they erected elaborate ceremonial buildings and prodigious numbers of forts

i've been obsessively tracking my hard drive. it arrived in atlanta on tuesday and was scheduled for delivery yesterday, but yesterday came and went with no change in its "in transit" status. how long can it take a package to cruise around atlanta before it has to wind up at its destination? it didn't come, and i was dejected; but i came in this morning to find it sitting on my chair! huzzah! let the downloading begin!

we prefer to be called BUCCANEER-AMERICANS kthx.

my tooth hurts. it hurt all day yesterday, all night, and into today again. I DO NOT KNOW WHY. is this is an honest-to-god TOOTHACHE? if so, i totally veto that. i've never had a cavity before and i hadn't really intended to start now. i was just bragging about my great teeth the other day! and i was getting ready to make a dentist appointment; my mother called to tell me they'd called to confirm the appointment i'd made when i was there six months ago. i think my insurance kicks in next week, thirty days after my start date, and i'll have everything cleaned and sorted out. in the meantime, i've found advil and am applying it to the problem. ow. OW.

speaking of insurance, it's probably time for an eye exam; if my prescription hasn't changed and i don't need extra contacts, i'm getting a new pair of glasses. or two. i've had my current pair since some time in high school, for six or eight years. i'm gong to drag someone along to help me pick them out. i wanna be one of the COOL KIDS.

i am constantly flummoxed by the sheer volume of PAPER in the office. i imagine it clumping and twisting together, reversing the pulping process, rejecting the added chemicals, photosynthesizing the light from the windows across the hall and putting down roots. whole forests springing up on the forty-fifth floor, and then on every floor below and above, in every office building in the city. i think: god, wouldn't this all be easier ONLINE?

most of the office isn't cold. all the rooms along the outside wall, they have western exposures and it's ninety degrees outside. i think the file room is even colder than my cubicle, it's hard to say, but it'll still be worth it to move in there. can i go today? is it now? when i go shopping (which i know i've been saying for the past . . . four weeks, but i mean it every time) i'm looking for PANTS and CLOSED-TOE SHOES and SWEATERS. it's summer, it's ninety degrees out and sixty-five in the office. i feel like bundling up every time i go to work and thawing out when i leave. somewhere, something is inefficient.

ahhhhhh i just drank a cup of coffee to warm up (mission: accomplished) and i think that was VERY BAD for my tooth, which had just eased off into tenuous non-pain. either that or the pills have worn off. or BOTH. *whimpers*

last night i came home and said hi to k. and went upstairs and took a nap. when i came downstairs an hour and a half later, everyone was just finishing dinner, including my nephews n. and e., here for the babysitting; a. was like, you're home! and i was like, "i . . . never left!" and everyone was really confused. we were going to watch kiss, kiss, bang, bang when the kids left, but the kids didn't leave until LATE, too late to start watching a movie on a school night, so i huddled under the covers upstairs feeling pathetic in the tooth area and reading about the neurology of sports.

i'm getting to the point where less and less of the neurology i read is really new to me, since a lot of it is the basics, repeated, but the case studies are FASCINATING. i could read case studies all day long.

i was going to write about being hungry before, but then i went to lunch; i was going to bitch about being cold, but i'm not at the moment. as with the earth's magnetic poles, you can expect periodic reversals.

we're having CAKE later. people need to stop having birthdays in this office, because i keep eating CAKE.

they're starting a trial step class on mondays at the gym this month, one i PRAY they keep on permanently, meaning there'll be THREE step classes a week on the calendar. oh god, please. i can't handle the damn machines (i don't even like their elliptical bikes; if i have to resort to the treadmill, i think i'm going to be very unhappy) but i also can't handle cardio just two days a week. argh.

today is step day, though! thursdays are so great. tonight i'll go to step and then shower at the gym and walk over to piedmont park to join k. and her friends for SCREEN ON THE GREEN. they're showing willie wonka and the chocolate factory. k.'s going off to college in august, and in the meantime she's hanging out with all her friends every second she can, and i remember that. but she'll make friends when she gets to school; i couldn't say the same for me.

at lunch today in the food court area closest to our office there was a brass band playing traditional favorites. i kid you not! they made it pretty difficult to read, i can tell you that much. homicide fit easily in my bag for ferrying back and forth from work to home, but guns, germs, and steel is a little too big; so i've got two books going now, an office book that i keep in the filing cabinet and haul out at lunchtime, and an at-home book. or three. it's time, it's time. find me my reading lists, venture out into the world.

a multi-channel, twenty-four-hour-a-day, infotastic clusterfuck

it turns out i can work, but only in, like, five-minute bursts. i gear myself up for productivity, ask a question, file something, stick something in a pile, and then lose the will to live. check the scores at wimbledon, refresh my gmail inbox (empty. *cries*), gear myself up for productivity; process repeats.

THERE ARE FILES EVERYWHERE. HALF OF THEM ARE NOT WHERE THEY SHOULD BE AND NO ONE KNOWS WHERE THEY ARE. WHEN CAN I BE PETTY DICTATOR OF THE FILE ROOM, BECAUSE NOW COULD NOT BE TOO SOON.

when i get to be petty dictator of the file room, i will:

1. institute a SIGN-OUT policy. at henderson they had out-guides specially designed for file rooms. you take a file, you put your name and the file name and the date on the out-guide, and you put the out-guide where the file should be. then when someone goes looking for the file (or, for example, when i want to FILE SOMETHING IN THE FILE) there's no sense of despair and loss and bewilderment when the file isn't there. because we'll know where it is! or at least we'll know the person responsible for knowing where it is and then we'll hang them upside-down by their toes until they cough it up. i mean—we'll ask them for it. nicely.


2. organize the damn drawers. some of them don't have letters on them telling you what files are in them, which isn't a terrifically big problem, once you get familiar with it, but still annoying. and oh, the files inside. all mixed up. not that cases are usually mixed together, but when there's more than one case for a given client? ANYTHING GOES.


3. hey, maybe get some filing done. now that i won't have to trail back and forth from file room to cubicle to file room to cubicle etc. etc. ad infinitum in order to find out what client a document belongs to, if the file exists, which case i'm looking for. it's maybe fifteen feet from my doorway to the file-room doorway, but it could be TWELVE PARSECS considering how annoying it is.


4. form a secret police force, terrorize my subjects, incarcerate and torture all who resist, and brutally execute my competition. then i will blind everyone with science!


5. ha, ha! just kidding! no incarcerations or torture in the file room! we'll skip straight to the executions.

. . . have i talked about potentially infinite recursion in legalese? no? maybe some other time.