Coffee heat rising

Ridiculous day, so far…

Okay, okay. I can’t even blame anyone (other than my turkey self) for this day’s launch. It wuz all my fault.

Out of the sack at 5:15. Off to M’hijito’s at 6:30, there to meet Bila the Painter par Excellence (or, if not p.e., at least par incredibly cheap), slated to arrive at 7:00 a.m. Son is still in the sack. A half-hour passes. No Bila. I’m hungry, not having had energy or volition to bolt down more than a couple pieces of cheese and a banana. Another half-hour passes. Kid gets up. No Bila. Shee-ut.

I drive to the train stop, 400 photocopied page proofs in hand, planning to earn another $50 in the transit to and from the Great Desert University. Stick my credit card in the ticket machine. Receive message: Not accepting credit cards today. Bureau-code for Eff You Very Much!

Naturally, I have no cash on me, because I never carry cash. Doesn’t matter: last time I tried to stick a bill in the machine, the machine spat it right out. If you don’t happen to carry $2.50 in nickels, dimes, and quarters, you’re not riding. Curse, stalk back to my car, drive to Costco, fill up. 

In the course of this Brownian motion, the local NPR station is delivering its flaming-debris-in-the-middle-lane reports: State Route 51 is dead stopped from the interchange back to Northern; the 202 has a wreck at 32nd Street. Wheeeeeee!

After filling up, I decide I’d druther wait at my house than on the road for the freeways to clear up, so I drive home and work on an article for a GDU client editor while the rush hour passes. Back at the casa, I glance at the calendar and learn that Bila is scheduled for the 18th, not for today.

Oh good. We can repeat all this next Monday!

Dumb tax!!!

Arrive on campus around 10:30. Duck through the church courtyard to avoid walking past Her Deanship’s office window. There have to dodge around a homeless mentally ill person sleeping on the sidewalk. Emerge near the stoplight at the crosswalk, where I’m panhandled by another homeless mentally ill person and then cross the street almost hand-in-hand with a third homeless mentally ill person. Really. We should at least set up showers on the streets for folks who need them, since We the People can’t bring ourselves to provide shelter and psychiatric care for our most helpless compatriots. Oh. Sorry. That would be SOCIALIST!!!!!, wouldn’t it?

Moving on, Her Deanship has requested that I send in the two endless forms to fulfill the requirements for the spring 2009 annual review. I point out that this is a bit redundant, since I’ll be gone in December (if not sooner, should I happen to find actual work elsewhere…). She replies that she thought I’d like to have it, “since you’ve worked hard this year.” 

Over the weekend, it’s occurred to me that I probably wrote most or all of the annual review b.s. shortly before she canned me. So, after I shovel the first supplicant out of my office, I dig up this spring’s paperwork. And yea, verily: it’s already filled out and filed on my computer. Thank God!

Nine. Single-spaced. Pages. Of. Ten-point. Arial. Pointless. Circular. Repetitious. Meaningless. Palaver.

Why on earth would the woman want to subject herself to this nonsense over an employee who’s out the door? Why??? I’ll tell you why: because one of her higher-ups must have ordered her to do it! Left to her own devices, she’s not crazy.

This. This one, for a change, is not my doing. For annual reviews, the GDU bureaucracy makes employees answer a long series of specific written questions, many of them amazingly stupid, that ask you to find original ways to repeat yourself seven different ways from Sunday. The result is a jumble of garbage, a vast waste of time.

Well, thank God I’d already wasted my time before the ax fell, since I had plenty of constructive things to do today. Now it’s Her Deanship’s turn to waste some time.

Another meeting, this one of disaffected staffers. We lay out tentative plans for our workflow for the rest of our tenure at GDU. One employee describes the bizarre antics of the soon-to-be-ex-husband. Dear God…what is wrong with people? The guy makes GDU sound like a haven of sanity. Moving on, we come up with 87 gerjillion things for me to find out from our client editors.

SK describes a new freelance assignment. I’m to find and sign a contract returned to us by a guy who wants us to edit a religious tract. Back to my fault: I set it aside on Friday and blew it off.

I send out a flurry of e-mails to the client editors, by way of accomplishing the 87 gerjillion things. By now I’ve infected every member of my staff plus the Dean’s factotum, who presented herself for the first meeting. No doubt by Wednesday (commencement!) so many clones of my virus will be circulating through the campus population that I will, by proxy, infect the President of the United States of America. Talk about your six degrees of separation!

Flee! Early afternoon comes and I escape, stopping by a Yup Grocery for two packages of pretty good sushi, I suffering again, for the second day, from a great craving for soy sauce. Must be some sort of electrolyte imbalance. Home to consume the stuff with dos cervezas. 

E-mail from SDXB: the cops are reopening his daughter’s 15- or 20-year-old case, in which she was kidnapped from the GDU campus, hauled into the desert, tortured, and then set free (or she escaped, unclear which) after her car was torched—coincidentally on a ranch belonging to a friend of mine. My friend’s mother-in-law saw the fire and called the Highway Patrol, who rescued her after the perps had fled. Oh hell, why not? We haven’t had our fill of drama, have we?

I can’t stand it. I’m going back to bed.