Robert Manners

Coming Down

This morning I began to regain feeling in the second toe of my right foot... it's been numb since Friday night. I was so scattered by the HallowQueen pageant that I failed to follow my own number-one Rule of Drag: always carry a pair of slippers with you. After schlepping up and down hill, and in and out of dense crowds of rabble and hoi-polloi, for hours on end, while wearing incredibly fabulous pointy-toed boots with four-inch heels, my feet took a while to forgive me.

PS... here's the first pic I've got back from that night, in my "reception gown," courtesy of Cookie Dough:



PPS: Another great shot taken as I schlepped up Market towards the Mint, viewable on page 4 of this album from OvaHere.com, I'll be ordering prints of DSC09354.JPG after payday, but that shouldn't stop you from ordering one or two for your personal use... Can-Can Caroline and her Zorro beau are visible in the background.

I also just yesterday managed to catch up on my sleep. After jotting out the last entry (which I actually wrote at 1:45 Saturday morning, but changed the post-time to suit my sense of appropriateness), I fell into bed and was allowed to sleep for very nearly four hours before I had to drag my poor carcass out of the arms of Morpheus and into the arms of Triton (via the shower), so that I'd be ready for pick-up at 7 a.m. My friends and fellow-GSRs Ed and Gene took me to Calistoga for my first ever Area Assembly, which was quite an experience.



I rather enjoyed it, the ride, the company, the food, the bizarre trends of discussion that can only happen in General Service and AA, the weather, etc. Although I didn't have to do anything terribly strenuous, or even have to think all that hard, in my state of exhaustion it was a hell of a trial staying awake and alert for eight hours of Assembly and the nearly two hours of riding to and from Calistoga. Some days, just sitting upright is a monumental undertaking.



When I got home, I was too tired to sleep, so I spent some time installing The Sims Superstar. I loaded it, uninstalled, deleted, and reloaded it three times, only to discover from the Sims website (when I finally admitted defeat and looked up their FAQ page) that the problem had nothing to do with my installation or with previous versions on my hard-drive, but rather because of my DirectX settings. Though I'm still not sure what DirectX is or why its creators gave it a name that sounds like a pay-per-view porn site, all I had to do was check a little box to disable DirectX Image Acceleration, and that was that. I wish I'd known that before I deleted all of my families. Anyway, I got to sleep around eleven-ish, despite the fact that I thought I was going to fall asleep at any minute.



Then Sunday morning Grandmother woke me up again at eight... which would have been enough sleep, if I hadn't been so exhausted already. We went to church, then to brunch, then I went over to my Daddy's house to help him staple a piece of cardboard over his swamp-cooler ventilator for the winter, and then I went over to my sister's to help her clean her house in preparation for a Section-Eight instpection later in the week. I wasn't much help there, I was so tired; plus, my sister is so disorganized she makes me look like a neatnik, and I simply couldn't follow her around as she flitted, apparently aimlessly, from task to task and room to room. So after helping fill one box of clothes from her bedroom and otherwise accomplishing nothing but taking up space and converting oxygen into carbon dioxide, I went home and played Sims Superstar for the rest of the evening.



The next morning I finally got my sleep out, though I hadn't really intended to sleep until ten on a workday... I just forgot (whether subconciously or accidentally) to set my alarm. But you know your life is out of hand when you have to use up your sick leave just to catch up on your sleep.



When I did get to work, the first thing to happen was the arrival of the mailman with my long-awaited black fox boa. It was kind of cheesy-looking, too, not nearly as thick or soft as I had expected it to be; so perhaps it's just as well it didn't arrive earlier, or I would have spent even more time and money trying to find a nicer black fox piece. One does try to keep one's expectations low, especially when buying things online, but between the poor quality and the ridiculously long delivery time, I was very disappointed.



As I sat here yesterday with my fox boa around my neck (it was cold yesterday), hard at work typing up meeting notes and answering the phone, and thinking about things at the same time, I gained a certain amount of mental distance from my life that I have not been able to manage in quite a while. They say that the unexamined life is not worth living (actually, Socrates said it, and They merely repeat it), but it's difficult to examine one's life when one is just barely keeping up with the work of living it.



And now as I examine my life, as if from a slight distance, I cannot escape the observation that things have gotten quite messy. My finances are all at sixes and sevens, with a late car payment on my mind due to having the car towed last week (note that I blame my empty checking account on the accident of having my car towed, not on the known behaviors of obsessive-compulsive shopping in which I've indulged the last two months), not to mention the empty savings account and the credit-card that isn't getting paid down as the interest start-date looms ever closer; I haven't made the tiniest effort at following up my insurance claim or getting any part of my car fixed, and I still haven't gotten the oil changed although I have driven over six thousand miles, nor have I even washed the poor thing and changed the duct-tape on the mirror in ages; my room is so untidy that I have to climb over piles of boxes and clothes to get from my bed to the snooze-button, and I can't find my coworker's birthday present that I bought two months ago, and I can't find the clean underwear and socks that I know I have because I just washed them quite recently and can't have worn them all by now; I owe a number of emails, letters, thank-you notes, and phone calls to pretty much everyone I know; I have only been going to the gym on an average of once a week for the last two months, and though I haven't been gaining the weight back, my diet has been shot all to hell; and I haven't made one jot of effort at my next Step (#10, "continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it")... though I suppose you could say that the above paragraph is an inventory of sorts, belated but no less thorough.



It seems, then, that the only thing for me to do now is to make a damned good effort to get my shit together. Now that I have finally, after all this time and trouble, won a title of my very own (however insignificant and nebulous it may turn out to have been the very first HallowQueen), I think I might be able to turn my energies over to doing something about making my life run a little more smoothly: get my room not only tidied up but organized so that it's easier to keep tidy; get my car at least clean and maintained, if not actually fixed; get my money in order, save up for Christmas and get that damned credit-card payed down; spend some time and thought responding to the cards and letters and gifts and emails I've received over the last couple of months... and in general pick up all the pieces I've dropped since I got involved in the HallowQueen Pageant, and before that in the Living Sober Musical, and before that in preparations for the Miss Gay Marin Pageant that never happened, and before that in... oh, hell, who can remember? Basically, I have to reprioritize, pick up all the pieces, and make my quotidian life a joy rather than a burden to me.



I'll let you know how that works out. In the meantime I'll most likely be sitting over there with my head firmly buried in the sand (or rather, in Sims Superstar, which isn't all that exciting but is at least fairly tidy... and the Rosebud cheat is so satisfying, just pressing a button and jacking up your Simoleans in a single operation).



Wish me luck!