Ever Get That Not So Fresh Feeling?

I drove as though I was whipping a team of 150 blazing horses on the freeway today. I should not be here, but I got tired of answering work questions from bed.

One question is fine, but a series of questions just winds up my mind and catapults me into worry about the things that I am not doing while I recuperate. I've had vertigo and vertigo- like symptoms for the last few days and yesterday was the perfect senior ditch day. I stayed in bed almost until noon, went to lunch with the partner and a friend, then to the friend's to lounge by the pool, capping the day off with the perfect senior ditch day massage. The only thing missing was the convertible Ferrari and some ex-cons at the parking garage to harsh my end of day mellow.

Someone noted that these blog entries make my job seem like a fun place to work. This is partly true, and what is also partly true is, if this place suddenly imploded into a whirling vortex to the center of hell, I'd be right there on the sidelines, throwing Molotov cocktails to lube up hell's sphincter.

I spent the morning in my own post Katrina flood of toxic anxiety dreams, all of which aggressively pointed to suicide. I could not lift my head, nor could I tell if I was sleeping on the bed or on the wall. I was spinning counterclockwise like a drunk, and every time I closed my eyes the spinning accelerated. I thought sleep would help, but you know how sleep goes during these times, it is one horror scenario after another, based on all of your own life’s glorious banality. This morning’s terror dreams were based primarily on the whereabouts of the digital camera I thought I had lost.

Each time the phone rang this morning, I was required to answer very specific questions requiring concise technical back story. I felt mired in my own sluggish, stuttering, speechless, stupidity; and I felt angry at the caller for posing any question at all during a time when I just wanted to enjoy my dizzy high. I felt partly like a) a drunken air traffic controller, but more accurately, b) the President at press conferences.

I just knew that it was going to go like this for most of the day so I thrust myself into vertical and livid mode and barked, “fuck it. Just fuck it. I’ll be right over. Just let me tame my hair and I’ll be there in an hour. You keep asking the same question.” I realize now that it’s probably because I wasn’t answering any question.

That person flaccidly disagreed with my resolve, and then asked me when I would be in. Immediately Sam, my favorite co-worker/surgeon, called begging me to stay home.

“Don’t worry about it,” I reassured. “I found out yesterday that if I drink a lot of coffee and I take ibuprofen, it dulls the spinning sensation enough that I can drive and talk at the same time.”

“Oh, is that what they taught you in medical school, Doctor 835?” he chided.

“What about your fucking med school, Doctor? You’re the bastard who thinks its okay to cut people open with X-acto knives. My med school is way less riskier than yours.”

“Oh, so you’re going to be cranky, wired and woozy?”

“I think I’ll be fine. It’s technically not a DUI if it’s just vertigo.”


*****

I do love earning, but right now my shit is tired and I don't have the energy to relocate to another place of employment. Let's face it, workplaces are for and by douche bags. It's especially the case when you have men running a ship of mostly men – in other words, most work places. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to update the adage to, “Well you know what they say, it’s a douche bag’s world.” You can argue with me all you want about female douche bags, who do exist, but they don't occur in loud, proud, shock-jock worshipping hoards, as do men.

As I write this, one of the main Douche Bags is on the other side of my screen, douching around over a bowl of mixed nuts.

I'm in the office because some minutiae spanning ten years has to be prepared in such a way that some important person, the hands down, Grand Duke of all Douche Bags, can understand it better. He is the principal reason that this thing has gone on for way too long, and it's my job to make a bulleted list of the events and hold ups caused by the Grand Duke, without making it seem like his Dukiness had anything to do with it. And I have to have it done by yesterday.

Ultimately I'm happy to do it, because it is helpful, but I want everyone reading this to know, I NEED TO BE ADOPTED BY OPRAH. I rarely clean up after myself, but I can TRAIN any housekeeper to do it.

Work can be such bullshit, not because of anything in particular, but because humans – frail, self-seeking, overly complicated, lazy, shit-faced, burned out, shop-a-holic, missing-link humans – no different from myself are at the heart of it. We make work suck. I make work suck. So sitting in the office of the main requestor today, I tried not to be the suck-making one, just answering questions, pointing out key details, etc, but what I really wanted to do was my impression of an air raid siren.

Let me be straight with you. My work is pretty much A-OK. If you told me in college that this is the job I’d have and the life I’d lead, I would have very little complaints. But I’m not in college, and I’m a sucker for more and better and I have serious authority issues that I generally pat on the head and soothe like rabid dogs, with the help of thousands of dollars bulldozed to my therapist’s office. I have not enjoyed work lately, and that’s one of the reasons I started this blog. I needed a way to report to an outside world of innocent understanders, the kookiness that I witness and participate in every day. Some days are better than others, but for the most part, I’m ready for adoption.


*****

I don’t like waking up before dawn for any reason, not even for a vanpool of barely legal teens on ecstasy. I have shown that I do really well in rat-race environments, especially in train stations, escalators, crowded streets, tall buildings, taxis, and other urban crap-o-la that you see in time-lapse movie sequences designed to indicate the unending rhythm of modernity. For today, I’ve had it, but here is the rub – I’m not big on sleeping in cardboard boxes. Here is the other rub, if adopted by Oprah, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Maybe after a few dozen years, I would stop shooting up, and all of my toys that other people have been putting away for me would get boring, and I MIGHT start thinking about giving to the community. I’m not sure.

For now, I keep showing up to the A-OK job that I’ve grown weary of and am now blogging about. And I keep asking myself, is this what it comes down to? I’m drained, therefore I blog?

It took me a few hours to condense all the facts as requested. I had to make several phone calls to people who hadn’t heard from us in years just to get some facts straight. Even though I wanted to nose dive into my keyboard, I was able to prop my head up with a lot of coffee and sheer force of will. Words on my screen and on the pages looked like horses on a carousel, just whooshing past me again and again. But I did it as promised. I sent it to the requestor, a complete, factual, accurate, and concise record of the minutiae. By the time that person left for the day, he hadn’t even looked at what I sent.

Douche bag.