9 October 2003, 1:40 p.m.

Nuts and bolts

back & forth

Falling to bits: My life is not really falling to bits, but it looks more like an exploded rendering of a nineteenth century Parisian apartment house than it usually does. This is good -- we know from basic technical drawing, and the exploded view helps explain the relation of thing to other-thing better than seeing the whole entire. Nonetheless, as evidence of explosion:

I have left my job at THATSOFTWAREFIRM.com. I have signed the Massachusetts Mini-COBRA forms and dreamt of tiny poisonous snakes. Circumstances of leaving were this: I was losing all energy there, therefore my honest attempt to show up even remotely on-time was failing pretty miserably. Words were exchanged, after which I was given an opportunity to resign. Which I took gladly. It is nevertheless upsetting that full-time work has on so many occasions stood in the way of what I really wanted to be doing. Which is (at the moment) applying to Granulate School. In something.

I have not yet heard back from my favorite professor to whom I wrote on Tuesday requesting advice and a letter of recommendation. I am expecting the worst, including, "Who the hell are you?", "Why are you asking me, little man?" and "But Graduate School is for smart people, silly rabbit."

It is hard for me to clean my room. I keep thinking that I need to buy things in order to clean my room (e.g., a filing cabinet). No. I don't need to buy things in order to clean my room; I need to clean my room in order to clean my room. I need to do laundry more often. I also probably need to set up some kind of arbitrary chart and clean by the roll of a die, since I'm having trouble knowing where to start.

I set up a stop-gap job with one of my favorite arts organizations. They haven't called back. A week ago I was saying to myself that confidence was all I needed to get ahead in the world. It was working, then. Now I feel a bit like a clockwork tugboat, the kind with an anthropomorphic face, spoodling around a cold bathtub, dodging erratically to avoid the mountains of suds.

In the middle of all the angst about my future and money and my fitness to live and love and catch something I might be ashamed of, my parents call to say they're booking us a holiday in Cyprus. I'm panicking about it much as a long-imprisoned radical panicks when the revolutionaries have come to free him. There's the fact of spending two weeks with P and SJ. Then there's the (relatively minor) stress of renewing my passport and booking flights and so-on. And finally, there's the fact that I can barely afford to pay my rent at the moment, I have quit my job, and I am recklessly taking the opportunity to frolic Cleopatra-style. It's absurd. [Note on rent-payment stress: this is chiefly because our four-person co-op has been reduced to three for the past few months, and SLB, MH and I have been paying a third of the fictive fourth housemate's rent for that time. Does anybody know any vegetarians who want to live in *rl*ngt*n?]