How shitty a day did I have yesterday? I will tell you. After dinner (plus drinks), I came home, smoked some pot, and listened to Dizzee Rascal while watching, on mute, a nature show about leopards. Then I passed out in my clothes.

Oh my god will I be glad when this job is over.

Do people even care what happened, what it was that pushed me over the edge and drove me after so many months to the bong? Like, people always want to talk about their child-care arrangements, or to recite a history of some physical woe that has its dramatic culmination in their finally discovering the miracle of acupuncture and narrative culmination in getting their insurance to pay for it. I fix a slightly wide-eyed, earnest look on my face and nod a lot. I can�t decide, as of the typing of this sentence, whether or not I�m going to get into yesterday�s smackdown � the outcome will be based on a sloppy combination of the extent to which I want to relive it and ditto to which I decide upon reflection that I come off looking like a whiner, the non-ambient temperature of the corner of the office in which I work (currently pretty fucking chilly), how busy I am and ditto bored. Here are three other items in the office-hijinks department though: (1) It was discovered yesterday that the person just hired to fill a senior budget analyst position has no idea how to create a spreadsheet or in fact to read one. How is that even possible in 2004? (2) Also that the person just hired, or in the process of negotiating to be hired, to replace me in what�s basically a half-receptionist-half-paralegal position is demanding to be allowed to telecommute. A telecommuting receptionist � that�s comedy, folks.(3) While routing a memo for signatures yesterday, I discovered two typos, one of which is a misspelling of the recipient�s last name, so I left a note for the sender stating same. The recipient is a super big kahuna but the sender is pretty high in the food chain herself, pulling in substantially over six figures. This morning the sender called me into her office and asked me my objective opinion as to whether misspelling someone�s name was a big deal, whether I thought the recipient would notice.

Cool news: Steve was totally enamored of New York and its riot of beautiful architecture � he had not been there in ten years, and then mostly in the dark � and is so willing to think about moving there if-I-don�t-have-a-grown-up-job-with-health-insurance-by-the-end-of-June that while sick at home over the past few days he�s been scoping out what the job situation would be like for him. Prognosis: not half bad. And I trust the Matt P. mafia to help make good on what he was telling me about some kind of exec assistant/whatever job, how I�d be safe as houses in a market in which braininess is more desired than viewed with skepticism and distaste. My cat would be sad; however, it is important to remember that he is only a cat. Steve doesn�t think he�d want to live in New York for more than three or four years, but I�m not sure I�d want to live and die there myself, so that�s OK � and then we�d move somewhere different. He also would want to stay in Seattle through the summer, though, which is understandable esp. considering what it�s like in Manhattan in August, so if the let�s-go decision did get decided at the end of June, we�d have a couple months to plot. For various reasons that run the gamut from housing costs to my deep dread of packing, my choice would be to stay here. But it may be that I�m not able to, and as long as your Plan B is New York, I figure you�re doing fine.

I�m not going to be able to write any more today after all � I�m being retaliated against by the person I pissed off yesterday (though oh! oh! She�s not the one who has anything to be pissed about) and I�ve just been handed the assignment of cutting out labels for binder tabs, gluing them to their little backings, one on each side please, and sliding them into the plastic slots. I should mention that tasks like this are usually set aside for the retarded guys on work program. Thirteen tabs, ten sets. So bye-bye for today.