Well this is annoying.

I’ve spent the last half-hour or so just staring at a blank page. It’s not that I have nothing to say, it’s just that it all seems to come out in small chewable-sized bits. Nothing like the fire hydrant torrent of opinion and invective that I can usually summon up at will.

Oh god…am I mellowing out? Surely not. Be better for my blood pressure, but there’s something so inherently satisfying about cranking up the volume and ripping off the damn knob. It’s my safety valve.

I still have the same pet peeves: tuneless whistling, arrhythmic tapping, people backing in to parking spaces. That one really drives me nuts. You follow someone into a parking lot, and they pass an open space. But before you can swing into it, their brake lights come on, followed by the back-up lights. Oh crap. Come on! You planning on robbing the place, Sparky? Then why do you feel it necessary to have your car parked head-out? Just pull in like a normal person instead of making me wait behind you while you take your Beemer through a 17-point turn. I could be digging into the complimentary breadsticks before you get your seat belt off. Not to mention the chain of us that all have to back up to give you the room to maneuver. And you have the balls to look at us with impatience? Bite me.

Another one that’s gained recent prominence in my forebrain is the ongoing substitution of “said” with “was like.” And she was like, oh no you dint. And he was like, uh-huh I did.

And I was like, shut the fuck up, you morons; you make my head hurt. Specifically, that part of my head that’s devoted to processing rudimentary English sentence structure! Listening to you jabber is like a chalkboard being dragged across a wall of broken-off fingernails.

Interruptions for stupid stuff. I’ve admitted that I’m in Marketing, so the majority of my day consists of writing. Newsletters, sales letters, postcards, ad copy, and press releases pour forth from my desk in a never-ending flood of creativity, swamping my coworkers in the ebb and flow of precise verbiage and the inverted pyramid style. The majestic waves of language build into a veritable hurricane of eloquent locution, in the face of which no customer can resist faxing us their credit card numbers.

*snort*

Bullshit aside, I do put a lot of effort into my writing. If you write, then you know the mental effort it takes to build something up word by word. Rearranging half-formed ideas or entire paragraphs over and over, digging through the thesaurus to find just the perfect expression. You’ve got the headphones cranked to block out the rest of the world. But then there’s the breakthrough. You hit the zone. Your fingers blur over the keyboard as you hurry to get it all down before it flies away again. Misspellings and grammatical mistakes abound as you frantically pound away at the helpless characters. We’ll let the DJ fix it in the mix – this stuff’s golden. Oh yeah. This is the sweet spot. This is what it’s all about.

Invariably…

*tap on shoulder* “Hey. Sorry to interrupt, but I need this (file, disc, golf ball, left shoe, etc.) from you right away. I’m taking it home with me tonight.”

My fingers get tangled over a tricky sub-clause, nearly breaking my wrists, and my words pile into each other like patrons trying to escape a Great White pyrotechnics show. I look at the clock. It’s 1:30 in the afternoon. This bitch just killed an entire morning’s work for something she doesn’t even need for another 3 ½ hours? Ever hear of e-mail, chickie? Sure hope that file doesn’t corrupt your hard drive. Now go away. I’ve got some coding to do.

School sales. We spend more money on Education in this country than we do our military. Why, then, am I constantly assaulted by bake sales, magazine drives, tubs of cookie dough, car washes, candy bars, candles, and all of the other assorted crap that our local schools try to pawn off on us so the band can get bus tickets to some podunk competition somewhere, or the cheerleaders can get new uniforms, or they can pay the hospital bills of that one really clumsy chemistry teacher? You’ve already gotten as much money out of me as you’re getting, Sunshine. It comes out of my paycheck without my consent. How would these people react if I came to their door at night, interrupting their dinner to try and sell them a coupon book to raise money so I could take my homeschooled kids to the zoo for a biology lesson? They’d probably be a tad upset, wouldn’t they? The way I see it, I’m being forced to pay for services I’m not using. Where’s that money going? Maybe if you stopped pissing it away with your top-heavy administration financing every fucking “feel good” program that comes down the pike, the Glee Club wouldn’t have to resort to selling shitty homemade T-shirts outside the Wal-Mart to get a new microphone.





Ah. I feel better.