Low Men and Technical Girls

The view from inside my cubicle. See how dead the lights make me look?

About two weeks ago, my cat decided to make sweet, sweet face love to my tablet while I was out and about, resulting in an unfortunate crash landing that the tablet didn’t take well. It became quickly evident that the tablet had resented its latest interactions with cat and gravity and was rapidly shuffling off this mortal coil for good, which left me in the awkward position of having to do my job without any podcasts or audio books.

Now, for people who aren’t shackled inside of a gray cubicle with six foot high walls proofreading ad copy, the lack of podcasts might seem like no real problem, but I assure you that proofreading is what business majors do to English Majors by way of revenge for us not writing their term papers for them. In short, proofreading ad copy is something best endured with as large a buffer as you can manage, for the sake of your sanity if nothing else.

You don’t actually realize how deeply dependent you’ve become on a thing until it’s gone, and I was just about to crawl my skin. What can I say? I'm a technical girl. And that was before I learned that my three month wait for the audio book version of Steven King’s The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger had finally come through in Overdrive. Finally, a chance to wipe away the horrible memory of that horrible movie (sorry Idris. I still love you, but the script was shit), and I was stuck with a glorified brick. I was practically getting tremors I was jonesing so bad.

I broke down and used my credit card rewards to get a new cheapie tablet. So much for mental fortitude and personal discipline. I need my books, or some poor sales rep is going to bleed, bitches.

Last night, my therapist invited me to start sitting with my discomfort instead of trying to busy it away or drown it with infotainment or delicious booze, as is my wont. I won’t lie. I’d rather scour my face off with brillo most days than feel my actual damn feels, which are stupid and very uncomfortable, but it’s something I’m willing to practice. I assume it’s going to help in the long run.

Nevertheless, eight solid hours a day, five days a week with only music and the constant whine of my own crazy-ass brain for company is a little much. I think at least having the occasional foray into escapism has to be healthy, too. 

So as soon as the new tablet is done copying over all my apps, I’m going to download me some Dark Tower. See if those low men can’t help shift the burden of my mental illness at least a little.

Warhole

Damn it. It’s been two weeks since I posted last. Somehow that happened despite my best plans. Actually, I know exactly how that happened. A pinch of stress, a dash of exhaustion and a dollop of not a clue about what I wanted to say in this blog was how that happened. Oh well, what are wagons for if not getting back on?

Tomorrow is Dental Appointment: The Bloodening. I’m not looking forward to it. Sort of long tailed cat in a rocking chair factory nervous about the whole affair, to be perfectly candid. Whatever crazy ass ginger gene that makes it so pain killers and Novocain don’t work so good I have in spades, which is awesome because I also have super soft teeth that cavity up if I so much as think about brownies.

Win.

Come to think of it, it’s been a win sort of month all around lately. Work, naturellement, has featured heavily in this non-stop shit smorgasbord, to the point where I’ve contemplated punching myself in the face a few times when I wake up in a good mood just so, you know, it might convince whatever malignant spirits govern my workplace into leaving my sorry ass alone for a change of pace.

Granted, part of this rant I chalk up to having to proofread a full page menu ad for a Mexican Seafood restaurant in Hobart, Indiana. That sentence has so much fail in it. Half the damn thing was in Spanish, and there were about ninety items on the menu. My pet theory is that the larger the menu, the higher the odds the restaurant is going to give you food poisoning. Considering this place serves about ten different forms of ceviche in Hobart-Fucking-Indiana (which is hundreds of miles away from the sea, FYI), I am fairly sure this place is actually just trying to kill people. 

On the plus side, their ad was fucking spotless. Kudos to design.

Where is all this rambling leading? Don’t ask me. I just drive this bus. I most certainly didn’t load it with plastique that’s set to detonate if I drop before 55 mph. What I’ve been thinking about a lot lately at night while I’m trying to get a bit of fiction written is escape.

Escapism has a negative connotation in our culture, and I’m not going to rehash the arguments for why that’s so much elitist bullshit. Other and better minds have beat that dead horse plenty. What I’ve been struggling with is how very few escape hatches there are in my life right now. Living in the desert of the now isn’t doing great things for me.

Which is why I did what I swore up and down I would never do. I opened up a goddamn World of Warcraft account. I managed to avoid falling down a Warhole throughout college by virtue of being way too poor to afford the necessary computer/internet combo, a fact which I concealed with a thick swaddling blanket of fake smuggetry.

Guys, it’s perfect. It’s everything I was afraid it was going to be: immersive, beautiful and compelling. Fortunately, by avoiding WOW for all these years, I seem to have developed the ability to restrain myself from freefalling into addiction. Which is good because this is a wonderful vacation. I like not being a cubicle serf for a little while. I like having a way of rewarding myself for hitting my word count goal. (You see the cleverness of my nefarious plan? I’ve found a way of paying myself for getting shit done until I can find a way of actually getting paid for getting shit done. Hell yes.)

So that’s the score. Twenty minutes of WOW for every time I hit my word count. So, fellow writers and artsy types, what’s your escape hatch? How do you manage to limit your own private world suck? Inquiring minds want to know.