sound and fury (signifying nothing)

I don’t write often anymore, and as a result, it suffers. Basic things like how to introduce my ideas with relevant and insightful commentary fall by the wayside in favor of “ohmygodIhadathought”-style incontinence of the vocabulary.

Not that this is going to be any different, so in that vein, here are a few things that have been on my mind lately.

One. If I put up a barrier and you (as a generality, not specifically) force your way past it, you have no right being upset or judgmental about what I’ve hidden. It’s not publicly viewable for a reason. I don’t have a concrete reason to be suspicious, just the nagging paranoia I’ve lived with ever since I was eight years old and convinced myself there was a camera in the air vent in my bedroom. I’m afraid someone, for some reason, is gonna guess a password or otherwise traipse into my digital domain and get an eyeful of my protected or unpublished entries, like the time my dad read my journal in high school. To his credit, had the sense not to punish me even though I called him some pretty explicitly rotten things.

I guess what I’m saying is that if you go snooping and don’t like what you find, that’s what you get. That applies both ways, obviously, because sometimes I stumble over shit I really wish I could unsee. And all that said, if someone somehow accessed my old Diaryland account and let me know how to get back in, I would actually be pretty grateful.

Two. I’ve come to the conclusion that I work very hard but I’m not very smart. This is the only reason I can think of for why I’m continuously told that I’m a great worker and yet am repeatedly passed over for promotions.

Three. The Ashleigh and Spencer Show is starting to look like Dana and John 2.0: new and improved with slightly less on-the-clock goodness. As someone who’d much prefer to put the entire Arkansas fiasco behind me and out of my  mind entirely (inasmuch as I can’t actually delete that period from the annals of time), and inasmuch as part of the reason I work so hard (see Point Two) is because I’m picking up slack on account of bullpenning*, I find it sort of annoying, both Spencer’s nonsense and the way my mind automatically draws these parallels without the express written permission of Major League Baseball.

Four. I have had the music of Alabama stuck in my head all day. Roll on!

Five. If I can’t fight fire with fire (which is my first choice since, in this case, it would just be fun, but its effectiveness would be limited, so I have to decide if I want to out-, uh, fun them or just out-annoy them), I’m going to fight it with Weird Al.

Let me state the problem plainly: I am becoming extremely exasperated with my neighbor. We share a bedroom wall, and he has a new girlfriend. Okay, so not-so-plainly, but you can connect the dots.

I’m not trying to be a prude. I like sex, especially that can’t-get-enough new-relationship kind. But while I’m glad he’s happy, I really don’t want to have to listen to it. It makes me feel like a pervert, which I’m sure speaks to some deep-seated issues I have. I suppose I could feel guilty about when we lived at Jeff’s, but he was on a different floor and at the opposite end of the house, so it’s not like we were bothering him (not that I’d care if we were, the jerk). I don’t guess it was particularly enjoyable for Todd, but the hell with that insufferable prick.

But I’m not an insufferable prick – at least not to Anders -  and so I don’t appreciate being subjected to hearing him pound his girlfriend. I mean, these are all two-bedroom apartments, so would it be that difficult to just move it across the hall? It’s not like I can just flip on the television to drown them out, since I’ve been storing it in the closet due to the fact that there’s no cable to connect to it.

However, I am in possession of some really fucking annoying music and a set of computer speakers. And next time they either wake me up or keep me from going to sleep, I’m going to have a gotdamn polka party.

*”warming up” your next relationship while you’re still in the current one, dancing on the “cheating” line. Actually, on reflection, I wouldn’t say that’s specifically what’s happening, since as far as I know neither of them are currently seeing anyone. I guess I just like the word.

I am so much of a perfectionist I’m a perfectionist about my perfectionism.

This thought stems from today’s events. I don’t really feel like going into all of it again; the only thing I’m going to divulge is that there are perks to being very hard on yourself, namely that when you fuck up spectacularly, they might go easier on you because you tend to punish yourself enough. Finally all this self-hatred has paid off!

I know it’s the acme of asininity, but I feel almost like I don’t have the right to be anal-retentive. That uniformity must exist, and that I don’t have permission to be a perfectionist because if I truly were one, I’d have finished school and would be living the dream with a split-level ranch and 2.7 children. I wouldn’t ever get angry or moody or messy. I wouldn’t be driving around with a gaping hole in my car where the back glass used to be.

(Okay, you could counter these with the assertions that pragmatism wins out over perfectionism, since it’s not at all feasible for me to have new glass put in, and FEMA wasn’t any help in that regard; that as a human being with emotional variances I am permitted to have, well, emotions; and that I never wanted the prepackaged plastic life anyway. But still, I should have at least finished school.)

What the fuck ever. I maintain (and will until I die, because among my other wonderful and lovable qualities, I’m a stubborn son of a bitch, inasmuch that I might say what needs to be said for the sake of pacifying the other party but keep on just thinking what I was thinking anyway) that not only am I not too hard on myself, I am not at all hard on myself. I am honest. I am pragmatic.* I don’t think I’m the shit, I don’t have an ego, and I am perfectly willing to humble myself to others because in my mind, I’m pretty great.

But in my mind is exactly where it should stay.

* This is one reason it’s useless to try and compliment me when I’m pissed off at myself. It makes me mad, it’s useless, and it undermines my ability to take you seriously. So when someone starts asking me why I’m so hard on myself and then lists all these supposedly great qualities, such as “you’ve got the brains, you’ve got the looks, you’ve got the figure,” all I can think is “Of course you think I have a great figure, you’re built like Barney the Dinosaur.”

I was terrified the other day.

It was after day 2 of the Fort Smith Police drive. Penny and the rest of the crew decided to do a lunch-after at Furr’s. I happen to hold a Kightlingerian view of buffets (if people could be slaughtered for food, that’s where they’d go to bulk up), so I was on the bus, internetting* on my phone.

About 40 minutes after they left, the bus door opened up, and someone came in and told me, “You have a visitor.” My mind raced with possibilities. Who out there would want to see me, only me? Who the hell do I even know in this city?

My first instinct was that it was Jeramy. It was about the time of day he’d be off work, and I figured maybe he saw the bus parked in back and stopped by to say hello. But that kind of initiative isn’t really his thing; if it were, maybe we’d still be together.

And then, another thought, this one far more frightening: maybe it was his mother.

I haven’t been avoiding her, specifically. Just not returning her calls and not going to the mall and feeling a slight twinge of fear every time I walk down AR 59. It’s not that I think she’d be mad, because she supported my decision to leave him. After all, who better than me to know what an obnoxious bastard her son had the propensity to be?

I dunno. I guess it’s just one less tie I have to worry about. Something else to sever, because I am not a maintainer. Just the opposite, which is why it’s so easy for me to leave.

Anyway, my “visitor” wasn’t her, either. It was Brandy’s daughter, whose name I cannot even begin to spell.

Get this: this kid, who can’t be any older than maybe eight, thinks I am unconditionally awesome. For no reason I can discern – I met her a couple days ago while Brandy and I were talking after work, and now she asks about me all the time. The closest I could figure, using that logic thing we grown-ups do, is it’s an unusual-name kinship. I’m not one of those people who relates well to kids.

I dunno, I guess I just think it’s completely awesome to have someone in my life who unabashedly thinks I’m great. I think everyone should have someone like that.

Music: Bruce Springsteen – Paradise

*yes, it’s a word. One I made up just now.

I am, what’s the word… oh yeah. Bad.

Not the hot kind, not the naughty-schoolgirl kind. The rule-breaking kind. The my-own-rules-breaking kind.

Here’s the thing: they say, always wear clean underwear, because you never know when you’ll get in a car accident. My drawers are as clean as my kitchen floor. Which is, before you can think it, pretty freaking clean.

My mind, though. It’s my mind that is dirty.

I was never all that enamored of my job at the clinic, but now I sort of miss it. Forest-for-the-trees meets 20/20-hindsight, I suppose.

On my performance review, I was told that I was good with the patients. I was like that at the hospital, too – even when things were crazy, or I was ready to kill my coworkers, I always had my best face on for those in need. Now, though, I cannot make small talk with a donor to save my life. Every once in a while I’ll get one I can chitchat with, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

I wonder if it’s because I’m better at dealing with people who are sick, or if it’s a manifestation of the deeper unhappiness I feel at the loss of autonomy, my inability to fit into a scheme where fitting in seems tantamount to the actual job, and the overall Orwellian atmosphere.

It must also count for something that I never felt like my colleagues saw me as a retarded big (or little) sister, or that they were only nice to me because they felt sorry for me, or that they were merely putting up with me until which time I would kindly die in a fire. Sure, there were a couple people I knew didn’t like me, but there were specific reasons (neither of them were especially likable people). It never bothered me that much, and I never felt like the only time people saw me as an equal was when I was willing to purchase alcohol and/or debase myself.

If not for the commute, the pay, and the fact that I didn’t have as much personally invested in it (ie, really believing in what I do), I would truly consider going back.

Oh, and the drug reps. It’s a conflict of interest: I’m in the healthcare industry to help people get better; they’re there to profit off the misfortune of the public.