Work Diary, 1/30/04

Work Diary, 1/30/04

1. I'm sick. My head feels like it's been deflated twice-over and I
woke up this morning with a cone of dried snot in my left nostril.
Gross, yes, but there it is.

2. During her evaluation, one of my employees told me she admires my
professionalism. Afterwards, I stuffed two Kleenex up my nose and
paraded up and down the front of the room while our unit met in the
conference room. Everyone knows I'm sick, which is how I got away with
it, but obviously there's a much deeper reason behind my behavior. I'd
like to say it has something to do with being mysterious but, really,
it's just me being a class-clown at age thirty-five. Pitiful. Also I'm
beginning to believe that people are attracted to emotional
black-holes. More on that later.

3. Generally speaking, decades are a good way to put your life in
perspective. Thirty years ago I was a tow-headed child who refused to
smile for the camera. Twenty years ago I was making pecan-tassies with
my aunt and thinking life was great. Ten years ago I was a teacher and
unhappy. The funnel is tightening, damn it, and I'm not sure what to do
before I become the clear drop of misery at the end.

4. Last night I went out dancing. I shouldn't have - I'm sick, after
all - but I'd been doing laundry and painting the guest room and
vacuuming and peeling toothpaste scum from the sink. I was busy because
my ex was having someone over for dinner, and I didn't want him to be
embarrassed by our normal state of affairs. Why did I do that? I know
what the self-help books would say - lack of self-respect,
compromising, etc. - but that's not how I feel. And maybe that's the
problem. Shouldn't I feel that way? Why don't I? Is it just me? Is
feeling that way unnatural?

5. Speaking of which: I haven't had sex in over a year. I could if I
wanted; the world is ripe for horny thirty-five year-olds with a car.
By "sex" I mean "making love," incidentally. I hate the term "making
love" because it brings to mind children fashioning genitalia out of
Play-Doh and giggling over the results, but really it's an appropriate
term. If you're having sex, and really in to it, you are making
something in a way, even if you never see the other person again. I
miss the intimacy and - perversely? - the smells of sex (what is a
stinky armpit between friends?). I have a lot to learn, don't I?

6. Each night I lay in my bed with a movie playing on the VCR that
never finishes. I've seen the beginnings of "Charlie's Angels" and
"Tomb Raider" and "Harry Potter, ETC," but I never make it to the end.
I fall asleep, my clock ticking and the next-door college boys
partying. I feel old, even if I'm not, and I remember being ten. I felt
old then, too. Life is some sort of misery, is it not?

7. Mostly I think life is just a means to an end. I'm pretty sure what
"the end" is: A brief moment of fear, a strange emptiness of light,
click. It's much like sprawling spread-eagle on a football field in the
dead of night, pondering space. You can imagine that first envelope of
nothing, and maybe the next, and the next and the next, but eventually
you're left with your own body, pressed up against the Earth, the grass
tickling your thighs and humming whatnots. Then it ends, because you
have to go to dinner, or your mother is calling, or two cars have met
disastrously just fifty feet from your head. It ends, because it has
to, and because life wouldn't have it any other way.

8. I am sick of endings, and what lies beneath our skin and on top of
it. I want to believe in something beyond the daily grind. All of it
seems like the end, in a way. It's too much.