I skipped therapy in February, and had to move last Friday’s appointment to this week. I know I’m going to be annoyed to have to go to the mall on a Friday night after work, but I think I might need the session. I always feel better after therapy, and right now I could use some feeling better – nothing’s really wrong, but I’m out of sorts. Grumpy. Cranky. Scowling at everything. Panties in a bunch; woke up on the wrong side of the bed for two weeks running. I don’t like myself like this, so it’s time to fix it.

I almost broke my neck this morning by accidentally stepping on the cutting board in my shower. Don’t you hate it when that happens?!

I wonder if I just need some sunshine. And an all-new wardrobe. It took forever to get dressed this morning, because I suddenly hated everything in my closet.

Go away, crazy! I do not want to deal with you!

As I ease myself back into space, I’ve been working with the support team to learn their methods and absorb their life energies (becoming more powerful than you could possibly imagine). This is fine with me – what better way to learn about all the things I’m totally going to change than to do the job in the first place? – but I am being seriously restrained, and I’m not at all used to it. This is only my 8th day on the job, but I am used to working at lightning speeds and pulling miracles out of my ass on a regular basis – so to be told that I can’t answer tickets or help people yet until .. well, I’m not sure until what. Just “not now”. This stinks, and I am bristly with being held back – I LIKE helping people. I’m GOOD at solving problems, and I’m BORED otherwise. I’d much rather jump in with both feet and poke around, figuring out things and generally spreading my awesomeness around like a virulent strain of full contact herpes. I’m completely not used to being the new girl who doesn’t know anything; I always have all the answers – so let me learn by doing, instead of waiting for someone to have the time to hold my hand when I’m already operating at warp 6.

We’re short staffed today, so I’m forcing myself into the queue and answering tickets. TAKE THAT! I WILL HELP YOU WHETHER I’M SUPPOSED TO OR NOT! neener neener can’t stop me i’m the magic man

Baby steps are for losers.

I couldn’t find elastics this morning, so I attempted to make ponytails using craft wire. Apparently this is a strange thing to do (and it didn’t work very well), because Ed laughed at me. What does he know? His hair’s never been longer than 2″. He knows not of girlie hair issues, like dealing with accidental orange hair. It’s not as bright today, which is good – it’s less “traffic cone” and more “Japanese girl got into the bleach again”. I might buy some black and go over it again; I might not care enough either way. Oh, apathy! You are so responsible for most of my ridiculousness!

Well, let’s start with the positives:

• My white hairs are completely covered
• The pillowcases will probably be okay after they’ve been washed
• I really like the black parts that didn’t get covered
• No chemicals!
• I can do another coat in a darker colour immediately if I want
• Even though my pillows look like I murdered someone with a hammer, you can’t see the stains with new pillowcases on
• I like the earthy smell, so I can live with my tragic pillows
• It doesn’t look THAT bad

On the other hand ..

• I feel like I should be singing a duet with Ozzy
• SO. MUCH. ORANGE.
• Seriously, I bought “Caca Rouge” not “Caca ALL THE ORANGE”
• I kind of really did ruin my pillows, but I love them so I’ll ignore the stains
• I should have known that I can’t remain still while sleeping; the saran wrap night cap was a bad idea
• ORANGE

hello i'm ORANGE

huh.

Does it look as bad as I fear it does? :(

We bought the Mazdabator just before the mp3 craze truly took off, which means our car is pretty much the only one on the road that doesn’t have an auxiliary port to plug in an iPod. We’re limited to CDs and the radio, and that sucks – it’s what I imagine life was like before the Industrial Revolution, complete with cholera and Typhoid Mary’s deadly peach melba reducing life expectancies everywhere.

To get around only being able to listen to 20 songs at once instead of several thousand, we use an FM transmitter. It used to be an excellent workaround, until technology took another leap forward – now I’m experiencing a wide variety of increasingly ass-marbling problems that have me wanting to sell the car and get a new one, all because I hate the radio.

Yes, I’m aware of how utterly ridiculous and first world that sounds. I kind of hate myself for it, but only until I get into the car again and oh look it’s the 1700s and I need doctor orgasms to cure my hysterics. I’m tired of the static, clunkiness of the transmitter, and other people: if I drive by anyone using any kind of device on the same frequency, it bleeds over and plays through my radio instead of my own music. It happens way more often than it used to, and is getting worse – this morning I was stopped at a traffic light when someone in a car near me unintentionally forced their music on my ears. This would be annoying enough – I was really into whatever the hell I was listening t0 – but the final insult to injury was the song that bled in.

Mother FUCKER.

Ed, we need a new car.

what up, jerk cat

On some level I should probably be worried about this, but it’s hard to be afraid of cute mystery notes that say you’re awesome:

awwww!

Hee! I don’t know who my secret admirer is, but I have my suspicions – there are very few people I know who are within note-leaving distance with the gumption to hunt down Lola and leave me fun surprises. Of course, I’m only considering people I actually know – I don’t want to think about complete strangers being able to track me down that easily. My mother never did warn me about perverts on the internet, but if she knew what the internet was and just what I actually DO on my computer all the time, she’d be obligated to Have a Talk with me about it.

What DID scare the hell out of me was coming home last night to an empty house and finding the TV tuned into the Edmonton/Florida game. I’m sure it was just a cat on the remote, but it was still alarming – coming home to hockey on the TV is not at all out of the ordinary, but not when I’m the first one in the house. Maybe we’re being haunted! Ghosts I can handle; ghosts who double the amount of hockey watched here I cannot.

Today there will be outside times!

maybe not outside on a beach in california, but outside nonetheless

My 20th (oh god) high school reunion is this summer, and I’m debating whether or not I should go.

A lot of people are wildly divided on reunions, and I’m not really sure where I fall. I didn’t have a bad time in high school – but I didn’t have a great time, either. School was just something I did between work and band practice, and I really don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or another. I suppose I’m lucky; I wasn’t bullied in high school. I wasn’t super popular, either – I was .. well, I wasn’t invisible. I had friends. I knew people and people knew me. And that’s about it, really.

Yeah, I have a lot of bad memories from that time in my life – but honestly, school has very little to do with any of them. 90% of the badness came from my mother (this was during the apex of her abuse) and all teen angst bullshit (sadly without a body count) I was going through: I broke up with my first boyfriend in grade 11 and it was devastating; any bullying I DID receive came from my home room teacher; I briefly got involved with a Bad Crowd, and I worked at McDonalds. School was where I went to get away from all of that: no more, no less.

Also, until very recently, I was convinced I didn’t actually go to high school at all and my entire life had been created in an autistic boy’s snow globe.

If I lived in the same city as my high school, I likely wouldn’t think twice about it. However, it’s in Victoria – so in addition to the cost of the weekend (there are three events priced per couple at $25, $20 and $100) I’d have to take the ferry over there and stay in my mom’s sauna in the dead of summer. It’s also over a long weekend, so the ferry will be insanely busy. All told, the weekend will cost me a few hundred dollars, and that’s money I could be saving for London.

Truthfully, I can come up with a thousand reasons to NOT go to the reunion (my overall feeling is “meh”, I wasn’t popular or loathed enough to make a romcom-style triumphant return, I don’t particularly have anything exciting to share, I don’t care about your eighteen children or who’s bald/fat/now identifying as a woman, anyone I would be excited to see either won’t be there and/or I’ve already been in contact with online elsewhere, I’m shy and would likely puss out at the last second anyway, Ed won’t want to go and I don’t want to go alone, it’s a trap). The reasons TO go are pretty small: there’s a few people I would like to see, maybe between now and August I will become wildly successful and/or actually graduate high school, there’s a slim chance I’ve repressed some awful high school drama that will come to the surface just in time to turn the trip into an epic tale of redemption and revenge – but is that enough to lay out the money and time? I am uncertain.

I’ve only been to one reunion before, and it wasn’t my own. I remember feeling really awkward around all these strangers, and I can’t help but feel it’ll be exactly the same at my own reunion. Yes, technically I know a lot of people .. but from an entire lifetime ago. In my final years of high school, I was already forging my identity elsewhere – my social circle mostly consisted of McDonald’s coworkers, and later, creepy perverts I met online. I had outgrown the high school scene long before my “graduation”, and revisiting it all doesn’t really move me one way or another. It makes me yawn, and my eyes water (although everything makes my eyes water; allergies are my FAVOURITE THING EVER).

Did you go to your reunion/would you go if it came up? Would you go at the $300 price tag I’m looking at? Tell me what to do, internet! I am undecided!

dot dot dot

This is the only kind of yellow paper I want to see on my scooter after a day of somewhat illegal parking:

:D

I don’t know who left it, but I certainly appreciate the sentiment (and the relief once I realized it wasn’t a parking ticket)!

IT CONTINUES TO BEGIN:

i amuse myself regularly

I rode into work today! I can’t quite see Lola from my window, but I can see her from a couple cubes over. There’s street parking around here – $4 for 10 hours – but I shoved myself in behind a car for free. The parking meters here are weird and don’t appear to be controlled by the city, so we’ll see how long I can get away with scooter squeezing before we move down the street and the hunt begins again.

The office is less than 6km from Sparta, so it’s a very quick commute. My ride in was jolly, if a little frosty – I could have used another nine pairs of gloves. Still, it’s awesome to be riding again in sunshine times – I love my scooter. And if I continue to be afraid of the lunch I packed, I’ll love the freedom to hop on Lola in search of food that won’t kill me. Hooray!

It’s funny how quickly you can settle back into a routine after time off. Less funny was the dream I had last night, in which I went back to my old job after three months and had to do an office tour for new hires only to be horrified by the appearance of walls everywhere. I’m fairly certain there are some deep, meaningful messages within that dream, but I’ll leave the mystery for my stalkers to whisper about amongst themselves.

How’s by your Wednesday?

One thing I had forgotten about working in this area of Burnaby is the omnipresent laundry smell – if the wind is blowing in the right direction, all oxygen is replaced with the cloying scent of really, really clean laundry. There’s a commercial launderer(erererer) directly across the street, and it smells. It doesn’t smell BAD, really – just chemically fresh. It’s like how dryer sheets smell nice in small doses, but opening a new box makes you choke as the vanilla lilac death blossoms of freshness reach down your throat and bungee jump off your uvula. I’ll take the carcinogenic chemicals any day over burnt coffee, but this morning it was startlingly bad.

I am pleased with my right now.

IT BEGINS

First day at my new job! I’m settling in nicely – driving into a friggin’ blizzard this morning did little to deter my plans for world domination. I have a desk with a massive computer, access to Diet Coke and ice cubes, and everyone is super nice. I’ve already started nesting; having brought in a bag full of “office essentials” (garden gnomes and pictures of Transformers) to make my space more my own. I have a chair with no arms, power for my iPhone, and I know where the bathroom is. Things are going along swimmingly!

I really need to deal with the horrible fluorescent lights overhead, though. I am a creature of tech – I work better in the dark (and fluorescents give me a headache).

My first three hours back in space have been excellent!