The past thirty-six hours have been rather unfortunate. After a call with one of my former managers at eight a.m. yesterday, I was encouraged to participate in another conference call today. Unfortunately, that call was scheduled for seven a.m. Even more unfortunately, I had already committed to seeing 'Capote' with Tammy and Vidya at 10pm last night. For those of you who didn't do the math, that means that I didn't go to bed until almost one, and had to wake up at 6:15 a.m. so that I could make it to the office in time to do the conference call. How lame is that the latest night I've planned in awhile perfectly coincided with the earliest meeting I've had in at least three months?
The good news, I guess, is that I don't have tuberculosis--and I was so looking forward to weakly coughing blood into my handkerchief, my translucent skin gleaming with ethereal beauty as I valiantly struggled to write one final novel before my death. Sigh. My only hope now is that a) bird flu will spread to humans, b) I will survive it, and c) it will miraculously make my skin translucent and ethereal. I somehow doubt that this chain of events will occur, but I remain hopeful.
I don't think I deserve to be hopeful, though, since I actually quoted Peter Gabriel in my post's title. Ew. I guess that's the price I pay for being so tired--it's not even eleven yet, and it's a Friday to boot, but I'm going to go to sleep after I finish this. I feel like my life needs a change, since I'm not really satisfied by much of anything right now, but any change that will come at work, at least, won't happen until after Christmas. And any change that I want to make in my personal life won't happen because I'm in too avoidant of a mood to actually settle things.
Despite the lack of sleep, work was good today. I had lunch with Alaska Matt, and while most of the conversation was work-related, it was still nice to see him. When I got home, Terry, Claudia and I decided to go out for dinner; Jackie met us out, and the four of us had a good time. We went to the Italian restaurant on California Ave. that Shedletsky likes to go to--despite his deplorable fashion sense, the kid has excellent taste in food. I had clams, which I love; one would think that, since I grew up in a completely landlocked county in the backwoods of nowhere, I wouldn't really like any kind of aquatic creatures, but I think they're the tastiest things in the world.
After dinner, we stopped briefly at the used bookstore next door, where I picked up some Agatha Christie novels. I browsed briefly through the publishing self-help section, and then realized how inherently sad it is to buy a second-hand book about getting one's novel published. All of those second-hand books were once owned by someone else, and the fact that they are sitting, dusty and forlorn, in the back of a dusty and forlorn used-bookstore echoes the lost dreams of their previous owners. When one sells or donates a book on getting one's novel published, that's essentially the end of the line--the place that we all reach occasionally when we realize that something we wanted to do very much will never really happen. It was that loss of innocence, that resignation (which some would call pragmatism) about one's fate that really bothered me. I left them on the shelf, so that my already-precarious dreams would not become infected by the same soul-rot that killed those earlier dreamers.
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