I bet you write wonderful letters

There's this Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle called Desk Set which was striking all sorts of chords with me - about a research department that thinks it's getting replaced by an International Business Machine 'electronic brain' (though I'm not sure how much I'd mind getting replaced by an electronic brain). Uber-aggressive product placement aside, it's really cute - especially cute if you care about the human and organic organization of information, have to put up with arrogantly incompetent tech departments at your office, and if you're curious about how people thought about computers before they were called computers and before acronyms.

My point is that I'm going to stop calling them computers and start calling them electronic brains. Also that I love Spencer Tracy . . . and . . right. Finally, that arsing off in an office situation should be both allowed and encouraged.

Tonight we're seeing the Nutcracker, my not-so-surprising Christmas present to the F-word. Seeing the Nutcracker is going to be my annual Christmas tradition, no matter where I am in the world, and if that does mean Qatar on a lousy pay package I'll just make some Fisher Price action figures dance it out. A child's hallucination of a ballet to that pretty, pretty music - good God, I love the Russians. So pagan - the death and regeneration of the warrior prince! That's the true fucking spirit of Christmas and we all know it when we watch the Nutcracker . . . anyways, I hope that's the case, because I'm so not in the Christmas spirit at the moment. More in the weekend spirit. I wish I was allowed to drink at work.

Old Person River, He/She Just Keeps Rolling Along

Yesterday's workshop was so lousy on top of more or less zero sleep the night before that I tried to drown myself in a glass of water. I made the effort while the seminar leader tried to inform us "between" and "among" were the same thing, except "among" was for more than two (ex. "There was enmity between Livia Augusta and Tiberius" and, uh, "There was enmity among Livia Augusta, Tiberius, and Agrippinilla.")

We also 'learned' that while sexist language is unacceptable (ex. "If someone knocks, let him in") the natural migration of the third person plural to third person singular neutral (ex. "If someone knocks, let them in") is not yet acceptable English, so we should construct unnatural and silly sentences to get around the whole fucker (ex. "Let in those who knock.")

Fuck, man.

Besides the people from my office, with whom I had a bit of a laugh, I wanted to murder everyone there, especially this dick of a woman who kept using the word "oftentimes". What sort of piece of shit word is that. I think it's replaced "orientated" as the thing I hate the most about the English language.

Anyways, I went home early, had a good long nap, and thought about what I want from life exactly. The upshot is I'll go back to English teaching if I need to, and I won't complain for months. I liked it more than I like being a media/ad dollars prostitute/pimp and it's the only job I've ever had wherein I made a decent living working the 20 hours a week that let me write at will, and write fiction.

The truth is the apex of frustration I hit yesterday drove home to me that there are many things in my life that are not satisfying my essentially modest demands, and while I can't fix everything I can sure as fuck fix my time distribution and profession. I have to say there's a temptation to just scarper altogether right now. I don't think I can - as much as I need to take back control of my life I also need to go to see Elvis, and I need to get a bridesmaid dress for the wedding of the century, I need to max out the RRSPs before I leave, and many such things. But even thinking of scarpering right now makes the world that little bit more engaging.

Off to work.

Pisser, pure and simple

Holy shit, am I ever sick of myself today. I mean, this mood is awfully bad. Very victimized. Very world-is-out-to-get-me. And on the basis of no evidence at all. I have a lovely family but sometimes going home rubs me the wrong way, and I don't like the layer that gets revealed through the polishing.

Ag. Off to a fucking all-day seminar now, which is in no way contributing to an alleviation of this mood.

Don't call my momma, don't call the doctor, don't call the preacher

I am pathetic and gross, and I miss my boyfriend. Last night I dreamt Paris (or some other Haussmann-type city) was quickly drowning in a tide of lava, and even though we were only on the second floor I was having a hard time caring because it was so nice to see him. But somehow we caught a train out of there that got us to a town that was some sort of hybrid of Scilla and Scarborough, which assuredly wasn't flooded with lava. We couldn't decide what restaurant to go to based on their poshness and the amount of customers already inside - ended up going to a high-scale pizza joint where we had to go in the back door. I was bodychecking people out of my way to get to the small line-up at the front door.

There was more to it, but it's rude and I had to get that down in note form here to be ready for analysis on Wednesday. I feel that I won't write anything else today. I always pay more attention to my dreams and things here because I always think it's going to be relaxing and liesured but it never is. And things here are surprisingly busy even by normal standards. It was actually a struggle to find time to see J*Fish because there was lots of preparation and disassembly from all the Christmas music my mum has been organizing for her orchestra (the concert was quite nice) and the carol thing yesterday - painful, but gave me a chance to ponder the miracle of God being born a man.

That's the only bit of Christian belief that's joyful and beautiful to me instead of just being "Oh, Lord, You're so big, so awfully huge. We're all really impressed down here, I can tell you!" or pleas to not get sent to a hell that was depicted in such lurid, horrific detail over the past couple thousand years. The idea that you have a perfectly powerful god who's willing to go through all the pain of being human, as though to demonstrate to us that even when you get killed in a way that was brutal by brutal early Empire standards, things can't be as bad as they're cracked up to be. I can totally buy celebrating that at Christmas. It makes sense. The days start to get longer and we can drag ourselves from the depths of comparatively sunless, foodless despair and start thinking about a viable growing season again.

My point is, things here are fine but I'm glad I'm going back to Toronto tomorrow.