Pickles & Dimes

Lately, I feel like a duck in a shooting gallery, grinding along the same path, getting shot at, having near-misses, getting shot at some more, getting hit. All following that same weekday monotonous path where jerks are trying to blow me away and my only view is of the duck’s butt in front of me. The same old same old, is, well…old.

The weekends are pretty fun, though.

To shake things up, I am breaking out of my introverted hermit shell and participating in five, count ‘em, five, social activites this month, most on weeknights, which goes against my moral principles. To some of you, that might be a typical Monday-Friday, but for me this is a major deal. One of my social engagements is going to meet Sassy Buster, whom I think I have managed to convince that I am not a stalker. She lives very close to where I work, and I am super exicted to see her and learn some basic knitting techniques if she can stop laughing at my crappy knitting long enough to help me.

I am also taking a 2-hour self-defense class this weekend from Jason’s brother’s martial arts business, which I am excited about if only for the reason that I can now defend myself whenever Jason tries to put me in a headlock or armbar or rear naked choke or whatever he feels compelled to do at least 328975698 times a day.

I’m going to have to be sure to stretch a lot beforehand though, because my hips have been completely out of whack lately, like the skeletal/joint equivalent of missing a buttonhole when buttoning a shirt. As such, I am reduced to performing my Old Lady Osteoporosis routine multiple times a day as I contort and bend and lean awkwardly to force my hip to painfully relocate itself into the proper socket position. I’m like Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon, all wild eyed and grimacing, trying to pop things back into place – only slightly more sane.

Speaking of sane, or a lack thereof, this work week has made it abundantly clear that it is going to suck. It showed right up on Monday morning, bright and early, and basically announced: Allo. You killed my father. Prepare to die. Today I came in early and worked for five hours without a break while encountering all kinds of epic cliches: a deadline that is technically two weeks away but the boss wants met today, a document that I spent 20 minutes editing only to open later to find it didn’t save any of my changes, 50,000 interruptions, and a printer that partially crumples the corner of every page. My boss and I are wild-eyed shrews taken to shrieking preemptively at people to get out why they still can when they come to ask us questions about non-deadline-related items. There is no Communications Department here today, only Zuul! To top it off, as I went to retrieve a printout from the Crumpling Machine, I stubbed my toe on a nearby table so hard it drew blood.

Forget Murphy’s Law: today is being governed by Murphy’s Angry Group of Vigilantes.