The Very Breath of My Body

Called in sick this morning. Stayed home from work and called my doctor according to his orders. My bronchitis hasn’t gotten better since monday when I visited him and started my antibiotic treatment. Instead of enduring another day at work with this shit, I stayed home. Don’t ask me why I felt guilty for doing it; I just don’t know.

So, yesterday at work, the bending over to pick up stacks of paper, the exertion, the activity made my chest clench up tight, and breathing was a real chore. It was tight, dry, and no amount of my asthma inhaler would make it release. I went home, guzzled water, made sure to breathe normally and stop freaking out. My plans to leave the house and go out for the first time this week were ruined. I simply stayed home another night. Gave me time to deal with reinstalling the OS on my laptop. Around 1:30am, I call it a night.

This morning, I woke up several times. When I can’t breathe well, I can’t sleep well, and so I keep waking up during the night and morning. Have been for the past week, and it’s tiresome. I’m tired. So, this morning, under my thicker-than-usual blankets, I laid there half-awake and warm. Finally, my lungs were open, productive. I could cough. But, as the alarm clock got me out of bed, I knew that today wouldn’t be a day to work. Not in the least. So I called in, then left a message with my doctor, and went back to my room to get into some sweatpants and continue drinking more water.

My doctor’s nurse called around 11am. Finally. After some consultation with my doctor, the nurse phones a prescription for Nasonex to Walgreen’s, which I pick up around 5. The prescription is a nasal decongestant, to keep my sinuses from blocking up or draining into my lungs during the day and night. After smoking for 8 years, I’ve forgotten what it was like to not have a stuffy nose, inflamed sinuses. Maybe I can get them back, and soon.

Patrick and I went out for some fast food, which I really needed. This mass consumption of water this week has me getting angrily hungry. And the antibiotic isn’t helping in that regard one bit.

I finally got out of the house. I’m at Mojo’s now, finishing up the last of the reinstallation and just tooling around online. It’s colder than frozen dogshit in here. Feeling kinda heady, buzzing from the decongestant guaifenessin (yes, I’m feeling ‘robo’). So, I think I’ll head home soon.

As for working tomorrow: I don’t know. My sick hours are growing short; I need to hold onto them. But if I go to work, will my bronchitis get worse? I simply don’t know. Anything.

Direction, Breezes, Breathing, and Flight

Things at work are still boring, stale, and dry. Irritating. Annoying. The other day I was talking with a coworker in passing, chit-chat kind of stuff. She was complaining about being on the tail-end of a chest cold, congestion problems. I remarked that there were some weeks I felt OK on monday morning, but by the time Friday came around, my chest was tight and my breathing was kinda rough. I mused about it either being fumes, falling insulation fiber, whatever. Doesn’t happen all the time. We shrugged our shoulders, I walked on to continue working, and that was that.

Around 4:30pm the bosslady calls me into her office. I hate when that happens, because she’s always got a serious look when she does it, and she’s called coworkers into her office quite a bit for no pleasant reason. So I was cringing, at best, and angry at worst, about what I could’ve possibly done to deserve punishment. So, I get in there, she pulls the door closed, and she begins asking me about a rumor from an unnamed source that’s floating around that I’m talking about possible health problems from the work environment, that she wants to “nip this in the bud”, and so on. I remembered thinking to myself, “Well, I know better than to trust that coworker again with chit-chat.” Either she relayed the chat, or the bosslady overheard, I don’t know. But I’m being asked about what I meant when I stated that. I told her it was only an observation, not a claim, not a fact. Whether it was environmental, or mental, I knew not. And now that I am living more healthily, it’ll be a span of time before I can make another assessment about it. Give my chest time to heal, then if it happens again, we’ll talk.

Talk about butterflies under the magnifying glass.

So, she’s got that “nipped”, and the conversation leads on to my attitude, my demeanor when I’m at work, my goal, what I’m trying to get out of working there. I’m there to earn a paycheck. That job facilitates my lifestyle, plain and simple. It’s not a career. Printing isn’t a career choice. It’s a job. Anything I do is just a job. But I can’t tell her that. She has a hand on the company pursestrings. I tell her that yes I enjoy working there, that yes my gruff and distant attitude is just a trait of my personality, and that as of late I’ve been having a mindset change, a slump. She tried to sum up my flat answers as best as she could, and she came up, rather accurately, with a flatline. And that’s exactly how I feel about life, about everything. Especially that job. It’s just, bleh. I have no ten-year plan. No five-year plan. No plans at all. She stated that I was smart, productive, and an odd fit for the job, and she started to question why I was there at all. I had no answers for her, simply because I didn’t want to paint myself into a corner. I didn’t want to provide ammunition, to hand her the pen to write my pink slip. She’s the bosslady. I tell her what will keep me earning pay. You can’t expect any other kind of honesty.

Flatline. I’m not happy there. Haven’t been in a while. She says she can’t imagine living a life where she’s not excited about what’s going on at work, about what she’s able to contribute to. If you ask me, I can see that people like that do exist, but I can’t, for my life, imagine what that position in life is like. I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about work. I rarely get excited about things these days. There are expectations there, everywhere, and I hate performing. Simple as that. Give me a task, show me a corner, hand me a machine, and leave me the hell alone. That’s when I’ll work. That’s where I work best.

But now, it appears I’m working under that magnifying glass.

Butterflies and wind.

Whatever. No Patience To Be Found Here.

So here I am. Whatever. Nothing ecstatically, fantastically great to report. Whatever. I hate technology. My Time-Warner cable modem connection has been sucking shit for the past three weeks. You expect me to feel gung-ho about life when I can’t reliably tell anyone? Time-Warner states that there indeed is a problem in the neighborhood. No shit. It’s not like it’s rocket surgery. Fix the fucking thing, or I cancel service. Then again, going to another company wouldn’t work — they all use the same fucking equipment. Whatever.

Last week, during the morning of a major downpour, there was water pooling and flowing across the road in the construction zone outside of my apartment. It’s a stretch of road I have to drive every day to get to work. Around 3pm, I stick my head out the back door of my job to check on the weather. It was then that I noticed that I was the proud recipient of a flat tire. Fuck. Three-inch long piece of stamped steel, looked like a hinge or a latch, buried in my left-rear tire. It must have washed into the roadway from the construction debris. So, I finished up a job, excused myself, clocked out, put on the donut tire, and limped to the nearest tire shop. One hour and $100 later I have two new tires to replace the flat and the other rear tire which has been patched a year ago. So, with all that, I was officially, undeniably poor. I still am until this friday, a long-overdue payday.

Things suck.

If you know me (which you should, since you’re visiting my site), and you see me in my recent daily life, you’ve probably noticed (if you cared enough) that I’ve been getting really short-tempered lately. I’m growing impatient with a lot of things. My tolerance of bullshit is growing really thin.

Case in point — the bosslady is growing on my ever-fucking nerves. I really don’t know what the hell is up with women who grew up as the girls who made THE RULES of the playground. They made all the rules, they made all the games, and if you weren’t playing according to the rules, spoken AND unspoken, then you were the target of their anger. So the bosslady, a.k.a. the woman married to the boss, has joined our team in an effort to police her husband make things more efficient and to help “set up ‘systems'” (that’s a term straight from corporate hell). Whatever. If she doesn’t stop pandering and condescending to us, I’m afraid she’s not going to have a workforce left to help pay for her future retirement. We’re adults. We’re not her daughters. Stop that shit.

So, yeah, I’m hating my job. Too much bullshit. Leave us alone and let us do our jobs. That’s all we ask.

But you can’t tell her that.

I was going to go to Texarkana last weekend to see my mother for her birthday weekend, but I don’t feel comfortable at all with driving that distance with my timing belt getting as old as it is. It’s about 50-thousand miles overdue, and I don’t like that. How much will it cost me to have it replaced? Hold onto your lunches, because I lost mine: no less than $450. What the fuck for? God. Something replaceable like that, there’s a system for doing it if the mechanic’s experienced. No sense in that shit. $80 for a new belt and water pump, so what’s the rest of the cost? Four hours of labor. Fuck that shit. Bullshit.

Nothing good to brag about. Sorry. Tune in later.

The Antisocialist Manifesto

If anyone has been wondering, I have been going through some pretty drastic changes lately. I won’t go into detail, but the changes are deep, far-reaching, and life-changing. And I’m not at all in a good mood. And I’m not dealing well with the world. And I won’t be a part of the world for a while because:

I hate people.

As much as I love them, as much as I need them in my life, right now, I hate almost everyone. It’s bothersome to keep up with them. Too much effort to listen, to keep in touch, to pay attention, to chase them. I don’t get it. Can’t get it. Can’t get all the information, the data, to keep up. In the broad sense of things, I’ve reached sensory overload. I had to leave Mojo’s earlier because it was too crowded, too noisy, too irritating. Too many people, not enough me.

I hate people.

Something happened in my head about three weeks ago, and I can’t pin it down. It just went *click* and suddenly I’m testy, disinterested, short-tempered, unhappy, uncaring. I don’t get it. I want to care, I want to be happy, but it’s just not working. I don’t want to look at anyone, especially in the face, the eyes. I tend to look away when I talk to someone. Don’t want to connect. As much as I want the community of people around me, I don’t want anything to do with them. Don’t want to expose myself. Don’t want to trust. Not anymore. Not now.

I hate people.

There’s a behavior that happens in the animal kingdom. It exhibits itself in herds, schools, flocks. The sick animal tends to distance itself from the group. One theory is that this helps to protect the group, with the animal thinking of the group at large. Perhaps. Would fit in-line with most behavioral evolutionists. I have a different idea on it, though. Again, Richard Dawkins, father of the “selfish gene” theory, puts forth a better idea, and my take on it is this: the energy spent by the animal to keep appearing healthy and sexually fit, worthy of being socially viable, in-step with the group, would take energy away from getting well. To keep itself alive, it pulls away. This is the first time I’ve considered this, and it makes so much sense. And this behavior is not unique to the “lower species”, but to us, to me, as well. So therefore:

I hate people.

If I don’t make any special effort to contact you, or spend time with you, or make my way over to greet you, don’t take it personally. Do not take it personally. I hate you too.

I knew you would understand.

The Lap Has Its Warmer Again

Wednesday at work, I’m tooling along, running one of the machines. The receptionist yells for my attention, I turn around, and as she presents me with a shipping box, she says, “Is this what you’re looking for?” Shocked that I got the package two days before expected, I hungrily grab for it, clutch it close, and run, apelike, back into my little corner to covet my prize. I got my laptop back.

During lunch, I gave the thing a lookover to see what Dell actually did. They replaced the keyboard and the motherboard, but that’s all they replaced. Bastards. I was kinda pissed. When I noticed the brand new hairline cracks on the top plastic, next to the hinges, I got angry. I remembered that I saw that the service depot had improperly closed the lid before packing and shipment. The latching hook on the left edge of the lid was outside of the body of the case instead if inside the pocket where it belongs, and it was shipped like that air freight. Bad. Bad. Bad. That got me furious.

Stupid outsourced repair shops. Solectron be damned.

So, when I get home, I reinstall the hard drive, battery, and plug it up for a thorough shakeout. Everything boots fine, fine. I go one step beyond, and install the thing on the docking station to see if the NIC issue was actually fixed. Sure enough, it works! Yes! I can dock my laptop into the station and charge it while having network connectivity without screwing around with pulling cables and cards from my laptop bag. I’m happy.

But the non-replacement thing still bugged the shit out of me. So I called Dell again. After about a half-hour on the phone, the tech scheduled an on-site repair to replace the DVD-rom, the LCD panel, and, assuredly, and for the third time since my purchase of the system, a replacement for the damned top plastic. Gah.

The field tech will contact me tomorrow for repairs. Hopefully this time tomorrow night I’ll have a completely whole, functional, and beautiful system again.

Tonight, I spent quite a bit of time at Mojo’s. Got a sizable chunk of coding done while hanging out with my friends. This is good. It’s surprising to me what I can do when I sit at the right table, have two cups of coffee, and get here at an early enough hour to get some time in on the Chrontium project. I’m happy.

And, with that update, I say G’nite.