Rage cage in 2021

Eh. I’m permanently angry. I am also lost. This is the first technical day of summer break (and it’s really the last summer break, since work starts Tuesday) and I feel so lost. So weirdly empty. It’s the sudden lack of structure, I know. I feel this way every time something big changes. Every summer is like this. I maybe don’t like school, but I’m okay at it, and I must really like the routine. Now I have to make new ones.

People have those weird going to work rituals. And of course, happy hour, which is neither happy nor an hour, but I don’t really drink so whatevs. It’s all a system we make ourselves to make the routines of life bearable. I think we try to create our own surprises. But sometimes the trouble is we made the surprise, so we end up…hating the surprise…because it isn’t. I mean, you can only get so far into planning a Wednesday night self care thing without knowing what the fuck you’re going to do. You can’t just chuck $50 into the air and get a surprise. (But someone should make that service, and don’t say subscription boxes, because they don’t arrive right when you need the boost.)

I’m a little irritable right now because I helped out a work supervisor with some clients she couldn’t get to because she went out of state (and our policy with covid is if you go out of state, you have to get a test and quarantine until it’s negative.) She knew all that and she knew her schedule and she managed to drop the ball all over the new guy and so I sacrificed 8 hours in the middle of the last week (worst week for making hours in a DVR/DDA csa) and now I am exactly - you guessed it - 8 hours behind. I have to make them up tomorrow. Because May is a short month because Memorial Day everything is closed.

I’ve been knitting a lot and watching a lot of shitty movies. I’m on my fourth corner-to-corner blankie (but they aren’t very big, they’re cat mat size) and I’ve seen a bunch of shitty flicks, but I didn’t expect to enjoy the Happytime Murders, but I did. Caveat emptor, though: it’s super crude and raunchy. As in, silly string cum. For minutes. It’s like Who Framed Roger Rabbit had a porno baby with Mel Brooks. That bad. But also really fun, so if there’re no kids anywhere in your block radius, it’s a good movie.

I am trying to think of things I can do for myself to celebrate baby’s first real paycheck. I need a pair of navy slacks and some khaki ones that aren’t capris (why are women’s pants so short???) I’m not even tall, five six, and half the damn things end up halfway up my shins and not at my ankles. And they’re not petite. And of course you can’t try shit on right now.

So, khaki slacks and navy slacks. Then I need a computer that has more than 4G ram, because this one is moribund. Sure, he works, but he can’t play online games, he can’t run some PC games, and every frickin Windows update cripples him for days until I find a workaround or a patch or Windows releases a fucking patch because the world is screaming because everyone’s cheap ass COVID laptop just died. I think this one is upgradeable, and I have the upgrade ram, so honestly I just need it put in. I asked Dick Face, but he says my motherboard is weirdly fused in place inside the casing, and I kind of believe him, because it’s an ultra-slim lappy, and they had to get that case size down somehow, and that’s pretty believable. He doesn’t want to risk breaking the components to get to the memory slots, so fine, I’ll take it to someone who’s either braver and better insured (bitch better have my money) or I’ll just buy a new one and give this one to the kids (who will want to play games with it…so I’d have to have it upgraded anyhow.) Speaking of fucking insurance, that’s a bill I have to pay on the first.

Mmph. Thinking of the shit I need to do makes me anxious to go do it, and I can’t right now, because I haven’t been paid, because I don’t start til the first. Which makes me irritable because it is not the first RIGHT NOW and I want to get on with this.

In the meantime, I need a healthy dose of cheap distraction. Why oh why is the library closed? There’s no other real place to go and hang out for six hours and not feel like a slug (or drink so much coffee you unexpectedly have to run for the loo.) I need that damn space back, world.

I kind of have a romancey-trope idea floating around in here (girl and the guy she falsely accused of a crime) and I’m thinking about writing it out a way and seeing if it catches on with my head. I like the tension of her thinking he’s slime and him not knowing she lied (but she lied because a friend lied to her, so of course happy ending is possible) but I’m sure there are ten million Harlequin romances with the same trite plot, so should I even bother with one more? And then again, I haven’t written it before, so it’s fun for ME, and I haven’t read it, either, but I don’t read a lot of mass market romance fiction, except Victoria Dahl and Jennifer Crusie. (And sometimes Mary Kay Andrews, but that’s Southern chick lit - it isn’t all about the romance.) I’ve found that the likelihood of the author having taught creative writing at a major university is pretty much proportionate to my enjoyment of the romance novel. I have thrown a lot of them at the wall. I remember one, by Cherry Adair, that I actually eviscerated in a blog post once as how NOT to excite an audience. It involved organ transplants. It was incredibly not romantic. It was actually horribly imbecilic. I mean, one minute, these two randos are running from organ thieves, and the next they’re banging on a gurney? Hello? Did they get your brains??

Dinner’s ready, I hear. It’s pulled pork I made yesterday, because the pork roast for the eggroll casserole was about three times too big for one dish.