Escape
I bought the RPG game
"Fable" yesterday and played with it for six straight hours last night. Now I can barely keep my eyes open. My eyelids feel heavy and strained. Anyway, it was worth it, to a certain degree. Like a good book, RPGs have a certain, can't-put-it-down appeal to them. I had to force myself to let go of the controller and shut the whole thing off before it fried up all my brain cells and rendered me a walking zombie for the next 24 hours. It nearly did. I can barely function normally. I can't think of a single thing to do in the office when there's a million things left undone. I say, "kudos, well done". The game accomplished what i set it out to do in the first place, splendidly. Now if only I can find my way out of this feeble state of mind.
No Excuses
That's what I always tell myself when things go wrong on my end. Instead of putting the blame on someone or something, I cut to the chase and admit, to myself, that it's my fault. Of course, I'm not always to blame. I mean, if a 10-ton truck spilled over on the superhighway, causing a massive traffic jam, resulting in my missing an "important" meeting, then I didn't have a hand on that. But because it happened on "my" superhighway, the one that I traverse to work every single day, the mishap is on me. I cut all the crap about being a victim of fate or circumstance. It's never, "why me?", and always, "why not me?".
That's why when I made the slight, hopefully forgettable, mistake of addressing a vice president of this company in what some might regard as a disrespectful manner, I make no excuses for not knowing who she was. She was commenting on a presentation that our group just made and I had to defend and explain certain points. If I came on a bit strong, man, so did she, so I see no reason why it should be deemed a big deal if I responded with the same "intensity". She was out of line and making comments for the sake of it. I did what I had to do. I don't see it as disrespectful at all. But if I get reprimanded for it, so be it.
Work Whores
When your superiors refer to you as a real workhorse what they really mean is that you're a work whore, available to them 24 hours a day, at their beck and call.
I didn't know how or when I'd become such a work whore. This past week (and the coming days) are so frantic that I haven't had time to check my e-mails or complain in my blog about how the work is driving me mad. I've taken my work at home, in my sanctuary. What used to be time better spent jogging or playing with my Xbox has been diverted to work. What travesty! My precious lunch hour has also been turned into lunch meetings. I'm used to using that time leisurely, sometimes even to take a stroll, but now I don't even have time to brush my teeth after meals. I would think, "that's the last straw", but no I seem to have accumulated a bunch of new straws to draw upon.
I better go. I have some whore-ing to do.
Free Lance!
"Lance Armstrong drugs". Go ahead,
google it. 227,000 hits and counting, all of them contains the "D" word. He's so used to the allegations that the man eats it for breakfast. Weeks after the French paper,
L'equipe, published that a "B-sample" of his urine, taken in 1999, is positive for EPO, I found these...
...It's not surprising to know that USA Cycling
has his back.
...or that some guy thinks it's
offensive for Lance to claim that he "willed" himself to beat the disease while other, weak-willed individuals cannot escape their fate.
...and of course, the French
denies targetting him.
I read his book, "It's Not About The Bike", half-believing both the miracle and the myth that is his life, knowing that the truth lies somewhere in between. He won the Tour de France 7 times, all convincingly except once, in 2003. In 7 years, we had all the time in the world to prove the doping genius that he is. Now he's retired, that window has closed. I'd gladly take the miracle now. Let it rest.
Friday
I remember writing this piece 11 months ago, on a Friday...
fridays are when i try to get a grip on my sanity and hang on, long enough to spend a meaningful weekend ahead. i don't care if i lose the handle (again) come mondays for as long as i had the "weekend". but this friday, today, is going to be different. this friday i'm going to get my life back. i've spent a big part of the past months living inside my head. i'm in the real world but i'm not really here. i'm in an alternate universe. sure, i wake up. i face this computer and work or i appear to be working. i have lunch at 11:30 with friends at work. we exchange stories and share laughs. i shop for things when i have the time and money. and then i go home and stay up late to watch my favorite shows. sometimes i go out for a run or play hoops. and then i go to bed for 6-8 hours and cycle begins again. the only time the cycle stops, and the wheels take a break from their mechanical turning is on fridays.
this friday it's going to take more than oiling the machine, and tuning up the engine. today is the day for major overhaul. no more obsessing about things i can't control.
for one, my favorite team, the seattle storm, is on a championship hunt. tomorrow is the first game of the finals but i'm not gonna be sitting on the edge waiting for the livescore to update on the internet. the website says, "page automatically refreshes every 2 minutes". clicking "refresh" button in rhythm with the beat my heart is not going to change anything out there in the worldwideweb---the page will still show fresh information only every 2 minutes.
so what do i do, in case you're wondering, during the two-minute lulls while i'm clicking "refresh" button frantically? i go to this little place in my head where i'm picturing what's going on in the game. i'm worrying if the point guard, whose nose was recently broken in a collision with an opposing player but is still able to play even after the surgery, is working the ball around or turning it over in lieu of the bothersome protective mask on face. is the star player getting her shots in? is player in foul trouble? is there a discernible panic in the eyes of the players that signals impending doom? after page "refreshes" and i see my team leading i would shout, in my head, "protect that lead or die!". oh, madness! i'm not even in front of the tv watching at those times. i'm at work, or in some internet cafe during my lunch hour (i had made up an excuse to my regular lunch mates just so i could skip over to the nearest netopia). the madness doesn't stop there. i have spent a total of 5 VLs this year to watch live games on TV, something that i might do again soon for the final game. and when i'm not watching games on tv or keeping track of live scores, i'm surfing the web for articles and news on the team. i have tracked down this forum that caters exclusively to loyal, crazy, obsessive fans like me. admitting is the first step to the cure so, hard as it to say, i admit that i have been stalking the seattle storm.
the long and short of it? heh, the "long" of it is behind you, the "short" of it is that i need to backpedal. start taking interest in the lives of other people, real people not just the ones i see on tv. old friends, new friends, crazy relatives, whack-job neighbors, the commuters i regularly sit with at the shuttle every morning who sleep during the whole trip, the people who work here, the people who are here but do not work when they're here (oh, but that's me), and etc., etc., some of them i find to be not as interesting to me as broken noses, zone defenses, blind referees, and pivotal do-or-die games, but i have to try to find that little spark in them that would hold my attention so i can keep in-step with what's real. It seems nothing has changed. I'm still in the same state of mind.
P.S
Seattle's going for back-to-back championships
