Eccentric Flower:200911/Things

It is now 2:30 and I haven't had lunch today because the preceding entry flared up at exactly the wrong time. (I am not blaming anyone for that but myself. Let it be clear.)

It is now too late to go out and have lunch unless I'm not going back to work afterward (I have been known to take a very late afternoon lunch on days when I leave early), but I have code which I must finish by the end of the day. In fact, I'm panged by the acute awareness that I'm not finishing it right this minute.

Then I will go home and enjoy a few hours of empty recreation before spending a weekend full of social obligations I neither asked for nor wanted.

Yes, I am a jerk sometimes. I am also lonely and exhausted and angry at the world for its stupidity. (No, no, not minor journal-angst stupidity. Maine stupidity. Fort Hood stupidity. Afghanistan stupidity. Things like that.)

I gave up the melatonin. My sleep has been pretty good without it, as far as I can tell. I'm keeping it around for crisis nights but I haven't had any. And yet I'm tired and crabby. I can't say I have a particular good reason. I suppose I could claim that I still see coroner's pictures of head wounds or that I lie awake thinking about how the religious right must be cleansed by fire, but it's not true.

If it's depression, it must be chemical because I can't see how it would be situational.

It's little things. Like finding out yesterday (while spending twenty minutes waiting on an incompetent pharmacy clerk trying to buy goddamned Claritin for my wife from a paranoid government who has made us all out to be criminals and meth-abusers) that my driver's license has been expired since February because apparently the state of Massachusetts has decided to completely blow off notifying drivers of such useful data. They've also closed all convenient offices, and they're making me go downtown because I haven't had a new photo taken for a license in nine years or more, which just underscores that they're far more interested in using licenses as a fee-generation system and enforcement tool of false crimes (like buying Claritin) than anything actually having to do with road safety. See, got a really good rant there out of something which is, on the larger scale of things, totally minor. That's about where my head is.

Another little thing is wanting for several days to talk about some Economist articles and finding out that the site has taken all its useful content behind a pay curtain so that I can no longer link the articles. Well, screw you, Economist, I hope your site traffic goes to zero now, your entire web site has just become useless to me. I'd quote the articles but of course I have disposed of my physical copy of the issue because I knew I could get to the content online. This is no way to run a railroad, especially for a magazine that (unlike many others) doesn't need to lock down their website heavily because their print edition is still in the black.

Geez, won't he just post something cheerful and stop this ranting and raving?

Give me a goddamned reason.

Oh, all right. Fine. I like this XKCD a great deal. Quite a lot. There.