Straight No Chaser

Fair to Say

i'm a little upset. marcus was supposed to be here in eleven days or less, for the three to four days before this conference he's helping to host in the district. he called last night and changed the plan completely, pushing his visit tentatively to the back end of the conference, meaning very late july/early august. it's not really his fault; the reason for the change was financial stuff, plus some antagonism from his mom, but he sprang it on me in such an inconsiderate way, at four o'clock in the morning after i'd already spent an hour listening to him chatter about the impending reconstruction of the morehouse college sga, and now i have to go back and rearrange a fair number of scheduling things, and just, erghh.

i stayed awake after we hung up to try to squeeze something creative out of my frustration, and ended up with the first stanza of what might eventually become a poem. i've got this image of him in a forest somewhere, playing his guitar, strumming so passionately that all the flowers around him start shooting up spores in aural ecstasy. i hate how that happens. the instinctive thing would be for me to be mad at him for wrecking my schedule, taking advantage of how flexible i tried to be about everything. before him i was fantastic at holding a grudge. or, to put it more accurately, at giving people the returns they'd earned through their behavior. no longer. not only can i not stay mad at him, i can't go very long without remembering why i appreciate anyone who pisses me off, and prostrating myself for reconciliation when i should be waiting for foot massages. i want to believe that the lessons i'm learning from him are all good ones, but it seems like it might serve me better in the long run to be able to keep things in stony perspective.

anyway. now i'm here again. work is pretty hellish this week. they left me with what they thought would be five days' worth of stuff to do, forgetting that i tend to finish most stuff within twenty percent of the time allotted. in other words, short-term assignments meant to take up the workday typically get done by ten in the morning, and this presentation, which should have kept me occupied all week, was done before i left on tuesday. this leaves me with a wandering mind and not enough stimulation, besides the window. no art class, no gymboree, empty counseling room. the sade lady (hereinafter referred to simply as "sade") is gone for good, i found out, so technically the woman in the next cube over is my new neighbor, and she's fucking crazy. the quintessential office bitch who never takes off her headset and calls people over just to yell at them. she keeps saying, has literally repeated three times, that she hopes she's "pedaling fast enough to keep up with the tidal wave that's coming to drown us all." i've considered knocking on the cubicle wall, hi, i'm shannon, that tidal wave thing, what the hell does that mean? she's either a jehovah's witness or just really ridiculously dramatic about her job; if it's the latter, then she's (over)reacting to the workload swell that always hits the center at the peak of summertime (the result, i've recently learned, of the way changing temperatures affect the copper wiring used to enable dsl service). if it's the latter, then i want her to shut up.

i am waiting on jupiter to align with mars. supposedly that's when peace will guide the planet (and love will steer the stars), and when i will find aquarian liberation. "no more forces of derision, golden living dreams of vision, mystic crystal revelation," et cetera. hopefully some extra patience with my fellow man falls in there somewhere.

to anyone affected by the london bombing tragedies: my condolences. it's astounding to me that anyone could perpetrate anything so cruel.

more later, i think.