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So how did the fact that the Giants game in Chicago tonight was not on TV help bring me out of my funk? Funny you should ask.
This could have been another downer day like yesterday. I don't have any good explanation for the way I tortured myself into such a state, but I was ready for a better day today. I was ready, but the rest of the world wasn't cooperating.
Wednesday is payroll day. Tim had hired three new employees, and I'd asked him to get me all the information early in the week. That way I'd have it in the system before I had to write the checks today. Without so much as a whoop-de-do, not even a phone call or an explanation, not that I expected any such consideration, he waited until today to fax me all the time cards, W-4s and I-9s that I needed. So that's how I spent my day, and why I didn't get to the post office until late.
There's more to the story, but it's even more tedious. Especially when I tell it, because details like these bore me literally to tears. I'd rather do a full day of mindless data entry than an hour of filling out government forms.
By the middle of the afternoon, I'd had it with everyone and everything. First I was angry with Tim for treating me like a lowly office functionary, then I was depressed because I am, in fact, a lowly office functionary. I've been feeling things a little too sharply lately, as you can tell by yesterday's entry. It's a good thing nobody asked me to do anything for them all afternoon, because I would have probably started cursing and then burst into tears.
Instead, left alone, I fell asleep, rather deeply in fact. If the phone hadn't rung (wrong number, but I was back to being nice by then), I might still be asleep. It was one of the sweetest naps I've had in awhile, but I was still kind of reeling when I walked out to the road to check the mail. Netflix came through again, with the first disc of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I decided that watching that was therapeutic enough to justify doing it during the work day. I can always work, but I can't always do something that helps me reintegrate into the human race.
Well, I'll take my reintegration where I can get it. If I'm going to have to be human, I'd like it to be in the Star Trek universe, where artificial constructs like religion and politics take a back seat to basic values like love, peace and understanding. I just can't wait till the twenty-fourth century! It'll be so much like the sixties! (Not the real sixties, of course, but the sixties the way some of us who were there choose to remember them.)
It had been overcast all day, and even after the sun came out this afternoon it was breezy and cool. This was just the kind of day to make me reassess my commitment to daily yard work, and I would have stayed inside and watched the game if it had been televised. Instead I dragged the old boom box out to the garden and turned up Jon Miller and Joe Angel on KNBR to full volume.
I started yanking up weeds, and the longer I worked, the better I felt. Physically better, I mean. I'd solved most of the emotional miseries already, but I needed this session outdoors to finish the recovery process. "Finish" isn't the right word, because the process is ongoing. But I came a long way today. It's a good thing that game was on the radio and not the television. | 
