I Should Not Be Given Time Off...
Time off? Oh yeah, sure, sounds fuckin' great. Hook me the fuck up. Let me roam around with nothing but spare time on my hands. I'm positive that I can keep myself occupied. I mean, I got a pile of movies to watch, and hey, I downloaded all those episodes of tv shows that are on too late for me to watch, right? Shit, man, eleven days will go by like greased lightning, or like Clay Aiken's career.
That was what I thought.
The fact of the matter is, it takes roughly one and one half days for me to suffer from the stir crazies. If I don't have the prospect of going to work where I have something that can keep me busy for no less than eight hours, I start to hear things. I start to drink excessive amounts of caffeine, which serves no purpose but to make me hyperactively irritating. I am aware of this happening, and I take steps to 'nip it in the bud' but it don't work.
I mean, early on in the week I started retraining myself on website design. And then I switched tracks to Flash (I apologize to those of you who clicked on the previous blog's link ... I am learning, and much like when I was learning Photoshop and went apeshit with bevel/emboss and drop shadows, it'll be some time before I discover a happy medium between crass artistic style and weird ideas). I read four books, watched a half a dozen movies. Some of those movies were the same movie four times in a row. I played an awesome video game called Uplink; you play a hacker working for a company, and you hack computers and shit. It is so much fun and such an amazing waste of time that I was forced to delete it from my computer after I spent all my time robbing banks rather than follow the plot line --- there I was, at two am in the morning, wigging out from caffeine and chocolate, yelling at my computer because there was no fucking way that that bank could have possibly tracked my bounces, I fucking deleted everything.
Now it's worse. Now I don't want to do anything, except possibly complain about how I have nothing to do. My mother, god bless her twisted heart, blithely suggests time and again that I do laundry, or tidy up my room, or go for a walk or fix my work boots (for some reason I can't figure out, they smell exactly like moldy cat piss after a bad day of rain). If I wanted to do something worthwhile, I'd find a job that pays more than nine bucks an hour. Worthwhile tasks have the maximum amount of impact on my surroundings, but the minimul amount of personal satisifaction. I don't get off on saying 'Look at me, I'm a tidy person' or 'Wheee! Isn't laundry fun?'. Laundry is a chore, and by chore, I mean trial. The only way it could get any worse was if I was forced to do it while in stocks. I'm just enough of a bourgeoisie cockass to pay my mother to do my laundry for me and to feel guilty about it.
Yes, I am aware that there are people out there the opposite of me, that they can, in fact, keep themselves happy and occupied for any length of time without going nuts and eating an entire refridgerator from top to bottom (I stopped at the olives, though, 'cuz those things are fucking repellant). I imagine they have quite a nice time on their vacations, visiting friends and relations, sitting at beautiful quayside coffee shops enjoying their lattes and their scones, or just wandering around their own homes so blissfully pleased with their lives that they don't see me coming at them with a kitchen knife until it's too late.
Surely, EvilMister, you are lying!
No. I'm not. That is why in the last ten years, I have never taken a vacation purely for the purposes of not doing anything. Every two weeks off I have taken either involves me moving somewhere or helping someone move. The majority of my vacation time has either been used up for sick days, to supplement weak paychecks, or lost in the vast machinery of corporate america. I am firmly convinced that in order to enjoy any vacation, I will need to not be in Canada, and even then there's a risk; I wonder how accomodating the local polizia in, oh, say, Cancun would be to a large naked man running down the streets screaming his head off because he's got nothing to do. (I won't do that here, because you don't piss where you sleep, and I figure if I'm going to lose it in a foreign country, I might as well have Indecent Exposure added to the charges. I think that would take the bite out of being arrested, and would make the story fun for the whole family.)
In short, kids, time off doesn't suit me well.
That was what I thought.
The fact of the matter is, it takes roughly one and one half days for me to suffer from the stir crazies. If I don't have the prospect of going to work where I have something that can keep me busy for no less than eight hours, I start to hear things. I start to drink excessive amounts of caffeine, which serves no purpose but to make me hyperactively irritating. I am aware of this happening, and I take steps to 'nip it in the bud' but it don't work.
I mean, early on in the week I started retraining myself on website design. And then I switched tracks to Flash (I apologize to those of you who clicked on the previous blog's link ... I am learning, and much like when I was learning Photoshop and went apeshit with bevel/emboss and drop shadows, it'll be some time before I discover a happy medium between crass artistic style and weird ideas). I read four books, watched a half a dozen movies. Some of those movies were the same movie four times in a row. I played an awesome video game called Uplink; you play a hacker working for a company, and you hack computers and shit. It is so much fun and such an amazing waste of time that I was forced to delete it from my computer after I spent all my time robbing banks rather than follow the plot line --- there I was, at two am in the morning, wigging out from caffeine and chocolate, yelling at my computer because there was no fucking way that that bank could have possibly tracked my bounces, I fucking deleted everything.
Now it's worse. Now I don't want to do anything, except possibly complain about how I have nothing to do. My mother, god bless her twisted heart, blithely suggests time and again that I do laundry, or tidy up my room, or go for a walk or fix my work boots (for some reason I can't figure out, they smell exactly like moldy cat piss after a bad day of rain). If I wanted to do something worthwhile, I'd find a job that pays more than nine bucks an hour. Worthwhile tasks have the maximum amount of impact on my surroundings, but the minimul amount of personal satisifaction. I don't get off on saying 'Look at me, I'm a tidy person' or 'Wheee! Isn't laundry fun?'. Laundry is a chore, and by chore, I mean trial. The only way it could get any worse was if I was forced to do it while in stocks. I'm just enough of a bourgeoisie cockass to pay my mother to do my laundry for me and to feel guilty about it.
Yes, I am aware that there are people out there the opposite of me, that they can, in fact, keep themselves happy and occupied for any length of time without going nuts and eating an entire refridgerator from top to bottom (I stopped at the olives, though, 'cuz those things are fucking repellant). I imagine they have quite a nice time on their vacations, visiting friends and relations, sitting at beautiful quayside coffee shops enjoying their lattes and their scones, or just wandering around their own homes so blissfully pleased with their lives that they don't see me coming at them with a kitchen knife until it's too late.
Surely, EvilMister, you are lying!
No. I'm not. That is why in the last ten years, I have never taken a vacation purely for the purposes of not doing anything. Every two weeks off I have taken either involves me moving somewhere or helping someone move. The majority of my vacation time has either been used up for sick days, to supplement weak paychecks, or lost in the vast machinery of corporate america. I am firmly convinced that in order to enjoy any vacation, I will need to not be in Canada, and even then there's a risk; I wonder how accomodating the local polizia in, oh, say, Cancun would be to a large naked man running down the streets screaming his head off because he's got nothing to do. (I won't do that here, because you don't piss where you sleep, and I figure if I'm going to lose it in a foreign country, I might as well have Indecent Exposure added to the charges. I think that would take the bite out of being arrested, and would make the story fun for the whole family.)
In short, kids, time off doesn't suit me well.
posted by Unknown @ 1:52 PM
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