I had a goal in mind before leaving on the three-day cruise last week: I wanted to read one whole book. I feel like I’ve been on a slow descent to nothingness in terms of personal likes, things I like to do, etc. My life had been turning into a steady cycle of “wake up tired, go to class, go to work, come home at night, tired, try to study until late, sleep very little, repeat”. It was depressing, I’m not going to pretend any of that was working for me. The thing about cycles like that is that they remove all need to think, and when you don’t think much, you don’t think much about what’s missing and how you have not learned anything or read anything on your own time that didn’t involve an assignment or a work project. All of my life revolved around meeting the needs of professors and bosses, which left little time to think about how my life had turned into one of those cautionary tales on how a person can lose their spirit little by little–
then wake up one morning too sad to keep going and too tired to fight to get it back.
But let’s not get too depressed here, this is more about how I did meet my goal of reading that one book during the cruise, as well as how I managed to practically sleep through the entire cruise. Well, except for this one moment:
Yeah, and after that I went back to the cabin to sleep and read – which brings me to the point where I laughed so hard I thought I’d never catch my breath in time to read exactly what was causing my laughing fit to my very confused cabin-mate.
You’ll have to read Survivor [Chuck Palahniuk] yourself, but here’s the quote [I'm including extra text so that maybe you'll get a laugh out of it as well, as opposed to a gigantic "?!" and the impression that I'm a sadistic, homicidal nut]:
The perfume and hair spray were from spraying the roses, but I can’t tell her that.
“The other thing is he had chipped red nail polish on his fingernails”
It was red spray paint from me touching up the roses.
“And he’s a terrible dancer.”
Right now, me getting killed would be redundant.
“And his teeth are weird, not rotten, but crooked and little.”
You could stab a knife right through my heart and you’d be too late.
“And he has these gross little monkey hands.”
Right now, getting killed would be a breath of spring.
“That’s supposed to mean he has a little wiener d*ck.”
If Fertility keeps talking, my caseworker will have one less client in the morning.
“And he’s not obese,” Fertility says, “he’s not a whale, but he’s too fat for me.”
In case there’s a sniper outside, I open the blinds and stand my gross obese body in the window. Please, anybody with a rifle and a scope. Shoot me right here. Right in my big fat heart. Right in my little wiener.
“He’s not anything like you,” Fertility says.
Oh. I think she’d be surprised how much we’re alike.
And today, it’s back to the office! And to Outlook outages that prevented me from feeling any sense of completion. I’m taking Violet home with me tonight, I’m so glad I have a job I can do while I empty the fridge out of whatever rancid-smelling leftovers my roommate left in there to die a second death while she relaxes on a beach somewhere in Puerto Rico…
For the record, I’m not bitter – that was actually about how grateful I am for my job [note to self: work on correctly portraying gratefulness via written word, it will reduce the number of disclaimers per blog entry].
G’day!
