keep the peasants on anti-depressants

i have to remember to carry my camera with me at all times. or ever. i keep seeing photo ops and kicking myself; funny signs mostly. today it wasn't raining exactly but the potential was there, and it was cloudy and cool and foggy. we're on the forty-fifth floor of one of the skyscrapers downtown—your ears pop twice in the elevator on the way up, and on a clear day you can see into tennessee; though the days have been hazy lately. to the north of us is the bank of america building, probably even taller than we are, narrow and phallic with a spire on top. and today out the windows to the north all you saw was cool gray fog and the very tip-top of the building floating in it, like something out of mary poppins, like a castle in the air.

also i would take a picture of the little robot-looking guy i built out of the binder clips that i take off the documents that i get. he's cute. he watches me from the top of my monitor, arms upraised in victory or joy, and keeps me company.

i've been bringing in my ipod. i hooked kansas up with a bunch of music last week, and yoinked some of hers at the same time. among her collection (almost 100% from m., which is probably at least 50% from me) was the audiobook of america: the book (a citizen's guide to democracy inaction) which jon stewart, stephen colbert, ed helms, samantha bee, et al. all read, and it is SO FUCKING FUNNY. please download it now and never stop laughing.

today i've been listening to music instead. i had sylvie lewis's "by heart" in my head, and thankfully i'd put it on the ipod, so there was an itch scratched. and now i found m.'s playlist through shared music on itunes, and i'm listening to "looking at the world from the bottom of a well," that soul coughing song (or mike-doughty, -former-lead-singer-of-soul-coughing song) that was on the radio maybe a year ago; i remember it when i came up to visit silentfire last summer, and i forgot about it and never found it. i'm totally stealing it from him later. that and other things. as of 9:07 a.m today my hard drive is in atlanta! being scanned! i do not know why! it's not scheduled for delivery until tomorrow (WHO HAS THAT KIND OF TIME?) but when it gets here i intend to embark on an orgy of media downloading. i've been neglecting the music blogs. and there's ENTOURAGE to watch. JEREMY PIVEN. random CAPSLOCK.

speaking of waiting for hardware, i've been obsessively loading and re-loading the apple macbook webpage, building and re-building my dream laptop. i won't be buying one until the end of the year though, whenever they release leopard (10.5, the new OS), and by which time they should have ironed out whatever problems they might be having with the new intel chips. being an early adopter is lots of fun, but it's a lot safer to wait for the second generation, when all the kinks have had a chance to be discovered and worked out. BUT I WANT ONE SO BAD OMFG. ezekiel is still gamely plugging along, and he'll be a lot happier when he's got a new external hard drive to share his burdens, but i want PORTABILITY and 1GB OF RAM and a 2-GHZ PROCESSOR and a SUPERDRIVE. it's called a SUPERDRIVE for fuck's sake. plus—and this is the important part—they are SO SHINY. *magpies like whoa*

have you seen ask a ninja: special delivery: "what is podcasting?"? if not, WHY NOT?

true story: when i have a question about what client a particular document belongs to, sometimes i just want to stick it in the attorney's box with a post-it note that says "wtf?" theory: that would not be particularly well-received. or, um. professional. damn.

the wimbledon update you have not been waiting for: it rained all day yesterday and no matches were finished; federer had won the first set of his match before they pulled them off the court, and today he came back and beat richard gasquet in straight sets (that's three sets) in a total of 72 MINUTES. when matches on the women's side only take sixty minutes or so, it's considered a BLOWOUT; women only play best of three. in the second set gasquet was serving at 81% (john macenroe always suggests 65% as a comfortable first-serve percentage to maintain for holding serve) and was broken twice. federer's winners-to-errors was 35-12. gasquet's: 7-11. poor, poor richard gasquet. PWNED. \o/ i have to remember to tivo these matches, or i'll only get to watch on the weekends again.

at the moment i've got the LIVE SCOREBOARD window open, which is awesome. it's just like having my finger on the pulse! right now i can tell you tim henman and robin soderling are 2-2 in the fifth set, and agassi lost the first set of his match with boris pashanski but is now up 3-1 in the second. paul-henri mathieu and mark philippoussis have split the first two sets and are on-serve in the third. i could be listening to their radio broadcast, but i think it involves downloading a program, and i want to clear it with m. first. i don't really fancy being the one to download something strange and destroy the computer/server/office/world/etc. paranoia! it's my friend!

i drove myself to work today—m. had a doctor's appointment and a. was getting picked up by the other partner to meet someone somewhere for something, so i drove his car in, his little red sports car, and parked in his primo parking spot, and bought myself a bagel and a coffee from the dunkin' donuts on the way in. TUESDAY MORNING WINS.

i came in and drank my coffee and started WORKING, but lost interest and the will to live after everything was sorted. i don't mind sorting or entering data, but i really dislike the actual act of filing. part of the problem is location: i'm down the hall from the file room.

THINGS THAT WOULD BE BETTER IF I WERE LOCATED PERMANENTLY IN THE FILE ROOM INSTEAD OF DOWN THE HALL FROM IT:

1. there would be one person actually in charge of the files. this would mean an actual sign-out system, meaning that (in theory) no file would ever be lost, because there would be a record of where it was supposed to be at any given moment.


2. since only one person would be in charge of the files, only one person would be putting them BACK, meaning they would always be put back in the proper place, and in the proper ORDER.


3. wow, would my job be easier. at the moment i'm sorting in my cube and then bringing the papers down the file room to file away; and i could sort in the file room, okay, that works for correspondence; but pleadings get indexed in the database and then their index gets printed and put with the file, so i'm hauling files back and forth from the file room anytime i want to file pleadings. it is, as the kids say, a motherfucking pain in the ass.

the problem is that there's really no room for a desk, let alone a work station, in the file room as the file room stands now. i'd personally be willing to be a little cramped; it'd be less private than even my cube is right now, but it would be worth it. I MIGHT GET THE FILING DONE FASTER, FOR ONE THING. the other day i had the brilliant idea that if i just had a laptop in there, i could file pleadings with no problem—update the database, print to the copier, boom. it would almost be worth it to stand the whole time. almost. we'll have to talk about it more. oh, and the current thinking is that when they hire a new secretary, they'll put her (because of course it'll be a her; *insert feminist rant of your choice here*) in my cube and move me down to the other end of the office entirely. THAT WOULD BE DECIDEDLY WORSE.

my dad just sent out an email: apparently my parents and sister are coming into town this weekend. yay? i mean—YAY. i mean.

question: what, exactly are my long-term goals? more to the point: WHY IS NO ONE KICKING MY ASS ABOUT GRADUATE SCHOOL. come on, people! i rely on you for this sort of thing! god knows i'm not about to do it. and it just struck me the other day—i've never gone anywhere there wasn't a family member already. except for cambridge. i want to do cambridge again. i mean, maybe not cambridge (i mean, HELLO, CAMBRIDGE, I WOULD DO THAT IN A HEARTBEAT) per se, but just strike out and stand on my own two feet. i don't know, i go back and forth between wanting to curl up alone and hide from the world at large, and wanting . . . i don't know. train of thought off the rails; come back later. apathy keeps me from doing most things, and laziness keeps me from doing the others. somebody find me a graduate-school application. to australia. to finland. to england. if i'm going to get rejected and laughed out of the admissions halls, i ought to aim high. what's a fear of failure until it's justified anyway?

do you feel unread things? books and fic? when i'm in the middle of a book or story i really like, i read it until it's way too late to hope for a good night's sleep, sometimes all night; i read snatches in the morning, in the three minutes i don't really have between eating breakfast and putting in my contacts and running out the door. i've got an open fic on my desktop at home right now, the last quarter of an epic starsky & hutch fic (for "starsky & hutch" insert your favorite fandom or book of the moment) that i tore myself away from at one-thirty this morning because seven a.m. comes so early and it's hard enough getting out of bed; today i manfully restrained myself from sitting down and reading just a little more, a few minutes more, but it's been tugging at me all day.

is this what a compulsion is? i find human experience fascinating, the experiences and the descriptions thereof, because so often it's hard to recognize a feeling with the common description of it, because that's not how you would have described it. you can't relate to the metaphor. and how does description influence experience? we recognize the metaphor, we map it onto our own feelings; there's a norming process in there, a consensus in the way we lump a bunch of feelings together under the heading of pain or love or psychosis, drawing straight lines through the scattered plot points of people; and it's a necessary thing, because we need a common language or nobody will ever understand where anybody else is coming from. we group things together and give them names. that's what we DO. we are namers of parts and synthesizers into wholes. so sometimes we don't know we have problems (or "problems") because all we know is ourselves; we know what we feel and what other people and science and psychology tells us, and sometimes it takes an outsider with an understanding of the fundamentals behind the metaphors to tie the two together.

i remember merryish once posting about therapy, and something stuck with me: that you can get to a point where you know your problems and how to solve them, but can't do it yourself. and that made me THINK, you know, that was an eye-opener, and it's something i have to remember all over again periodically. i know i sometimes demand a lot of people, i have little patience for their faults, i don't give them a lot of slack, and i always try to turn it around and make sure i'm being just as hard on myself and expecting others to do the same.

uh, i think these two issues are unrelated, but um. i think maybe i was trying to tie them together with my own theories about and issues with independence and privacy and impatience with the failings of myself and others. i'm still working on it.

update to the wimbledon update you weren't waiting for in the first place: agassi won his match in four and tim henman won his in five. AWESOME.