Ultramundane: It’s Just Not Natural

I need a better list.

The list I use at work has fifty items on it. Not all of them are my to-do items, naturally, but it kind of feels like it. Because they’re on my list.

So I sometimes maintain a second list. Thatt works, as long as I can’t see the first list too. Because if I put them together in the same place, then my brain adds up both lists together—even though it’s not supposed to—and then shits its pants. (Its metaphorical pants, thankfully. Otherwise ‘Change Underpants’ would need to go on the list that I’m not supposed to look at…and that’s a vicious cycle just waiting to happen.)

This would all be a lot less difficult if I were doing it without the pounding headache.

And then, of course, these are only my work lists. I have personal lists in short term, long term, shopping, cooking, and downloading flavors. I am slowly getting to the point where I need a list of my lists. Which will be fine, because the pile of lists is actually a pretty comfortable place to just sit and play World of Warcraft instead.

The Rickroll is the Wet Willy for people who aren’t in the same room as each other. Sloppy in your ears and rather dated. And it’s flippin’ everywhere today. I suppose it could be worse—this year’s omnipresent April Fool’s joke could have been “two girls one cup.” *shudder*

Of course, on the flip side of pop music memetics, I was getting an expensive sandwich at a nearby store when Mariah Carey came on the radio. I don’t know if it was just a bad speaker or if the tuning wasn’t quite right, or if I am just now permanently ruined; but I swear she was singing it in Bulgarian.

Everybody has been packing their stuff into boxes. Awfully dusty in the office today. That must be why I’m tearing up.

At least I haven’t thrown up yet. Maybe it’s good that I haven’t had lunch yet.

I’m not even the one who’s leaving, but man am I feeling disconnected right now.

Standing in the kitchen, eating a piece of bread you made yourself (in the bread machine) with the compound butter you mixed yourself from fresh herbs, while you wait for the baked red-and-wild rice mix and brussels sprouts to finish…at times like that it’s easy to fantasize about being the next great cooking celebrity. Launching my own cookbook…making up credentials for the Food Network…planning my next episode…

Getting take-out for the next several nights afterwards is kind of like a commercial break.

An extended commercial break.

Six thousand pieces of mail in the last 12 hours. All bounce messages and spam notifications from a spammer spoofing my domain in their return address. There is no circle of hell harsh enough for the hate I have for spammers.

I hope my iPhone isn’t trying to download them all.  I may cry.

Probably you should IM me today if you want me to respond.

I was having the hardest time deciding between the two. Did I feel more racist or sexist today? Everything else was pretty easy. Bonds, Casinos, Destroying a Historic Landmark so Hippies can do a Peace Dance on the Remains. But I hesitated on this last vote. The array of choices, printed months ago on the ballot before some of the longshot candidates had dropped out from lack of money or media attention or just because they had to go back and defend their current seats, taunted me. “You had options once,” those graying names said. “Now you have only two, and if you haven’t been paying attention, it feels more like one.”

I gripped my pen and made my mark. But in the moment before, I quietly said, “Sorry, Dennis.”

I hate it when my mood doesn’t match the weather. It’s clear and blue for the first day in a week and I’m simply not interested in cheering up. Of course, I wasn’t much better when it was wet outside either.

My White Whine for the day: for the first time in my life I make too much money to receive the White House’s economic incentive package.

There are far worse things to happen to a person, I realize.

What I thought was a pimple yesterday turned into little raised bumps all over by the end of the evening. Yay for skin rashes! I’ve gotten these before so I’m not apt to panic about them, but it does mean taking the bright pink antihistamines. Which leads to uncontrolled napping. Which is generally frowned on at work.

Of course, the morning I have splotchy, red skin is the day they want to take a photo of the Marketing team. It’s been a bad day. Please don’t take a picture.

But an intellectual query posed by a friend—do white people get hives more often than black people?—lead me to try a simple search for “African-American and hives.” Didn’t find the answer. Mostly I got a lot of results about bees.

So maybe these aren’t hives…maybe it’s yellow fever. Who can say.

Maybe I’ll go home and play Super Mario Galaxy and listen to some indie rock until I pass out.