Today, I learned just how deep into the Abyss of Chemical Dependency my caffeine addiction plunges. My morning consisted mostly of making my every movement look like it requires the efforts of a hundred dying slaves (I’ve used that one before, haven’t I?), and overall being all mopey and boohoo and oh God my apartment’s a wad of snot and I hate my job and nobody loves me and all that crap you’d sooner expect to see on some angsty college kid’s blog.

Then I remembered I hadn’t had any coffee or Mountain Dew. So I got me some of both. Within ten minutes, probably less, the sun got a little brighter, my legs got a little lighter, my teeth were a little whiter, the guy in the next cube wasn’t such a little blighter, and I think that’s about as long as I can keep rhyming like this. That last one took me a good ten minutes to come up with.

I’d quit, but then I’d probably gain weight. Okay, yeah, that’s the smoker’s argument. It’s true, though. Look at every weight loss supplement available on the market today. Filter your eyes through the various active ingredients these herbal snake oils boast. What’s the one commonality amongst the disparity? Why, it’s our friendly friend, 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine, of course! Can you just imagine what a fatty I’d be were it not for my caffeine intake helping me to maintain a nice, stable, hummingbird level of metabolism?

And sure, it raises blood pressure and the risk of heart attack. But y’know what? The amount on the bill is heed, and I will not remit. I’ve always been all about going down in a blaze of glory. I think having my chest explode spectacularly, splashing hemoglobin all over the guests at the pimpin’ party I’d thrown to celebrate my new life as a hot-shot test pilot - someday, I swear - rates up there in the grand conflagration scale.

It also kills my attention span. Fortunately, since this is just an informal journal, I’m not really expected to flesh out all of my ideas and come up with a good conclusion.

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Y’ever have one of those mornings where you wish that your coworkers could just shut up for half a second while you slit their throats and drink their blood while chanting satanic verses? Really? ‘Cause I don’t have those kinds of mornings. I just want them to shut up, is all. I mean, how long can you possibly talk about using the free laser pointer you got for Engineers Week to play with your cat? But geez, that doesn’t make me want to channel the fires of hell and tap into the powers of the Dark Lord Lucifer. Sheesh. You’re messed up.

As long as we’re on the subject of crummy stuff, let’s go over a few more gripes I have with the real-ass world:

1) You know that part in Office Space when Peter hesitates before touching the door handle because he knows he’s gonna get zapped, and then he touches the door handle and gets zapped? What he’s going through there really does happen, except in my case, it’s the sink in the men’s room.

2) I think I might have been hired as a patsy. My project has this sort of cloud of doom hanging over it, and wouldn’t you know it, I’ve been considered the project’s technical lead since I joined the company, only nobody told me I had been positioned as such until the other day. Thanks, guys.

3) The slightest snowfall is prefixal to the End of the Universe for most people.

4) You never use anything you learned in college. Thank God I never did more than a 3.0’s worth of work.

5) That hopeless money sink men call rent - if I wanted to make a check out to some anonymous black hole every month, I’d father an illegitimate child. Must… buy… real estate…

6) Acronyms. Mother of donkey muffins, have I ever grown to hate acronyms. AOA, JBMD, KDX, ORTS, J5, BL7P1R - seriously, cut it the monkey out already and just say the words. It’ll take you all of a second longer, and I’ll no longer have to keep an AIDK list on the wall of my cube (Acronyms I Don’t Know).

7) For some reason, you will never, ever have to make tinkle until the exact moment passes at which you no longer have time to hit the potty before your meeting.

This is by no means a comprehensive list. For example, I left out the part about me never having anything better to do than sit around playing the NES emulator on my Pocket PC.

Nor is this meant to convey that I hate the real world and want to go back to school, good Lord no. College was great and all, and nothing beats the suspense encountered when you wake up with a screaming headache at 4pm on a Sunday afternoon and discover that you’re missing your underwear and whoa, why does your finger smell like that? But I tell ya, having money, wow. Direct deposit, holy Dr. Schollsy, I’d never imagined how cool it could be to check my account balance every Monday morning to see the $700 that magically appeared in there just for me at some point during the weekend.

But I swear, if the guy on the other side of the cube wall to my right hums the tune of “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” one more time…

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I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and played with the tablet some more. Here are the consequences:

That should give you a good idea of the sort of shit that keeps me up at night.

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I just got a nice new Wacom tablet and drew this when I was trying it out:

It’s going to good use, as you can see…

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I don’t know why, but I’ve been having the worst time getting to sleep at night this week. Running on only about four hours every day is killing me at work, and yet even after three nights of it, I still spent a good long time staring at the ceiling last night. Relief seemed to be in sight when I started dozing off around 11:30, but then I had a half-asleep dream where there was this spider the size of a dog growling like a bear in my face. I’m a rational man, so naturally, I jumped out of bed and ran like a bat out of hell into the living room before I woke up and figured out what the funk was going on.

I fell back to sleep some time around 3 or 4. Bear in mind that I get up at 6 during the week now.

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