Monday, August 30, 2004

It's Never My Fault

I woke up this morning upside-down in my bed, with my feet tucked under my teddy-bear and my head resting on a pile of discarded blankets. It was kind of nice, opening my eyes on a different vista of room than I usually do; but it was kind of unsettling that my unconcious body moved itself so dramatically without waking me up. It makes me wonder if I should move my furniture again so that the top of the bed lies in that direction (south-by-southwest, but I always sleep diagonally across the mattress and so was pointing due south).



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I've decided that I cannot blame myself for this lack of anything to talk about. I was blaming my depression for the verbal lassitude that I've been suffering all week, but I've written through depressions before, so now I think of it I'm sure it's not that. The truth is, there is nothing going on in the world that is worth my interest. Everyone is talking about things like the Olympics and the Republican National Convention, but I don't find those things interesting.



One would think that hours and hours of hot guys in tight costumes doing nifty physical things would be able to hold my interest, but it just hasn't... I watch for a minute or two, and then get bored. And one would think that all of the RNC weirdness would be worthy of comment, or at least indignation, but all it does is depress me. The USA is rapidly turning into the McCarthyist version of the USSR, which is too sad to even be ironic.



The Scott Peterson trial was supposedly rife with soap-opera happenings last week, but I've never been able to generate any interest in it... I mean, people kill people all the time, and the only reason this is getting any airplay at all is because it does read like a soap-opera, and features good-looking people. Even the weather, that old stand-by of the nothing-to-say set, is boring: it's really hot here in the Bay Area, there is a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina, and typhoons are raging in Central America... but it happens all the time, it's simply that time of year, so who cares?



Even in my own life, nothing interesting seems to be happening. At the office, we're still working on moving, and finally found an office space that I like... and then events transpired that the pigeon-coop space I hated is no longer available, and so we're moving to the space I like (the realtor was rilly cute, too). Upheaval is coming, though, and I'm not looking forward to it. But it doesn't strike me as that big a deal anymore.



There was some family drama yesterday, but I don't know how much detail I want to put into it. Basically my father and my uncle decided to have a family meeting Sunday afternoon, but they didn't organize it at all well, and somehow I got bitten in the ass three or four times over the fiasco when I didn't have anything to do with it; for example, nobody told me about this meeting until I was getting in the car to go to church on Sunday morning, and I had already committed to being at an extremely important Court function that afternoon; and then, nobody told my cousin Jamie, in whose house the meeting was to be held, so she and her husband were in Half Moon Bay. The whole thing threw a huge kink into an already difficult day, and I'm still a little too pissed off about it to talk about it calmly.



Actually, "pissed off" is too weak a word. I am enraged. But that doesn't make it easier to talk about, and I imagine that once I do calm down enough to write out the sequence of events and mistakes, they will prove too boring for even me, the Queen of Mundania, to publish here.



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Well, I think I will focus on something positive instead of bitching about how boring the world is and how enraged I am over that silly Sunday fiasco. So here's some positive:



Saturday was a nice day. I got a lot done... not as much as I wanted to get done, but a lot more than I've been getting done. I got about eight new paragraphs added to Worst Luck (even though I didn't get to the end of the chapter yet, so I didn't post it; and I have introduced two new characters, describing them at some length, even though they are merely incidental to the story), and it felt really good to get moving on it again. I also, at the same time, washed six or seven loads of laundry (although I didn't get the floor picked-up enough to see the rug, and I still have another six or seven loads to go, and I don't have anywhere to put the clean clothes yet), and it feels good to have clean clothes to wear.



Sunday afternoon (aprés le fiasco) was Royal Grand Ducal Investitures, when our new Monarchs (Royal Grand Duke XIII Peter Padilla and Royal Grand Duchess XIII Ruby Slippers) granted all of their reign's titles. Caroline was made Royal Princess, and Madasin was created Lady in Waiting; I was dubbed Royal Entertainer, which is one of the lowest titles in the Court... I started getting offended, but then I realized that since I already have the second-highest lifetime title available (the only higher is Grand Duchess), it would be a waste of time to give me another crown title which would only be subsumed by my lifetime title. It also underlined my preferred role in the Court, as an entertainer rather than an administrator; besides, any possible offense was absorbed by being invited to perform at Investiture, a signal honor.



The Investiture itself ran like clockwork, no dead air and no hemming-and-hawing, and was over with in about an hour and a half (last year's took almost four hours), so the rest of the afternoon was left blissfully free. I was able to get out of face right away (the heat was crushing, and in a wig it was just untenable), and spent some time just sitting and chatting comfortably with the courtfolk.



Afterward, Caroline and Madasin and I went out for walkies ("walkies" is a pastime that encompasses window-shopping, people-watching, and chatting all at once) and had some dinner at the Claremont Diner (whose menu has become extremely gay, favoring artisan breads and pomegranate-wine sauces and feta cheese in everything, instead of the substantial and predictable diner-food they used to serve, but the burgers were quite tasty and the waiter was cute as a bug, in a quirky urban-hipster way). It was all very pleasant.



Today when I went to get my sandwich, there were two new guys working at the sandwich shop... and while I was temporarily taken aback by being denied my daily dose of cutie-pie Kyle, the two new guys are really cute, too. Not quite as cute as Kyle, but then one cannot realistically expect such a thing... nothing in the world is cuter than Kyle, except maybe a basket of puppies.



So that's the positive. Having got all that off my chest, I think I will go back to work. I have to chivvy some information out of our bank, and they're always so reluctant to give information over the phone, so I may have to draft a letter. And pretty soon I'm going to have to start going through my files and throwing out irrelevant paper... it would be stupid to pack up trash and schlepp it to our new office. Those two tasks ought to see me through until it's time to meet Caroline at the gym for our forty minutes of cardio.



Have a super day!



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