how did this happen?

i'm sick again, Internet. It seems unbelievable, I know, and it's sucking my will to live. 48 hours have passed and nothing--not the cocktail of pills nor the seemingly endless hours of sleep nor the dozens of episodes of Gilmore Girls--has made things any better. It's been weeks since I did all my dishes. On my way home today a slow Calexico song came on and I almost started to cry. However, the Christmas lights downtown are very pretty.

Heartbreak in 17 syllables.

A follow up to 2 haikus I wrote for my new travel mug.

i remember it
my stainless steel travel mug
in the good old days

i've searched everywhere
it's not in the lost and found
i might as well die.

etsy is making me sad today, for the first time ever. so i am far too depressed to update my blog.

No one loves me today, at all, and I am not exaggerating.

Monday is my last day of work, and we're going out for lunch in my office, except I thought lunch was today, so I didn't bring a lunch. I emailed James to ask if he wanted to go to Quizno's with me. But James can't go for lunch with me today because it is his boss's birthday, and he has an obligatory boss-birthday lunch event to attend.

I emailed him back:

I am probably having the saddest day ever. Qiuzno's by myself? Maybe if I ask nicely and tell them about my skills, they'll let me work there, and then I can become really really fat and get free subs.

And it's true.

Saddest day ever. For the past 24 hours, I have been feeling really under-appreciated, specifically on two fronts: (a) jokes. I make funny jokes at work, and either no one thinks they're funny, which is terrible; or people do think they're funny, which is worse. (b) cynicism. I don't think it's too much to ask that my worldview be taken seriously by other people. I keep running into this, day after day. It's not that I want to convert anyone. I just want to get through a whole day without anyone condescendingly treating me like I'm a moron.

Two "weltschmerz" posts in a row? OH NOES! Abandon blog-ship!

Ask me about my angst

I don't know why apartment therapy wants to make me cry by posting links to vintage library card catalogues on craigslist SAN FRANCISCO.

All you can ever find on craigslist Edmonton are data entry jobs and things from IKEA.

this was a triumph--I'm marking it down here, "huge success."

I'm having a crappy day, so I went home on my lunch break to have some alone time and better food. (After my office-mates invited me out for lunch with them, then left without me. Hrmph.) Running the microwave AND the toaster oven at the same time blew the fuse, or the breaker or whatever (I don't know, I'm not an electricity-ologist) and when I went out into the hall to fix it, I cut my finger on the fuse-box, and the band-aid on my cut finger is saturated with blood. It's pretty gross, and depressing.

On the plus side, I bet this is the first time a blogger entry has been tagged "weltschmerz, pathos, paranoia."

2 1/2 recent projects

I made these inserts for my off-brand swiffer duster. I actually like dusting with that thing, but I feel guilty throwing away the dusty parts, and then I feel cheap having to buy more of them. This solves both problems. All the dusting, none of the environmental guilt. I got the idea from this photo in the CRAFTY! photo pool. The fabric is remaindered fleece of some kind--$2.40 at Wal-Mart.



And this is a baby blanket I made for some friends who are having a baby in a couple of weeks. It has cute multicoloured stars on one side, because I would cover the whole world with stars if I could--so emo! so 80s! And the other wise is pink curdoroy, because pink corduroy is adorable, and all baby girls should have something made of pink corduroy.



This barely counts as a project, but I'm on a roll. I printed out a page of these super-cute embroidery thread cards on half of an orange file folder. Then I cut them out and used them to organize some of my more unwieldly embroidery thread.

I need a flippin' Flickr pro account.

Why I should never watch Lost in Translation alone on a Saturday night: because I will spent the next 48 hours in a melancholic, Wagnerian weltschmerz funk. This whole day has kind of made me want to cry. Last night I sat on my bed with the curtains open, spying on the people in the apartment building across the street, the night barely even dark because of the reflections from the snow. Today I went to Wal-Mart on the bus, primarily because I enjoy the bleakness of Capilano mall.

So.

I probably need to make something else right now, so my blues don't catch up with me.

___________________________________________

Currently listening to: Jonathan Coulton - Still Alive
via FoxyTunes
This song is AWESOME. And Jonathon Coulton's foxytunes page bio says: "Jonathan Coulton is an esoteric folk rock singer. He was first featured singing "Midnight Train to Georgia" with the Yale Whiffenpoofs. He is now the Contributing Troubadour at Popular Science..." He sang with the same acapella group as Rory Gilmore's grandpa? He's the "contributing troubador" at Popular Science? That is so frakkin' cool.

The shark-games people play

This Shark-runners game (From Discovery Channel, in honour of Shark Week) is kind of fun. You get to captain a research vessel conducting shark research. It takes place in real-time and the movements of the sharks are based on the movements of real sharks--tagged with tracking equipment. I do enjoy captaining things.

Facebook is updating their servers, or something, and I can't access the site. It's weird how these things become such a habit that not being able to check them is really disorienting--even though I KNOW there is nothing important happening on Facebook. Especially since no one else can log in either.

The final paycheque of the month is a depressing prospect--I pay my bills and have $90 left over to last me until the next one. No Etsy for me. This is contributing to today's sense of weltschmertz. My class isn't helping either--I dread Mondays and Wednesdays, and sort-of dread Tuesdays, as they have too much in common with Mondays and Wednesdays.

A diagram to accompany my previous post

Emotional state, and music preferences

I have now relieved another 2% of my self-pity by making Microsoft Paint diagrams.

Sure-fire signs that I am having a bad day

1. I cut my hair on a whim. I had a dream last night that I cut my hair, and I woke up, and I was like, I should cut my hair! And then I DID. That's what passes for inspiration these days, folks.


2. I got said hair cut at West Edmonton Mall, and it cost $18, and when I paid for it, the woman told me, "You need your eyebrows waxed," and offered to wax them for a few dollars extra. Like I am some kind of body-hair pity case. What happened to the customer always being right? When I told her that I didn't want my eyebrows waxed, she sort of scrutinized me, as if she were trying to figure out of I was ignorant, miserly, or just retarded.


3. With said hair cut I now look exactly, and I do mean EXACTLY, the way I did in fifth grade. Except in fifth grade I was not allowed to have my nose pierced, and to tell you the truth, I don't think the thought would have even occurred to me at the time.


4. I accidentally wrote a whole paper on the wrong topic. I am not kidding.


5. I went to this information session about job interviews today, and I realized, as if it was a message from God (*Zoolander talking into his tiny phone* "God?") that I am never going to get a job. My pre-workshop idealism and ignorance were far preferable to the state of career-related misery in whcih I now find myself.


6. On the way to West Edmonton Mall, on the bus, enroute (unbeknownst to me) to be verbally abused my a Chinese woman with bouffant blonde hair, there was a very old man. He was a thousand years old. He wanted to get off downtown, but the bus was an SuperExpress bus, and they never stop. He had to go all the way to the west end because he could not get off the bus. (a)I felt sorry for him, and this made me depressed. (b) Then I realized that the ancient man who cannot get the bus to stop is like a metaphor for my entire life. (c) Then I felt sorry for myself, and also like I was being sort of melodramatic and Mariah-Carey-ish.


7. I am watching Mysterious Skin, and it's good except it's very upsetting. And for the past three days I have been walking around feeling sort of dirty and sad, thinking about sexual abuse, in this kind of sexual-abuse-funk. If you have never had that feeling, let me tell you: it is not a good one.

Making this list relieved 12% of my self-pity but only 4% of my inner turmoil.

Disillusionment with the state of Western civilization; also, snack food.

I am not exactly a morning person, but I can usually muster enthusiasm to get out of bed with relative timeliness, locate and put on clothes, and even eat breakfast in the morning. I tend to wake up in my usual mood of apprehensive, cautious optimism, seasoned with amusing irony. But today I had one of those mornings when I would have given anything, almost, with the exception of my classic GameBoy and my firstborn, to just stay in bed. This led me to a depressive line of reasoning where I thought about what a great improvement it would be if our society had a little more tolerance for this kind of sloth. I am not talking about lazy, ne'er-do-wells here; I am talking about well-intentioned, contributing members of society who sometimes deserve to take a day off for no reason, Ferris-style. Can you imagine? Jocelyn's not coming to class today; she felt incredibly tired and depressed this morning for no reason. Achmed, can you take notes for her and then email them to her after class? Great. You know? Wouldn't that be something? I may sound like I'm being glib, but this is a serious question. If Western civilization is so great, then why do so many of its members spend pretty much every day doing things they don't really enjoy for no reason? Hmm?

It's definitely a "scooters" kind of day. I had cookies for breakfast because I could not summon the werewithal to thaw, toast, or cook anything. Then at 10 I had to go buy Coke, just to avoid falling asleep in my class. I don't know if caffeine really helps that much, but at least it makes me feel like I am being pro-active.

On this note I present to you: Why Work? This is a serious site whose ambition is to examine the titular question. (Ahem. Lifetime to do list item: Use the phrase "titular question" in a sentence. Check.)

A slightly less significant, but still puzzling, question is this: why do we (and by "we" I refer to myself and not, as in the previous paragraphs, to the West) have three partially eaten packages of pita bread in the freezer, plus one in the fridge? There is a cluster of neurons on my brain-- the "buy pita bread" neurons-- who persistently misfire every time I am in the grocery store. "Jocelyn!" these neurons tell me. "Buy pita bread! And maybe some hummous! Oooh, chocolate bars! I don't feel like getting out of bed tomorrow, do you?"