I like it when you blush

A Day in the Life (Since I haven’t had a real text post in forever)

I know that my life is fascinating to you all, and by that I mean I am entirely aware that no one is particularly interested in my daily activities, but a tugging sense of narcissism/solipsism and the fact that I have nothing else to do compel me to record them anyway.

5:20 a.m. My mother wakes me up. It is far too early. I only went to bed 5 hours ago and by “went to bed” I mean I passed out on top of my laptop while watching old episodes of The Office. I am a grown-up though, so I get up anyway. After several attempts, my clothes are on properly and we go to the gym.

I sharpen my athletic prowess and strengthen my already rippling muscles. This is false, but that’s what I like to imagine.

On the elliptical I listen to angry lesbian riot grrl music and watch the history channel. I watch the TV without sound, so I like to think that the music is the narration to the show. It mostly works. That stupid COOKIE DIET commercial comes on and I want to throw up. Sometimes I watch infomercials for dancercise programs as if they were narrative-based television shows. I get very involved.

I get ready and dressed for work and pack my lunch because once again, I am a grown-up. I drive to work and listen to bad radio, and try not to fall asleep while driving. Most of the time I am successful.

8:00 a.m. I am at work. For the first half hour I play solitaire and check my email. This morning a strange man came to my cubicle and tried to sell me tamales. My cubicle is lonely and no one here really knows my name. It’s okay though, because I have my own phone line and business cards and a whole mess of office supplies.

I finally get up and ask my boss what I am supposed to be doing today. He gives me some vague instructions and says he’ll have more for me later. He never does. The work that I’m supposed to do will probably take an hour or two, so I don’t worry about it yet.

I drink several cups of coffee, which is dually beneficial. First, if you are working with a mug of coffee you look like you are doing very important work. Second, coffee increases my bathroom trips by 5,000% which is also an effective time-waster. If I walk slowly I can make each bathroom trip last five minutes. Considering I go to the bathroom three times an hour, I have already filled ¼ of my time.

9:00 a.m. I catch up on my couponing and crafting blogs. I don’t coupon (I don’t even buy groceries except excessive amounts of Diet Coke) and I rarely craft, but I started reading these blogs when I started working in a cubicle. I think my justification was fully embracing meaningless wage-slave middle-aged life mode, but I actually like them. These are very happy women.

That takes about an hour, and then I spend another hour reading my google reader which is filled mostly with design blogs and web comics. By 11:00 I have conquered the internet, so I play more solitaire. I also count down the minutes until lunch time, which is also dually beneficially. I have lots of pieces of paper on my desk with numbers on them which makes it seem like I am doing lots of hard math and thinking really hard, but actually I am doing the complicated math of subtracting the current time from lunch time. It also takes me about 1 second to write each number, and I write a number about every 5 minutes, which over the course of the day I’m sure equals at least two bathroom trips.

Lunch is very lonely. As previously mentioned, my life is very much unlike The Office where the break room is filled with lively conversation and pranks. I have no friends and no one knows my name, so I eat the lunch I packed for myself in my cubicle. I usually eat lunch in 10 minutes and then have nothing to do for the rest of my lunch break, because I have already exhausted the internet. Today I chose to read Hyperbole and a Half which turned out to be a mistake. Allie Brosh is a very funny person and writes very funny things. So funny in fact, that I often giggle out loud. This is a problem when you work in a cubicle in close proximity to others, as when you giggle out loud in a silent cubicle, people think you’re weird. Today was especially bad. I found a particularly funny post and was lollin’ all over the place. I tried to contain my laughter but it came out as a weird muffled snort. I regained my composure, but the damage was done: I was in a giggle mood. I stopped reading the blog post and tried to look at some very serious charts and graphs but then I thought of a funny joke and lost it again. The guy in the next cubicle who I have never spoken to and don’t know the name of definitely noticed this time. After a particularly extended snort/muffled laugh I heard him shift around and clear his throat. I did some ferocious clicking to make it seem like I was doing very serious work. I took deep breaths. It was no use. It had been 20 minutes since my last trip to the bathroom anyway, so I went to giggle there.

One of the good things about being one of the only women in my office is I always have the bathroom to myself. This is a good thing because of my crippling pee shyness and insecurities about bodily functions. It took me two weeks to even be comfortable to poop in the empty bathroom. (I clearly have no insecurities about talking about said bodily functions, just performing them.) But today, just when I need the bathroom for letting out an explosive set of the giggles, there is another woman in there. So I wait until she leaves and the terror of someone invading my bathroom sanctuary has removed all the giggles from me so I sulk back to my desk. I still have 30 minutes left in my lunch break and I’m afraid to read more of the blog so I play more solitaire.

3:30 p.m. Things are getting really slow. I did all the work that I could have accomplished today without taking serious initiative, which involved making two phone calls, sending an email, and clicking around on some charts. I like to justify the fact that I spend 5% of the time I am at work doing work with that fact that I am just an extremely efficient person, which may be accurate, but probably not. Around this time everyone in the office gets a little restless so lots of people walk by my office. Unfortunately, I’m in the only cubicle you can see into in the hallway so I have lots of things open at once and I make it seem like I’m intently looking at an old graph whenever anybody walks by.

One constant source of amusement is Chuck. I think Chuck owns his own company, but he works in the same building. His office is close to mine and he never closes his door. He also talks on the phone a lot. Very very loudly.

He starts every conversation with “HEY ____, HOW THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?” He actually says it in all caps. Sometimes he loudly laments about his life. Following his typical greeting, it is common to hear “PRETTY FUCKING MISERABLE, ACTUALLY” which I’m not sure is the best way to enter a business call.

I have learned many things from Chuck, mostly concerning acid reflux and alcoholism.

If there was a nationally competitive solitaire league, I would join that shit so fast.