just another eight to five
Seven days a week, I get up at six o'clock. I drink the coffee that comes out of my fiancee's (now mine through right of possession) auto-timer coffeemaker that I set the night before, and I surf the web and check email. If it's a weekday, I go to watchmaking school, and weekends, it's work at the pharmacy. Fridays I work after school. In the evenings, I try to do something fun if I can. If nothing is cooking in Dale's tepid social life, he just hangs out at home, usually on the internet, looking for something that, to borrow an expression he absolutely hates, trips his trigger. I alternate between first and third person sometimes, just for something to do. It's nice, and gives me someone to blame when things go wrong.Over time, the seven day a week deal makes me tired, and unsure whether I am behind on sleep, or if it's world-weariness that's climbing me like a knotty vine. Melodrama would make that an easy choice, but my melodrama is pretty annoying even for me, much moreso, I would think, for anyone else.
I read once that there are more kinds of parasites than there are hosts in the world, more things that live in other things than there are other things. As one of the other things, I resent this a little. The things that live on and in me aren't bad for me until I'm too weak to fight them off any more, so for now, as per nature's plan to keep us alive till we can pass along our genes, I'm fine. For all I know I've got another fifty years in this meatsack. But working and going to school every day wears me out, and if I had to go on doing this for the rest of my life, I wouldn't want that life to go on indefinitely.
One nice thing about my job is that everybody's calling in sick all the time, so if I occasionally do that even when I'm not sick, it's no big deal, and they pay me when I'm not there as part of an elaborate "paid time off" system that is part of the union's deal with the company that owns the hospital. My income is basically guaranteed, as long as I usually show up, and they pay me well enough, so that's good. If I had just that job full time, I could live a normal life on what I made.
School is fine, though a little stuffy. It makes me remember things I forgot on purpose, memories of school. These memories, except that they are school-related, are totally unlike school in its current form. I just want to make that clear. I'm going now because I know what delayed gratification is about, and what kind of jobs are waitning for me if I don't go. Being indoors at a desk makes me remember things like the weather being perfect outside when being outside was forbidden, and an authority figure at the front of the class saying things I could not care less about, saying things I already knew, that the other kids were too stupid to get the first four times they were told. And I was the bad person for being impatient. Stupid people never get in trouble for being stupid. It's always the ones who know those guys are stupid. People like young Dale. The other kids would read --some of them the ones who were more popular than I was and (does one affect the other?) meaner-- stumbling, staggering, and tripping through the sentences, making that silent mouth-shape like a fish gasping right before it dies, until the teacher would say the word for them and they would move on. When it was my turn to read aloud, I would do it so quickly and articulately that the teacher would tell me to slow down so the stupid kids could move their fingers along with them crazy writin's.
JV and I are going to go over to a friend's. We decided at the last minute it was a little too cold for Elko speedway.
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