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Dang. Belly is full. I made Apricot-Stuffed Pork for dinner. One fatal flaw of this recipe as it is: roasting the potatoes and brussels sprouts for 15 minutes before plopping the pork in the middle for 30 minutes results in burnt potatoes and brussels sprouts. At least that was my experience. I also tend to blame my culinary fuck-ups on my electric oven/stove.

I also need to clean my oven. Dig if you will, the picture of me frantically flapping my oven mitt at the billow of smoke while trying to get the fucking ceiling fan on and shouting, “Everything’s fine! Really!”

I rock at all things domestic.

Granted, I was kind of in a, erm, tender mood yesterday because I had a nightmare the night before and the nightmare was about our break-in. But, like, our break-in on steroids. Very upsetting. I woke up in a cold sweat, panting, and heart pounding. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I’ve had such nightmares and I’m thinking that’s a sign that the ol’ noggin is still having trouble getting over that whole thing.

Anyone want to play therapist?

Anyway, work was work. I had my marketing class last night and was not totally surprised to find myself in the company of “hardcore capitalists,” which is, frankly, a personality trait I find annoying. Of course, it’s not nearly as bad as the History of Capitalism course that I took at Pitt, which was filled with capitalists who surpass “hardcore” and go straight to “fucking frightening.” But respectful because at least they’re honest about the shit.

At 6, when class was over, I walked back to my office and found myself locked out. My boss always works late but last night she didn’t. How dare she! But I scrounged up a phone and security was there within minutes.

Then I got home and managed to screw up making Jiffy corn muffins. Christ.

We watched Bill Maher a few nights ago and…man. Please, Jesus, let the strike end soon for, lo, the comedian is not that funny as it turns out. And I think he knew it since he was practically begging for the writers to come back after the audience merely tittered at his 45th “Hillary crying” joke.

I have a list of maladies today:
Productive cough (with extra loogies)
Stiff neck
UTI (I’m pretty sure it’s the same one I’ve had since about late November, it just chooses to up its level of irritation from week to week. Ebb and flow or some shit.)
Huge, painful pimple on the chin
General pissiness due to the baby’s bus driver just neglecting to come this morning. The hell, dude?

Anyway, one week of classes down, 15 more to go! *weeps* I had a lab class this morning for my Online Information Design course. I always try to participate/speak in class early on so it’s out of the way. I don’t like talking that much. Anyway, the instructor asked if anyone knew what HTML stood for and I raised my hand and Tracey Flicked that it meant hypertext markup language. And the instructor asked me what that meant/what it did and I replied, “It makes the webpage work!” Am n00b. Whatever, man. I went to the University of LiveJournal for all of my web design “skills.” I’m doing pretty good, considering.

On our way home last night, we were behind a car whose license plate read, “EMIN3M.”

The 1337 nature of the plate got me to thinking that someone must already have EMINEM and that there are probably people with variations like 3MINEM and 3MIN3M. And also that there are people who like Eminem’s music and like it enough to pay homage to him on a license plate and how messed up is that?

We took down our Christmas tree last night. We had stripped it of its decorations (like the shameful hussy that it is) a while ago but were waiting for recycling day to come back around before putting it out. Of course, we stopped watering it some time ago…cause we like fire hazards.

But watching the husband lug the tree to the front door was pretty amusing since he managed to knock over some chairs in the process. It looked like the husband was the bouncer at an arboreal bar & grill and our tree was some leprous, drunken patron, leaving bits of himself all over the place as he was “escorted” from the place. Our dining room floor resembled a forest for a little bit and when the husband came back inside he had pine needles stuck in his beard. I didn’t tell him that, though. I like my men as rustic as possible.

Late Saturday night, I got a bad feeling and after checking some stuff, my bad feeling was confirmed. I was going to have put out some serious fires at work on Monday.

I spent Sunday doing whatever ineffectual things I could do to try to make this first day more bearable: made the baby’s lunches for the week (took about 5 minutes since he won’t eat more than 300 calories a day), chopped stuff for dinner for the next few days, cleaned the bathrooms, did one pitiful load of laundry. I also fretted. A lot.

Sure enough, when I got here it was all like this and there were a bunch of these and maybe I yelled at some people. I’m not proud. I am, however, having some trouble quelling some homicidal tendencies.

I’m also starving because I spent all morning dealing with said fires and didn’t get a chance to eat anything.

Is it summer yet?

Sometimes, after dinner, I leave the baby and the husband downstairs to their own devices (I usually hear yelling and screaming within a few minutes but luckily I’m able to ignore that until the cops arrive) and escape to my/our bedroom so I can nerd out on my laptop. You know, because I don’t spend enough time on the computer all day.

When I do this, the cat always comes upstairs and joins me on the bed and goes through this ritual wherein he walks on my keyboard, kneads my back, then curls up next to me.

I enjoy this time together, except for the walking on the keyboard because he invariably sticks his butt in my face and I don’t like him in that way.

Also, I don’t live in a doughnut-shaped room. I think I had the fish-eye effect on in Photobooth or some shit.

I received email from an old friend today, a friend with whom I’m no longer really speaking for reasons neither of us can pin down. It was emotionally charged and spewing of issues. And it got me thinking about myself and my flaws and the ways in which I’m a shitty person. I thought it would be a good exercise to sit down and write out the ways that I fail at life so I could look at them, confront them, own them. But that’s a daunting task. Perhaps I’ll spread it out.

Flaw: I take the notion that we’re all alone in the world to extremes, and think that I can’t relate to a single person in the universe. I’m a unique and beautiful snowflake, dammit. I guess on some existential level, this is true. We all think different things and have different experiences. But it seems incredibly arrogant to translate that into an excuse to isolate myself.

Another flaw: I reference concepts like existentialism even though I haven’t read a lick of Sartre since high school.

On our way into work this morning, I was absentmindedly staring at the car in front of us and I noticed that something seemed odd about the occupants. After a second or two I realized that it was because the passenger was not sitting in the passenger’s seat, but rather in between the driver’s and passenger’s seat. And she was moving around slightly. It occurred to me that the passenger was giving the driver some manual pleasure.

So, I very scientifically said, “Yo, I think that woman is giving that guy a hand job.”

And because we are a very mature couple, the husband said, “Really?!?!? Let me see if I can get a look.” Well, we were going to be changing lanes anyway. The husband signaled and went into the right lane and as we started to pass the other car, the husband not so subtly turned his whole body around and peered into the handjobmobile. “That was SO a hand job happening there!” he reported. “Niiiice!” I Borat-ed.

We giggled for a minute and then the husband pointedly asked me, “How come I don’t ever get hand jobs on the way to work?” The sister-in-law piped up from the back seat and said, “Um, I would really prefer if that did not happen right now.”

Fair enough.

Last night, Tracey, Angela, and I all geeked out in a group Gmail chat so we could collectively exclaim over Frontline’s report on The Medicated Child. Frightening shit, dude. I know that I don’t live these people’s lives, but it really sounded like doctors were pushing MULTIPLE prescriptions of serious drugs for tiny children because they were acting like…children. Somehow, pharmaceutical companies seem to have convinced millions that tantrums in 2-year-olds and mood swings in 12-year-olds are bipolar disorder and that we need to start kids on the drugs as soon as possible.

And the footage that they have of the doctors speaking to patients was surreal. Even when they’re aware that they’re being filmed, they still act distant and uninterested. They don’t talk to the child, only the parent. And within 30 seconds new drugs were prescribed or dosages increased. I remarked at one point, “All of these assholes should be doing commercials for Hydroxycut.”

It didn’t do much for my general apocalyptic attitude.

To compound that, I was startled awake in the middle of the night to the sound of banshees. It was actually this freakish storm. The wind was screaming past our house and the rain sounded like someone was throwing buckets of pennies on our windows.

My only (drowsy) thought: “This better not be a tornado. I am way too tired for that shit right now.”

Of course, we don’t really get tornadoes in hilly Pittsburgh that often, but if anyone is going to sleep through a twister, I would put my money on me. One time I had a dream that I slept through the apocalypse and when I woke up (in my dream) I looked around at the destruction and thought, “Typical.”

Do you ever have one of those mornings where you think, “Nothing. None of this is working. I must quit everything?” And I recognize that that statement sounds very woeful, but I’m coming from a very frustrated, irritated point of view in which my willingness to give a shit has simply ceased.

See, the husband’s classes started up again today and suckily enough he has a 9 a.m. class on Mondays and Wednesdays. 9 a.m. classes don’t go over very well in our family because a) we’re not morning people, b) the baby’s bus sometimes doesn’t arrive until 8:30, and c) we live in a cheap part of town, meaning we sacrificed convenience and are usually faced with horrendous traffic. Added to all of that is the fact that one of the main boulevards in Pittsburgh is closed for the next year for repairs, so our usual morning commute clusterfuck has been replaced with the new ’08 model clusterfuck: The Motherf@($*#((%@)$%*%))@!!!!one! 3000.

This morning, we gritted our teeth through the traffic which was way worse than usual, probably because all of the Pitt students are back in the mix. By the time we got to Oakland, it was about 8:58 and I still needed to be dropped off at work. So the husband was already seething and muttering about how we were going to have to radically alter this routine before Wednesday. We pulled up to a red light at the intersection of Forbes and Craig, right in between Starbucks and Kiva Han, the cool indie coffee shop where all of the English and film majors and white Zapatistas go and say cool things like, “Yeah, me too.” *

So, we’re sitting at the red light and all of the artsy and academic types that populate Oakland are blearily shuffling on the sidewalks, absorbing the Mondayness of it all. And the light changes to green. And then this fucking shithead starts to cross the street. Very. Slowly. And he had timed it so that he was walking right in front of our car as the light turned green. And he has his Starbucks cup and his backpack and his floppy hair and just totally did not care that it’s 9 a.m. on a Monday morning and people have to be places because he only has to drink coffee and be a shithead. The husband laid on the horn because what the fuck?

Then. That kid. Spit. At. Our. Car.

The husband rolled down the window and screamed a string of obscenities at him. Ordinarily, I would have tried to reign him in a bit but that kid totally deserved it. And all of the artsy and academic types looked up, startled, and were probably irritated with us but whatever.

The 9 a.m. class. The traffic. The closed boulevard. The Starbucks-spitting shitheads. The lack of apostrophes.

I want them all to die.

Happy Monday!

* Louis C.K.

You know what’s kind of frightening? Slipping and falling in the shower. I know because I just did it. I stepped weirdly, I guess, and then my feet were doing this tap dance of panic and then down I went. I remember thinking, “I hope I don’t break my neck or become otherwise incapacitated, especially since I’m home alone. Then I’ll have to lay in the shower whimpering until someone comes home and finds me naked and with extremely pruney fingers and toes.”

Luckily, I managed to only bump my knee. But Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman are now making Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon-esque old man movies about squeezing the most out of life. That’s kind of depressing to me.

Here’s an indisputable sign that you’re not totally ready to go back to work after vacation: you instinctively start to pack some beers with your lunch.

Grunt. See, we had settled into the habit of beginning to drink around 2 p.m. at the latest so, naturally, I thought to myself, “I’ll still be at work at 2,” and reached for the beers before realizing, “That’s not appropriate, dipshit.”

Indeed, the glare of real life is pretty harsh. I did manage to get out of bed at 6:30 this morning. Not because I was excited to get back to the 9 to 5, but because I realized about 30 seconds before falling asleep last night that I wasn’t sure if I had anything to pack for the baby’s lunch. I braced myself for an early morning run to the convenience store (for microwave burritos and Gatorade I guess? maybe some Copenhagen?) but lucky for me there were two slices of bread that were about five minutes away from being stale, so I lovingly slapped some peanut butter on one of them. The baby has placed himself on a strict diet of peanut butter, bread, air, and chaos. It seems to be doing wonders since he’s about six inches around. I should market this new fad, no?