Kablammo!

Between late August 2004 and mid-July 2005, I wore my contact lenses each and every day and went through less than 8 ounces of saline solution. I know that because one of the first things I did after my plane landed and I learned my baggage was 4000 miles away was to buy a bottle of saline solution. The bottle was 8 ounces, and when I went back home some eleven months later I hadn’t used it all up.

In contrast, over the past two months or thereabouts I’ve used over 24 ounces of saline solution, and I haven’t even been wearing contacts every day of that time.

In the past week I’ve learned a couple of neatly complementary things:

1. There’s more to life than just work.

   I never really expected to be in a position to learn this, given my track record of being a lazy underacheiving slacker in everything I do, but that so-far-steady paycheck I’ve been getting for a little while now makes me feel like I should be earning it, and not just because if I’m not earning it it will dry up pretty quick.

   At my current employment status and pay scale ranking and whatnot, I’m legally barred from taking any unpaid overtime. Shockingly (to me at least), there have been times already when I’ve wished that weren’t so because I just know I could get a lot done if I stayed an extra hour or two that day. And while it does feel great to get the fuck out of the office at the end of the day, especially when you’ve used what meager annual leave you’ve collected to get yourself a 3-day weekend, I’ve never been tempted to leave early, even though I could probably get away with it. I mean, that would just be stealing.

   And anyway, more often than not the only thing I do once I leave for the day is to go back to my apartment, watch a little teevee, and eat dinner before going to bed and wishing I felt like doing some cleaning or working on one of one of my pet projects I keep meaning to begin and/or finish (see “slacker”, above).

   Often, the high point of my day is pressing Ctrl– to insert a soft hyphen in a word, so I can use justified text without the spacing being all wiggy. Nobody has complained, so I intend to keep it up.

2. There’s more to life than just drinking and debauchery.

   The punchline to point #1 above is that this past week-end gave me some perspective on things. I got together with a bunch of friends and had time enough and the right surroundings where I could just fucking relax and spend several hundred dollars on alcohol and various related expenditures. Silly or petty as it might be, I felt reminded of the reason I’ve been doing all that work in the first place. I don’t mind doing it, but I’m not doing it for its own sake.

   Of course, anything can be taken to excess. And if you’re running on five hours of sleep over the past two nights, and you know damn well you have to go to work tomorrow, maybe you should take it easy that day instead of spending another day at the Tiki bar downing oyster shots and daquiris. Maybe you should relax and maybe get some rest instead of making sure you’re fit for nothing but falling comatose in the passenger seat next to your friend who’s going to drive your wretched corpse three hours closer to home.

   Because part of that whole job-responsibilities thing includes showing up in a condition where you can actually, you know work.

So what ended up happening was that on Monday I actually felt pretty good, until I spent 3 hours in a very very air-conditioned room. If I hadn’t already been overtired I’m sure it wouldn’t have done anything, but then yesterday I woke up with a head cold and feeling like shit. I made my way to work, albeit later than usual, and finished up the document I’d been working on for a while. I submitted the draft to my supervisor, who told me to take the rest of the day off.

Today I woke up feeling a good deal better, but certainly not 100% yet. I thought I was in good enough shape to get some work done, but I went downhill pretty fast and got sent home again after a few hours.

I fucking want to work, and it’s bugging me that I haven’t been able to, and it’s bugging me that I’m so worked up about it. That it’s entirely my own damn fault I got sick, though, is a beacon of hope. Because maybe, just maybe, next time I’ll learn from this.

Fuck I hope I feel better in the morning.

It’s a good thing I finally got my health insurance card, since this promises to be the kind of weekend where I might end up needing it.

Last night marked the first time since moving here that I’ve stumbled home drunk in the wee hours of the morning. I didn’t mind the interminable subway “Metro” ride, or the 15-minute walk from the station back to my apartment, because I was looking forward to getting a hot dog. I spent a year walking past a Statoil whenever I went anywhere (or came back), and I can say with confidence that Statoil’s hot dogs are incomparable; they’re veritable kings in the world of drunk-snacks.

There’s a 7-Eleven on the way to the Metro station, and of course it has one of those rather horrifying grease-coated cooker-thingies that’s usually bedecked with an array of tubular meats slowly rotating in their juices. But they didn’t have any, the fuckers. 3 in the morning on a Saturday night, and they were out of hot dogs? Come on.

I had to fall back to my standby option, the can of sour-cream-and-onion Pringles. Not as good as a hot dog, of course, but I’d forgotten how much more of the flavor-dust stuff they put on Pringles in America. European Pringles barely have any flavoring by comparison.

The margins of victory in long races can be sickeningly slim. In the 1987 Tour de France, for example, the difference between the first and second place finishers was 40 seconds. Mind you, the winning time was over 115 hours. That means the runner-up was, overall, slower than the victor by only 0.0096%, or one part in around 10400. That’s all it takes to become the first loser.

Anyway, Floyd Landis’s agent should get a bonus for the wonderful PR job Floyd has gotten. Sure, it’s nice for him that he seems poised to win the Tour, but I knew his name before the race even started! Goddamn feel-good puff pieces. (Style section, I’m looking at you.) I hope the endorsement deals he’s sure to get don’t conflict too badly with his Mennonite upbringing.

Finally, it’s interesting that “peloton“, a French loanword used in cycling, is also a word in Finnish, where it has a completely different meaning. But the Finnish meaning, dauntless or fearless, could also, it seems, be applied to the peloton.

Around seven months ago I participated in a blog-meme that I saw in this blog post right here the day before and decided to emulate. Two days later, “Brian” made a meta-meme post, which included among other things a shitload of links to instances of the meme that had popped up in the three weeks since some guy initially came up with it. My blog was among those linked to.

I bring this up now because today I found out I’d had a visitor linked to from “Brian’s” blog. In the seven months that link has (presumably) been there in his blog post, nobody had (apparently) clicked it! Also, it seems that’s the only link to here from a blog, ever. I don’t know whether to be amused or saddened by that, so I guess I’ll just remain indifferent.

However, there are a couple things I mentioned in that post that I’d like to revisit:

5. I still have yet to finish any of those books. I did, however, recently finish the autobiography of a quadriplegic recovering alcoholic.

9. As it turns out, the name of that book is The Daddy Decision, and it has a solid five-star user rating on Amazon. So it must be a great book!

Dude:

I can’t think of a better way to retire than to give Materazzi a devastating headbutt to the sternum and be ejected from the final game of the World Cup in overtime. That moment will be talked about for decades at the very least.

It’s 9:40pm on July 4th, and I’m just waiting for my laundry to finish so I can go to bed.

I’m not sure I even recognize myself.

You know all those stories about people drowning in newspaper, figuratively speaking? Sure, you can blame it on the hoarding.

But I blame it on the newspapers. Seriously, do they need to print quite so much all the time?

Il pleut Il pleut
Il fait beau
Il fait du soleil
Il est tôt
Il se fait tard
Il
Il
Il
toujours Il
Toujours Il qui pleut et qui neige
Toujours Il qui fait du soleil
Toujours Il
Pourquoi pas Elle
Jamais Elle
Pourtant Elle aussi
souvent se fait belle!