jaysaint Getting it all down on paper…

I’m so grateful to be diving into the weekend. The week did progressively get better, and today at work was downright fine. It’s difficult to get around that my boss pretty much determines my emotional temperature at the office. If she’s being rough with me, it’s hard for me to maintain equilibrium.

But now it’s Friday night. I did that thing where I ate an early dinner and fell asleep. And now it’s 12:30am and I’m fairly well awake. I did this same thing last weekend and wound up disoriented. So this time I’ll try to right my body clock in the morning.

I don’t have anything planned for the weekend except cleaning up in preparation for Damon’s arrival. I don’t pretend that the apartment will be a showplace by Sunday night, but it will be tidy and welcoming. I’m happy and relieved he’ll finally be home. But I’m also bracing myself for the radical change in my lifestyle. I subside into silence deeply and easily when I’m alone and it’s always startling when I’m pulled back into noise and action that I didn’t instigate.

Here’s a foolish thought: I saw an ad for an adults-only haunted house this weekend, and I want to go. It’s not adults-only in the XXX sense, just, I guess, very scary. And since I’m the kind of person who can’t bear to watch horror movies because my ability to suspend disbelief is so strong…. Makes perfect sense. I’m just curious. Maybe I’ll see if I can get someone to go on Sunday night so that Damon will be there in the wee hours and he can peel me off the ceiling if needed.

I’m watching I, Claudius. I’ve always loved this, but did I never notice before how this series borders on mysogyny? There’s not a single powerful woman in this series who isn’t utterly corrupt and evil. The best woman is — brace yourself — a hooker with a heart of gold.

What I’m watching: I, Claudius part 5
What I’m reading: The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

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.