My day yesterday was a strange one. I started it at work, at exactly midnight; I'd been set a task and was throwing myself at it,lent a burgeoning confidence by the knowledge that, with the store locked, I could talk to myself as loudly and [EXPRESSIVELY]* as I wanted to.
But a day doesn't start at midnight; it starts when you wake up. For me, a night shift worker, it starts when everyone else wakes up. Which was about 6:00am, when I was serving the first of the mad newspaper buyers, smiling at them, shouting at them, enjouraging and disparaging them like ancient schoolkids.
"Sir, I have to scan your paper. No, I can't just punch it in, I'd need the bar code number. No, I'd rather not read it, or have it read out to me, for I'd be depriving this sad machine of its only purpose in life, save blinding belligerant old men. Sir, you may wish to know that you're cleaving to that paper as if it has some kind of precious quality conferred at a touch, like eternal youth, expanding intellect, or heightened agility. I'm sorry to say that it isn't working."
Then I got home, and the first thing I did was to go online and make sure my blog auto-updated. I did this by refreshing my own blog for about two hours, and then smirking when "I'm 23" appeared, and then correcting all the spelling and so on (I say all - I was very tired. I will not be correcting any more).
Then I got actual birthday money. Like, proper birthday money from my granny and my parents. To think birthdays are events marking your progressive ageing, and yet they always make me feel like I'm eight. Me and Lisa read our book for a little, and I forgot to really eat, and then Klee showed up.
While Klee was upstairs explaining her situation endlessley to somebody in a call centre, my Mum came home and we talked about things, and I ate some chips (crisps) and read some of the Sandman book Lisa got me, "Endless Nights".
Then Klee came down and we all talked for ages, mostly people sharing interesting stories (Klee had some hilarious things to say) and then I went to bed.
I had a dream wherein I was personal buddy-friends with one of my role-models, and we were driving about in a car being hilarious and it was good fun. Only this dream, like all dreams, was cruel; my clinginess, my desperation to please him and not lose friendship with this person I so rightly believed was made of the same matter as I, ultimately drove him to alienation and bewilderment.
Also, in this dream, he lived in America, which isn't somewhere he currently lives, but the interesting thing is that he got here via Harry's webcam, on which Harry'd been running some new open-source software that could send people via webcam people. It sounded much more obvious and clever (in a trivial, would-you-believe-it way) in the dream. He also had nine monitors; in reality, he's celebrating his second, and, with a murderous roving greed from which no oblong picture-device is safe, planning a third.
When I woke up, Lisa and I played some Team Fortress 2, which is an arena entirely dominated by my lovely lady-wife now. I've never heard someone laugh like that, enshrouded by the screaming of dismembered foes. Truly chilling.
Then I prepared for a night of Braid by playing it quite a lot. I love it, but some of the puzzles have me totally stumped. I'm playing through world 5, and I've missed maybe 2 pieces. Anyway, so I played that for an hour and Lisa went to bed. So I got in beside her to do the husbandly back-rubbing thing and, uh...
Well, I fell asleep, and just woke up about a half hour ago. I didn't have:
- The Cake Ritual (we even had cake ready for eating)
- Any proper meals,
- Enough time to sink my teeth into my presents,
- Any emotional meltdowns or trips to A&E,
- Consciousness enough to power a single meaningful sentence,
- Anything to complain about.
I will now make some food. When it's ready, I'll eat food and play video games at the same time, which is about the most decadent vision I can summon at this time. Oh, and read sandman, at loading screens n that.
I totally could have spent all of last night playing Left 4 Dead for free, but apparently I didn't. I did drool a lot, however, and have a Peter Pan dream, and more webcam-teleporter dreams.
Well, I hope this has been fun. Now: To make sure this auto-updates!
Happy May-day, to whom it forms significance!
*To whom it may interest: This is how I write blog posts; normally, all of these words are replaced with more fitting ones; this is a sort of weird shorthand I use to paraphrase things. I'm leaving this in here for posterity. I was going to write something more along the lines of "flamboyantly" or "meladramatically"; translating the meaning in my head into words on a page is the whole business of it, after all.
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