Polonius: “What do you read my lord? Hamlet: “Words, words, words…”; “…Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words”…), regardless of how many you use. But I’m not someone who’s particularly adept at actions (which, if we’re talking about Hamlet-like actions, is good) so words are sort of my “thing.” Ah, well.

In other news, Wired just posted an article entitled “Space Dust: It’s Alive and It’s… Us?” based on the following findings:

…an international team has discovered that under the right conditions, particles of inorganic dust can become organised into helical structures. These structures can then interact with each other in ways that are usually associated with organic compounds and life itself.

Moby was right. There were probably precursors to that song, too. Research is required.

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I tried watching some of the others, but this was just the funniest for me. The others just didn’t have that certain, well, rhythm.

The others also had annoying people screaming along to them, or animation instead of puppets.

As an alternative to those not amused, I offer this brilliant Hans Zimmer piece:

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They set out to fix a problem with a highway font, and their solution — more than a decade in the making — may end up changing a lot more than just the view from the dashboard… Now, as the idea of branding has claimed a central role in American life, so, too, has the importance and understanding of type. Fonts are image, and image is modern America.

From Sunday’s New York Times, a piece entitled, “The Road to Clarity” about the development of a new typeface for road signs to help increase legibility and safety–complete with slideshow and detailed analysis of typographical elements as well as previous typefaces. Or as their one-line summary puts it, “how a graphic designer and a typographer and their obsession with fonts and legibility led to a painstaking effort to clean up America’s road signs, one letter at a time.”

I got unnaturally excited about this since it’s something I’ve been wondering about lately while looking at highway signs, train stations, street signs, etc. and noticing the variety of typefaces used on each. The lack of consistency irritated my OCD self, but also made me wonder what sort of development or “evolution of signage” was going on.

Timely. All the news that’s fit to print indeed. They included something I found worthy of my time anyway.

Today started off with a bang. This morning, I tripped and fell in the street crossing over to my office and scraped up my knee quite nicely. I was wearing a skirt, so the embarrassment of tripping was honestly the more painful part for me. I will take a sleep aid tonight so I don’t keep replaying those 20 seconds over and over again in my head tonight and keep myself from falling asleep.

I got into the office and cleaned it up, but the best part was walking around the rest of the day with a huge 3″ x 2″ band-aid across my knee - looking all professional-like. If I had some some roller skates, pigtails and a big lollipop, I’d be ready for my own personal “Xanadu” or 2nd grade birthday party, or I could ditch the roller skates and find some multi-colored overalls and try to bring back Rainbow Brite (her friend Patty O’Green - and I can’t believe I remembered this - sported band-aids on her knees… it’s amazing how these little things just come back to you, and how Google and some obsessive collector people can help you do a little blast from the past thing).

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