Tuesday. November 27, 2001

because I've been too lazy to take a picture of anything, that's why

"What shelter to grow ripe is ours?
What leisure to grow wise."

Matthew Arnold, Stanzas in Memory of the Author of "Obermann"

When I woke up, I realized I'd been dreaming about amputees. They were cheerful as if having to have a hand or leg lopped off was the most normal thing. Just a normal surgery. Very strange and disconcerting.

Work. I was depressed. So depressed that I actually wrote down the reasons that I was depressed.

The list went something like this. I know that none of this ought to be depress me. That has nothing to do with it.

• Taxes.
• The body fails everyone.
• I can't retire until my body fails.
• Nothing really excites me.
• I'm having disturbing dreams.
• The coffee machine is acting up. (So FFP spent thirty minutes on the phone with their 800 number and made it work. And since this was probably my most serious problem I shouldn't be depressed. Kidding.)
• Holidays.
• I'm not as excited about work as I should be to do my best job.

So that's the list I made. I'm a pitiful whiner. Jaded, overfed, overstimulated, too lucky. So, yeah, it's mostly faded. Don't e-mail with your real, actual problems. I'm too selfish to appreciate it, that's clear.

SuRu was sort of depressed herself but not so bad that I thought we would become suicidal together over cheap Mexican food. We went to Ala Carrera and I agonized over the choices before getting the Lite Plate like I always do. (It amuses me to call Queso, an enchilada and guacamole 'lite.') I ate a bunch of chips. I was still depressed. The weather was turning cold and even though I'd drug a sweatshirt out of my drawer at work to put under my light cotton jacket, it was burr out there. We went to Eckerd's and I got the shampoo and hair gel and stuff I needed. I agonized over the gel as I always do since I've never found one I really like. I finally got one that promised mega, proactive, extreme spiky hold. I'm not kidding much. It really said proactive. My least favorite word but it made me laugh on hair gel.

So I made it through a couple of meetings. It seems that people are trying harder to get along. Trying harder to keep their jobs, finding them a little more precious. Or maybe it's just my imagination. I had a strong sense of dejà vu in both of these meetings. Especially one of them. Really both. I also had a strong sense of being useless but that's another story.

After work, I went home, still sort of down. FFP made fresh spinach salad and it was tasty. We settled in to watch Citizen Kane, a new DVD we got. I finished off the newspapers, started a story in an old New Yorker and mostly watched the movie. FFP fell asleep. Then we watched the Peter Bogdanovich commentary and then Roger Ebert's. Dozing a bit. Very cool DVD. There is still more stuff on it and another DVD with a documentary about the controversy over the story with Randolph Hearst.

Somehow the excess and the downfall of this (somewhat) fictional character and the extremely cool camera angles and lighting cheered me up. Go figure.

JUST TYPING
Life.
So random.
And yet.
Predictable.