Strange
Day

I literally spent the entire day — minus potty breaks and a 20 minute bout of sunbathing on the roof — entering information into a website. Not designing. Not coding the site. Not debugging. Not optimizing. Just entering data. I inputted about 350 articles, after stripping them from another, older iteration of the site, and about 100 photos. I still have probably 50 to 75 articles to go. Then the site will have to be debugged. I already don’t know why the “see other stuff like this” box isn’t working. And the calendar is completely batshit.
And I want to have it ready to show the client Monday.
This is one of the reasons I didn’t go to the Rave tonight.It would run till morning, with the inevitable stop for breakfast. And I probably couldn’t get back to my place to sleep ’til noon. I would lose almost a whole day, which I don’t think I have. One of my friends reasoned something to the effect that ‘sometimes you have to suck it up and do the bad stuff instead of having fun’. Which is really kind of crap. The actual performing of the work itself is kind of neutral, enjoyment-wise. The client works for a cause I find very important. And it doesn’t hurt I’ll be making some fairly serious money… mostly due to the work I perform this weekend.
Meanwhile, come Tuesday morning, I can go throw organic debris from the Attack Cat at passing politicians in Lafayette Park if I want to. This is the thing about being your own boss. You really get to do whatever the fuck you feel like. And some of it you get paid for. So I don’t gauge this night of work as “bad”, but simply as a night of work. Tomorrow may be a night of wild sex with a supermodel. Or more work. But I love my work. And I love supermodels. So … you know… whichever.
Said friend has been trashing my career of choice and business in particular since I’ve known ’em. So I don’t get too worked up about such things they say, anyway.
(I really have a hard time using the term “career”. It seems kind of dirty, like “republican” or “Californian”. While I never forget that I may eventually go back to working for someone else, in the meantime, all things 9-5 “for the man” leave a nasty copper tang in my throat.)
The thought of a whole night of Techno kind of scared me anyway. I enjoy some seriously fucked up music… but I still have a hard time calling anyone who can’t get up and perform on a stage in a small club, a “musician”. And I’d certainly be hard pressed to pay the $45 cover charge. For $5, I could have gone to Chiaroscuro and listened to Industrial music until 3 AM, (the drunk, redneck cousin of Techno).
My friends ideas of what it is to get out and have fun doing ‘crazy’ things, lately, kind of disturb me too. Anything that requires you to deal with Ticketmaster is not “wild and crazy”. Things that you plan 3 weeks ahead of time aren’t either. Road trip? Great! To a haven of old, conservative, white people surrounded by family restaurants and tourist gift shops? Um… no.
I’m not asking my friends to be completely insane all the time. I’d have to… you know… beat them about the head or something. But I swear one of them’s gonna be inviting me to a Barry Manilow concert soon. Then I would have to strangle them with their pillow. And I’m not sure I’m strong enough to even lift the water cooler, much less toss it through a window. Even if I did, the resulting hernia would make it hard to run.
I’m not sure any of my friends have a strong grip on reality. Do I attract people with identity crisis? (We’re still a tiny bit young for mid-life crisis).Oh of course they’re good people, or I wouldn’t call them friend; a word that means too much to me. But I’ve got people here who can’t face their professional life; people who can’t face their interpersonal life, people who can’t face their intrapersonal life. (And if they’re out there reading this, planning my slow castration with a rusty spoon… remember… you’ve all told me exactly the same things about yourselves. I’m not exactly Yuri Geller here, delving into the unknown). But just… when do we finally break down, and be honest with ourselves. When do we say “This is stupid. I won’t do this anymore”.
Yeah… I’m not not a shining example for everyone to follow. I’ve always been a bit more grounded… but I don’t think that’s necessarily a good thing. If friends and family knew how far back and to what extent I do and say things because I know ahead of time that “this is the appropriate thing to say to elicit X reaction…”, they’d probably look at me like one of those robots in the movies who’ve become too human. (We’re talking pre-teen, here). More often than not, when I’m being difficult or a jerk, it’s because I’m simply tired of knowing what I should say or do, to make whoever happy.
And only a year or so back, did I notice that the cycles of clarity and depression that started towards the end of college and through my first few ‘reality’ years had vanished. No idea where they went. Seen as how it occurred around the same time I gave up being terminally negative (blame Sara… I know I was much cuter before), I’m sure they’re somehow related. Good riddance, though.
Not that the events of the last year haven’t brought their own unique facets to my life. But that’s a long discussion for another time.
So yeah… about the concert. Okay: 1) Crap music. 2) Expensive 3) No spontaneity 4) Too long. The only thing really making me want to go was to take pictures of people being crazy. But it doesn’t come anywhere near balancing out the other crap.
But I gotta hit the Market in the morning, anyway. Still have to find a present for my father.