Day 23

I’m back. Not that I really went anywhere, but mentally I’ve been off my game for some time. I haven’t been writing or collecting rejections due to ennui (read: laziness), then I felt physically bad at the beginning of the current experiment. Other excuses include pining for my dentist, the moon being aligned with Saturn, and the Giant Atomic Chickens which will eventually overrun the world in accordance with prophesy.

In the meantime I continue to feel slightly, almost imperceptibly, better day after day. I have now begun waking up before the alarm goes off (sometimes by a couple of hours), and yet I don’t feel tired or in need of a nap to make up the lost time. Still, I’m not so sure this is a good thing. Now I awaken early, lay in my bed and flop like a beached flounder as I dread another day at my job, and then eventually fall back to sleep just before the alarm wakes me once more. I guess I could read or something, but it just seems like I should need more than five hours sleep. Maybe I’m getting old, or slowly turning into a vampire.

If you’re wondering why I dread going to work, it’s because they put me back on the stinking customer service complaint line (in addition to my usual IT duties). If there’s one thing I hate, it’s manning a help line (actually I might enjoy a suicide line – I’m sure I would have a higher success rate than any of my colleagues). People think the telephone is better than e-mail because you can talk to a live person real time. I think they suck because you have to talk to an actual person, usually an idiot, real time. Telephones are evil, and not evil in the usual cool, sexy, violent, and heavy metal way. They’re evil in a bad way, like Diet Coke, AOL, or John Tesh.

I gird my loins and remind myself that this account is going away within two months so I just need to hang on, but sometimes it feels like trying to wait out a two month root canal. Just endure the pain and whine of the drill – it’s only another sixty days. So now my weekdays are filled with angst, pain, and dread. Back to normal and all the stuff’s the same.

Which brings me back to the original point of this post, which was to announce that I’ve gotten back to writing. I hoped after my impromptu vacation I would sit at the keyboard and a torrent of clever words would spill forth, but it was more like the first hesitant steps of a car crash victim in physical rehab. At least it’s forward momentum and building every day.

Eight days to go before the experiment ends. For my next thirty day experiment I think I’ll spend a month shooting heroin or sorority girls. Any suggestions for another month-long experiment are welcome.