Doldrums

This weather is really starting to get me down. It's been raining pretty much steadily for the last two weeks, and I'm sooooo tired of it. I really am accustomed to more change in my weather; here in the Bay Area, you get all sorts of different weather all the time, so two whole weeks of deep cold and heavy rainfall is very unusual, especially in winter when people in other parts of the country expect such things. Bay Area weather is supposed to be perverse, unexpected, and ever-changing.



But now the perverse and unexpected behavior is to not change, to be just like weather in other places. It happens sometimes; but I hate it.



The funny thing is that I normally like rain. I like the charged ions in the air, I like the sound, I like the way it cleans everything off and turns everything green. However, while I am totally heliophobic and can't stand for the sun to touch me, the absence of light is starting to wear me down. I mean, it's high noon right now, but it feels like dawn just because of the lack of light; it feels dismal and depressing, and it's felt like that for far too long.



Going to work this week has been a horrible chore... so horrible, in fact, that yesterday I simply didn't do it... and I may not do it today, either. It's so boring there! There's about ten minutes of overlap when the lady who's working with us on a project (she's organizing all of our files, an Herculean undertaking) is still there, but she leaves at noon and that's about when I've been coming in. For the rest of the day, I'm there all by myself.



I was complaining about this to the Grandmother yesterday, and she remarked that I used to love being alone for a week at a time. But that was back when I had a lunatic for a boss, and so being alone was a peaceful break; besides, in my old office, I didn't feel so alone... there was cutie-pie Kyle in the sandwich-shop around the corner (but now, even if I were still there, Kyle and the sandwich shop are gone), and places to go to get something to eat or a soda or a newspaper or whatever. In the new office, there are no shops nearby, there isn't even much foot-traffic on the streets, just noisy trucks rumbling by... so it just feels lonelier somehow.



And then, aside from being alone, there's a certain futility to my being there... the only calls that have come in are for people who are still on vacation, and so I have to absorb the callers' impatience as I explain that, while the office is open, it isn't really operational.



To top it all off, my work computer got hit by an incredibly pernicious Trojan horse of adware, which infested my internet browser with at least eight separate programs that I had to uninstall, and several more that I had to find and delete, and at least one more that I can't seem to find the source of or disable in any way; it completely overrides my pop-up-blocker and makes "offer optimizer" windows open up all over the place whenever I use Internet Explorer, and I have wasted hours upon hours of my time trying to get rid of it. I've also spent time as well as good money on adware cleaners, but they haven't been able to get rid of the offer optimizers, either.



Of course, there is plenty of work I can be doing without using Internet Explorer, but it is work so tedious that the very idea of doing it makes me shrivel up and die a little inside. It's all data-entry work, which is so boring that the only time I can do it is when there isn't anyone else in the office to distract me. And since I haven't done it this week, I'll have to do it next week. But next week isn't right now, and right now I just don't want to do the work.



Besides, there is plenty of work I can be doing here at the house... although I got the Christmas tree out of the house in plenty of time for it to be picked up, I haven't put the ornaments away (they're still on the card-table in the living room), nor have I put away any of the other decorations or restored any kind of order to the living room. There are also a dozen glasses and some other hand-wash-only holiday dishes left over from Christmas that still haven't been washed. On a more personal note, I also have laundry I could be doing, and a novel I could be writing, and a body I could be exercising.



But I can't seem to get myself motivated to do anything, neither work-related nor home-related nor personal. I just sit here on the computer for a while, then get back in bed and read another Ngaio Marsh novel (I've gone through three this week), and sometimes go out front and watch some television. The house is too cold, except when the heater is running and then it's too hot, and my skin is drying out and my hair is sticking up; though I have been writing lengthy emails to my father, sparked by some of the chain-emails he's forwarded to me, I haven't been able to write any of the letters I want to write, nor have I been able to write the next paragraph of Worst Luck, much less the rest of the chapter (I'm stuck on a piece of opening dialogue); I just feel so tired, and I keep eating all this candy trying to get rid of it, and not eating proper meals because they're too much effort to assemble, and sleeping a lot.



All in all I'm feeling just a trifle bleah.



It'll pass, anyway. All I have to do is do something, get started in one corner and work my way into the next corner, and I will eventually get everything done, and will miraculously feel better once I have gotten them done. And the weather will change to something else, to which I will no doubt object.



So maybe I'll get up now and go do something. Or maybe I'll go back to bed. I don't know. Doesn't really matter. I can always blame it on the rain.