jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

So my friends here have read my recent moping. But I’ve found a few things to truly enjoy this evening….

1. I baked a batch of cookies. And now my apartment smells thickly of chocolate chip. I’ve got a brand-new half gallon of organic milk in there and once I’m finished enjoying the aroma I’m going to go to work on them.

2. I dug out an old pair of mucklucks. I don’t even know where they were hidden when we lived in DC. Now I’m wearing huge, floppy yarn boots. Hard not to be glad about that.

3. Someone must have found my on random and addeded me to his friends list (Hi Snowboom!) That was a fun surprise, and I was goofily flattered. I’ve looked at journals randomly a million times, but I rarely save any of them. So it was nice to be bookmarked by someone.

I’m paid pretty well. Although not that well for Manhattan. My coworkers seem to think I’m talented. But sometimes I feel like I’m really bad at my job. And I really am bad at my job sometimes. It’s not just crying wolf. Clearly I am feeling sorry for myself, even though in a global or even historical sense I am one of the most fortunate people ever born.

I went to a goodbye party today for one of the assistants at Time Inc. She told a story that boiled down to this: Her VP asked her to go buy a tie that he wanted to give as a gift — a “power tie.” He says, “Here’s $40. Go to Saks and buy a tie.” This gets a big laugh that I don’t understand. Then my boss says, “Did he say go to 7/11?” And I’m thinking, “What is she talking about???” Then the assistant reveals that the ties at Sacks are around $150, but she did manage to pick one up at Banana Republic for $60. But it was rejected by the VP and he took her back to Saks to teach her how to buy a real tie. He just didn’t have any concept of how much his ties cost, so he had just handed her what cash was in his wallet. Everyone was asking her why she left with $40 when she knew it was at least $100 shy of what she’d need. And I kept thinking that I wouldn’t have thought twice about that.

I doubt that I will ever be wealthy. But I also doubt there’s enough wealth in the world to justify $150 ties. I heard somewhere that only people who can truly envision themselves as rich ever get rich. I don’t think I’m on that list.

I’m all over the place tonight. I need something to focus me. I feel like I’m a little light on confidence. For the millionth time I think maybe I’ll do some writing, but I usually don’t. When I was younger the things that I wrote always created such a fuss, that I began to dread it. I’m not such a fine person that I didn’t like the accolades. I just began to sink under the weight of not being able to live up to my own hype. So first I wrote for newspapers, and then television, then ad copy and finally tiny internet blurbs. And I don’t even write many of those anymore. I’m hopelessly backward about the whole thing.

Maybe I’m spending too much time in my head.

It’s just about 6:30. I don’t don’t don’t want to go to work tomorrow.

It’s not that anything torturous is happening. But it is really intense and busy. And I’m just dreading it.

I wish I could go in right now and just stay at my desk for the next 50 hours or so. I’m a big fan of getting in there and getting it done if there’s a chore that I’m dreading. Conversely, I will often procrastinate on doing things I know I will enjoy, just so I can savor the anticipation. Sometimes this makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t.

RPS — What does this mean? I did a random journal search and came up with this amazing journal. A woman who, as far as I can tell, works in an animal hospital. And she might own a goat. But mostly she writes gay porn stories about Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood. I’m sure other very pretty men figure in as well, but those are the names I caught on her most recent journal page. I think one of her stories actually had Johnny Depp having sex with his character Jack Swallow. There was definitely a pirate/hobbit kind of thing going on in her stuff. While I can’t say it turned me on, I was definitely transfixed for a while. Once I found porn about the Harry Potter characters — Harry having sex with Draco. That blew my mind.

Now I’m back to paying attention to I, Claudius. My Dad and I watched it together when I was a little kid, and he read me the books by Robert Graves. He even brought home little reproductions of coins minted during the reigns of all the Caesars. That Livia was bad bad news.

Today I was supposed to have the day off work because I would be surrounded my favorite people. Sarah and Mick in for a visit, and Damon home for a day. Sarah thought she could change her flight, but she couldn’t. So she flew out yesterday afternoon. Mick was under the weather, so he flew out yesterday morning. I talked to Damon right before his show last night and he sounded so exhausted that I told him to stay in Baltimore and that we’d catch up next weekend.

So I cancelled my vacation day and headed on in to AOL. And now I’m sitting in my ultra-quiet apartment. It’s not bad at all really. I’ve got Zoe in my lap, I’ve had a bowl of spaghetti. And it’s feeling like an off-to-bed-early kind of night. I’ve been watching a documentary called ‘The History of Rock and Roll’ that’s outstanding. I was afraid I had made a bad choice — there are ten hours in this thing. And there’s so much I want to see. But I left it in the Netflix queue and now I’m so glad. This is beautifully done, and the interviews are A-list all the way. Off the top of my head we’ve got Bruce Springsteen, Bono, Mick Jagger, Carl Perkins, Jackson Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis, Quincy Jones, Little Richard…. it goes on and on and on. So far, not to many women. But I’ve learned a few things, including a new appreciation of Elvis. I’ve never felt moved by Elvis, and I always knew he was a pioneer. But this doc has really driven home to me how new a thing he was in the world. And I never realized how insanely famous other bands were. I just watched video of a near riot at an airport over The Animals. I had no idea. There was also a great interview with Brian Wilson where he talks about how they were dying of jealousy over the Beatles.

More later. For now, cake and ice cream are calling my name.