Daylight Savings Time
I have two engagements tonight and skipped a third. Right now I’m sitting on my couch with my hair in towel and the TV has switched off of my on-demand showing of Intervention, and is now playing clips from the upcoming Twilight movie. I believe I got dumber by osmosis during this experience, although I was not paying attention.
I was watching the minutes on my laptop’s clock tick away, closer to the time I need to leave to celebrate a friend’s birthday down the street. I’m having a difficult time figuring out why I don’t want to go. Candidates include the fact that I feel fat and ugly, it is cold outside, it is dark outside, or I’m developing a crippling disorder known as agoraphobia. The center two options can be explained by Daylight Savings Time, and I have a fuzzy recollection that last year I saved a lot of money in November, December, and January. Part of this is because Rico* and I were playing chicken with the power bill about who would cave first and turn the fucking heat on. I think it was me because Rico was new and thought I was still powerful. He’s only recently learned the power of my silence – the only problem with that strategy is that it requires the other person to be annoyed by not having the privilege of my presence.
Anyway, I saved a lot of money in the winter, and I realize now it’s because I did not leave the house. I occasionally allowed myself to splurge on parking to go to school, and this was really exciting; but otherwise I went to school, my internship, the gym, and occasionally the grocery store. The grocery store was difficult and I had to coax myself by taking my ipod, which made the clusterfuck that is Giant only slightly more tolerable. Particularly the afternoon I recall during which I wanted to take the stairs instead of the elevator from the parking lot and was first accosted by the obvious stench of feces and rotting urine (all glass enclosements, you cruel mistresses, increase the heat but never absorb!), and then three vagrants lay over the steps so I had to walk over them. I felt both scared and like an asshole, both for being scared and for stepping on homeless people. I felt even more anger toward Giant than usual that day, and in my normal fashion, I decided to approach this by crafting a letter to Corporate Headquarters while I did my shopping. Unfortunately I took money out of the ATM and first and my whole plan was ruined when two Giant employees came looking for me to return my card to me and I felt too guilty about having thought they might be jerks that contributed to Giant to write in.
That put an effective end to going to the grocery store for anything that would take more than a few minutes, however. I also remember making plans with Mel* a few times and canceling at the last minute because I didn’t want to leave the house because it was cold (and probably dark). That was awesome of me. I did the same thing to her a couple of weeks ago even though it was warm and light because I had to work on a paper that was giving me anxiety.
This post is all over the place, and I posit that this is in part because I’ve killed another twelve minutes not getting ready to go to the Birthday Party for someone who has been very kind to me and the going away party of someone who is moving to New York whose apartment I hope to stay at for free.
I’ve been sitting here trying to think of a sign off for a few minutes and realized that was just wasting more time. Okay, when I hit “publish” I’m going to dry my hair. I am. Maybe I’ll play music while I do it. Hopefully there are no vagrants or piles of shit on the way.
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent in this blog. I will try to use only fake names and be consistent. Except for Norma since I sort of fucked that one up already. And Alaric.
