Fear, Loathing, & Publishing

To sleep or to die, that is the question.

Day Five of vacation begins with something of a whimper. My nose just keeps running which is finally beginning to make me think I have a cold or something as opposed to it being my ever-present allergies. Or, it could be the allergies given that the weather has been unseasonably warm. Anyway, vacation began as most of them do: I left work all wound up and whoopin' and then tried to plan for other work for the whole vacation and then felt overwhelmed and then decided to do nothing since it was vacation and now my immune system is compromised enough from work/stress that now my allergies and/or a cold (see above) have finally kicked in. Even Mel(ody) was so disgusted with my rolling around in exhaustion that she went up to Brutha Drain's last night to watch the Cowboys game. (It was only on satellite TV so I listened to it here on the old dairy barn radio.) It was quite the thriller.

If I had anything else to say I would say it. But I don't. So there it is.

Goodbye.  

Patrick Starfish, safely ensconced in the G-Mobile.

This is Patrick. He rides in the G-Mobile with me every day. I got him remaindered for $3 at Books-A-Million a few weeks ago when buying a hello kitty themed gift card for the recently departed GS (Graphics Specialist). This was shortly after Mel(ody) and I made a Friday night pilgrimage out to the house of her adjunct teaching buddy Reverend Jim. He has a twin bed and no furniture in his living room so we hung out in the dining room. I had taken my own low-slung lawn chair to sit in. Sitting on one low bookshelf were a set of model buildings, great skyscrapers of the world. The Sears Tower. Others from foreign countries. Asian countries, they have a ton of tall buildings. Each of the buildings has light bulb inside that can be turned on to softly illuminate some of the windows, much like the buildings that make up the backdrop on the set of Matthew Crouch's talk show on TBN. RJ says that at night he'll lay on his bed in the living room with the lights off and his buildings' lights on and he'll talk to the people in them. "Go home," he tells them, "you've worked hard enough for today. You can go get some sleep now." He also has an unhealthy fixation on Jennifer Love Hewitt in The Ghost Whisperer. (Reverend Jim, that is. Not Patrick.) 

I talk in an affected high-pitched reedy voice to Patrick while scratching his stomach with one finger when going to and from work. "C'mon, driving buddy," I say in the mornings. "We've got a hard a day of work ahead of us. Let's get started!" At the end of day I'm happy to tell him, "C'mon, Patrick. We've worked hard enough today. Time to go home and get some rest, driving buddy." As we went to Austin Friday and I was getting Patrick squared away, Mel(ody) said, "You know, you could talk to me that way and touch me." But, when I used the voice on her and scratched at her leg with the one finger she recoiled. Recoiled! She's acquired the need to talk to her dad Butch concerning this. But, just look at Patrick's beaming face! There is a guy with the right kind of attitude to make it through this world in a fine fashion!

Enjoy your Sunday off, Patrick! We've got a long ol' week of work ahead of us! 

Today, this morning, I can happily report that life at Fear, Loathing, & Publishing has resumed its natural state of affairs after a serious detour through Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas over the course of actually getting out of town for Thanksgiving. As Brutha Drain would say, it was one of those episodes where you get up the next day and the only documentation for the world (or even, especially, yourself) you want to leave is to write "Dear Diary, last night NOTHING happened!"

So, today, this morning, we're back on track: I'm having my regularly scheduled series of anxiety-laden dreams that mean I'm waking up too early and repeating to myself "everything is okay" while in bed which sometimes means I can go back to sleep before the white noise in my head takes over but most days, like today, actually winds up getting me up and engendering the drinking too much coffee too soon that will cause me to look moderately too wild-eyed by the time I get to work and means I will be too tired, too soon to have any semblance of a normal blood-sugar level by the end of the day. 

Remember Andie McDowell in Sex, Lies, and Videotape? How she was all freaked out about how much trash there was to deal with? How obsessing over all this kept her from facing the real (& local) problems that confronted her? I don't know about this last part--what's THAT got to do with ANYTHING?--but publishing requires entirely too much multitasking. Each week I make a "next step" list of the things that need to be done to keep things moving along. One upon a time, like, when I first moved out of the English department, it had like 10 things on it that were in a nice palatino linotype 16-point font but which, over time, has turned into a two-column nightmare in 8-point font with like, no shit, 50 goddamn things on it. But, what you gonna do about it? That's why the school pays me what they consider the big bucks: to seriously worry about all the shit that nobody else could care less about. Then again, while I was putting crappy certificates of completion for the interns in crappy plastic frames the DS (departmental secretary) was doing a final copyedit on the dental books . . . riddle me this, Batman, about how that could possibly be the most cost-efficient expense of our respective time?  It's just too much, man, too much!

Mainly, as always, I have a sense of overlapping dread about the intern reception. On the one hand, it signals the end of the semester for us. On the other hand, it requires the big public spectacle with a bunch of--that is 40-50--people from the school, most of whom I could go the rest of of my life--and have a happily complete life--without seeing again. A big norther blew in last night so I was hoping against hope, praying against prayer, that we might get snow day today but, of course, no such luck. Normally, that is, based on past experience, I would have had too much to drink the night before the reception so that I could add a low-grade hangover to the reception fun, but this time around I manage to avoid that. So, instead, it's just a matter of waking up two hours before I really had to.

On another note entirely, I'm going to start adding tags at the bottom of each entry that will categorize it. That way, if someone/anyone/only me wants to find all the entries for that category, all they'll have to do, I think, is click any particular tag. I was looking for a blog template that would list the tags on the right-hand column but I couldn't locate on. It's at times like these I wonder why I ever got a livejournal blog to start with: uploading pictures is a hassle, no traffic tracking, and not near the features of blogger or even wordpress. What was I thinking? Duh: I wasn't thinking.

Story of my life.