Happy Fun Cog

For the umpteenth time, my head clears when the day is coming to a close. All the angst and neurosis from everything leading up to this point fades away. It's like a very, very, very mild form of Ecstas y in that I feel the affection for others and forgiveness for myself that I am so often lacking in my normal frame of mind. It is rare that I am sober and cognizant of how blessed I am in my life. I wish I could have these moments in the daytime so they wouldn't blur into the amnesia of sleeping.

I played in my first beer-league softball game of the season tonight and, for those who don't have experience in this area, "beer-league" is interpreted very literally. I drove home from the game with my window down, smelling the warm night air thick with veins of organic scent. I was immediately transported back to young nights in the South, and felt powerfully homesick. There was something else there, too. I felt very conscious of who and where I was, driving on a somewhat rural route between to towns in Massachusetts, far from where and how I'd grown up yet intimately connected.

Copied from Grammar Book . c o m:

Who vs. Whom

Rule:

Rule.	Use the he/him method to decide which word is correct. he = who him = whom
	Examples:	Who/Whom wrote the letter? He wrote the letter. Therefore, who is correct.
		For who/whom should I vote? Should I vote for him? Therefore, whom is correct.
		We all know who/whom pulled that prank. This sentence contains two clauses: We all know and who/whom pulled that prank. We are interested in the second clause because it contains the who/whom. He pulled that prank. Therefore, who is correct. (Are you starting to sound like a hooting owl yet?)
		We want to know on who/whom the prank was pulled. This sentence contains two clauses: We want to know and the prank was pulled on who/whom. Again, we are interested in the second clause because it contains the who/whom. The prank was pulled on him. Therefore, whom is correct.

The scenario started as so many do, with your narrator consuming an excess amount of caffeine. Namely, a large iced coffee from Dunkin Donuts in the morning, and two 20-oz bottles of Diet Coke in the afternoon.

Towards the end of the day, I was cc'd on an email at work in which my boss named me the contact for helping a tech from another group set up their server on a Citrix farm that our group 'owns.' The technical aspect of it isn't really important; the point is that I was named as a contact point for a process that I didn't understand but was, in fact, responsible for.

I spent 30-45 minutes going through documentation, trying to find an answer. I had been the backup tech when we set up our Citrix farm, so I had some exposure to the software, but I had no idea about what the next step was. This was made worse when the requestor called me and told me he needed it by Thursday. I came very close to losing my temper with him. Mostly, I was mad at myself. I felt panicked because I didn't know what to do.

I fired off an email to the consultant that we worked with while setting up the Citrix farm, but continued to stew in my own juices, brimming with rage at everyone, especially myself. I couldn't think straight. Why couldn't I find the information in the documentation?

I felt stupid and incompetent. Between the stress and the caffeine I'd ingested earlier, my jaw muscles were clenching repeatedly, almost spasming.

All I wanted to do was head back home to my apartment and crawl into bed, so sick was I with disgust and anger for myself.

But I forced myself to go to tae kwon do, where I had a good sweat. Nothing brings your mind back to the present like struggling to breathe.

When I got back home, I looked at my Blackberry and the consultant has responded to my email. I had, in fact, been in the right all along. The information that I needed had, in fact, never been documented. There was never a process in place. There was no way that I could've known what to do. I had, in fact, done the correct thing - tell the person requesting assistance that I had to look up the information, then contact the consultant.

I feel like I've made a lot of progress in analysis, but I still have this habit of defaulting to anger and self-loathing when in doubt. I just need to learn how to have faith in myself and, above all else, chill the fuck out.

I just remembered, out of the blue, some clip I saw 10-15 years ago - I was either in college or a junior/senior in high school. The clip was from the set of a W.C. Fields movie, and the cameras were rolling as a large earthquake hit and everything in the studio started rattling. It was intense - people off-camera were screaming. But W.C. was the calmest of them all. He switched out of his drunken jester voice and announced in a loud, clear baritone, "Everybody, settle down. It will all be all right. Settle down." I'm not sure I got his exact words right, but his role as a calming, sober presence was hilarious given his on-screen persona.

1. I'm in a little agony right now, but it's a good thing. I went to the lunch buffet at my local Indian joint and overate. I ate what was approximately the same portion that I usually eat when I'm there, but now it's making my stomach feel distended and painfully bloated. The reason why this is good is because I think the pain is inidicative of the fact that I've been consistently eating less food, so my stomach has shrunk.
2. I've found that crossword puzzles are an education in how my mind works. I picked up a book of them because I wanted some good mental exercise, and they're driving me a bit mad. I'm a bit surprised to see how quickly I get irritated when I can't think of an answer off the bat, and I have to fight to stay focused on the task at hand instead of drifting off to daydream. I mean, I can't stay focused for longer than, say, 30 seconds on a problem. I think this gives me insight into the struggles I've had at work or with my personal creative writing pursuits, and it should help me overcome the feeling that I struggle because I'm stupid; I'm not stupid, I just give up too easily.
   

I watched Lars and the Real Girl this weekend, which was a moving little flick (albeit one that got a little too saccharine for its own good). In short, it's about a sweet, very lonely, and very deluded young man who gets a Real Doll (if you're not familiar with Real Dolls, don't Google it from a work computer).

And here's the part where I extrapolate meaning as it relates to my own life without spoiling the movie. One of the plot points of the movie is that the various events reflect how much people in the small town care about Lars, but he's too blind to see it. I think I can learn from this. I'm very harsh on myself and others, and as a result I expect people to judge me harshly as well. In reality, people are almost always far more forgiving or, more likely, apathetic about the problems or mistakes that I obsess about.

A lot of the pressure that I put on myself comes from this belief that others are judging me harshly, so if I can just teach myself that I'm the one doing the judging, I think my life would be a lot easier.

I struggle with my identity as a writer on almost a daily basis. I haven't written more than a handful of (bad) short stories since leaving college almost 10 years ago. I have no significant body of work other than sporadic journal entries. So how can I identify as a writer? It makes little sense, and I've been trying to figure this out over the past few days.

I think I still identify as a writer for two main reasons.

First, I've always done so, ever since I won a small plastic dinosaur in a 3rd grade short story writing competition; I was also an English major with a creative writing focus in college. Background, by itself, is not enough of a justification. That's where the second and most important reason comes in; writing things down is the only way that I can sort my thoughts out. I'd forgotten about this until the past 6-8 months or so, when I slowly started to re-integrate writing back into my daily life. It's been a bit of a struggle because I repress a lot of things and writing brings them back up again. As a result, I still have an on-again/off-again relationship with writing. It reminds me of the time that I quit intoxicants (i.e. booze and pot) for over a year. After a few months of clear-headedness, all my repressed emotions and thoughts came bubbling up and I found myself spontaneously bursting into tears and punching walls.

Maybe the problem is that I assume that identifying one's self as a writer is purely dependent on actually getting published.

I find myself vacillating wildly between the poetic and the nihilistic, between the hopeful and the hateful, and between determination and desperation. It feels like I am simultaneously on the verge of hitting my stride and on the verge of finally giving up and allowing myself to be consumed by pettiness, superficial concerns, and a hopeless life.

I'm 33 years old - should I not know who I am and what I want in my life by this point? I know that many people don't, and that such a condition doesn't necessarily keep one from living a good life, but I expect myself to know these things and understand.

I was watching Hotel Rwanda last night and, per this post that I wrote afterwords, I started looking around my apartment and wondering, "What the fuck is with all this stuff?" Really, when you get down to it, I spent a lot of my money on sprucing up my apartment for the sake of encouraging women to be interested in a romantic relationship with me. It's the nesting instinct. Not only that, but it's the Ikea nesting instinct. straight out of Fight Club. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies of all time; I saw it in the theatre when I was living in NYC, fresh out of college. I was energized by it, charged by its take on the world of thirty-something men. I felt that, by watching the movie and getting it and liking it, I was somehow innoculating myself against making those mistakes.

And yet here I am, doing exactly what this powerful film was satirizing: falling victim to the Ikea nesting instinct, allowing my material posessions to control me, to dictate what I do with my life by virtue of perpetuating the cycle of getting in debt and then working a soul-sucking job as a way of paying off that debt (and then being so miserable in the job that I buy even more material posessions to distract myself).

Maybe one of the reasons why I have such a hard time connecting with women is that I know on some level that I don' t want to live this kind of life, the 40-45 hour work week, the performance reviews, the accumlation of material goods... maybe I'm just rejecting the way that I've chosen to live my life, and I'll continue to be miserable and suffering from wild swings in emotion and perspective until I'm doing something else with my life.

I put thousands of dollars on my credit card to furnish a new apartment - a new couch (which I've never had before), a new desk, a new kitchen table, a new this, a new that. And for what? So I can make my little niche in yuppidom more comfortable? I'm becoming what I always swore that I wouldn't - somebody who puts themselves in debt for material goods that don't really mean that much to them, and as such sticks with a job that means nothing because of the financial security it provides.

Tonight's posting will be full of self-loathing.

The first thing that I want to state, the main thing that I want to put up in front of cyberspace and God, is that tonight my sister gave birth to her daughter prematurely. The baby is healthy, in theory, but under 6 pounds.

I want to state that separately because any of the circumstances or facts that follow this should be recognized as being being secondary to the fact that above all other things in my life, I wish health and good luck for my sister and her baby. My own neurosis and drama are secondary in my heart and mind.

I got the news as I was leaving a local bar, where I'd been playing pool with two friends from work, one of whom is the lady friend who has been the subject of quite a few posts over the past year or so, but who is, ultimately, a platonic friend.

My mom called, but I missed the call. I called her back and she delivered the news about the premature birth. She'd been planning on flying over the ocean to see my sister in about a month, but changed her flight plans to this Saturday to reflect the changing situation.

Before I called my mother, before I knew the news, I'd decided that I'd bop on over to sushi joint that's near my apartment for some food and that One More Beer that would push me from buzzed to drunk. So I spoke to my mom in the parking lot of the sushi joint, as I paced around my car and kicked at the bumper. I held back the tears. I decided that I'd go ahead into the sushi place because hey, I was still hungry and that extra beer would sit well now. But I'd forgotten that this sushi place turns into a bit of a nightspot after 7 PM, and when I entered and went to the bar where I usually sat, the place was filled with 20 somethings and 30 somethings dressed nicely. The music was loud and the light was low and red, and I looked at the faces that turned to face me and all I saw was death, impersonal death.

In a 7 hour time difference from where I am, somewhere across the ocean, my little niece is in intensive care. And I, I walked into some random restaurant seeking comfort and saw only the blank faces of the dating scene.

And you know what? I spit on you. I spit on myself. I'd rather die alone than ever identify with your vacant faces. Fuck you all. Fuck your casual sex. Fuck the emptiness that you feel with matches the emptiness that I feel. Eat shit and die.

And then I went back to my car and called the friend mentioned above, and she just shrugged me off. I cried a bit in the parking lot, feeling a little scared and very alone.

This is my life. My niece is born premature and I have no one to talk to and nowhere to go.

God, I get the hint. I fucked up. This is my punishment for being antisocial and curmudgeonly and God, I want you to know that I accept your judgment, even though I don't accept you.

And then I got home and there was a text message from the friend I'd called, telling me that everything would be OK and that she was there for me. And as I read this, I suddenly remembered the boozy argument I'd made to her earlier in the night, giving her shit about her boyfriend, a man of whom I am obviously jealous.

And that's so me, you know? I give my friends shit, and I tear them down in my mind, never realizing the shit that I've given them, and yet they are there for me.

I spit on myself. I spit on myself. God, please let my niece be OK. God, please.

Why is it that I have my clearest thoughts about lifeat night, late at night, when I'm ready to go to bed or am already in bed? It's so fucking frustrating. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that I'm at work during the day and my mind is on other things, and even on the weekend I'm out and about doing errands.

I really need to figure out a way to consistently give myself some quiet thought time during the day.