Observations

1. Mondays suck.
2. If Alex Rodriguez is the best player in baseball, why have the teams he's played on not appeared in the playoffs? Is he actually worth the money he's paid? I don't think so.
3. There are very few things that taste better on a sucky Monday evening than a grilled ham and cheese sandwich and a little glass bottle of Coke.
4. This afternoon, I needed a list of items that were purchased with funds from the state library grant that I wrote last year. I knew it was on my desk (at work) somewhere. I had to dig through 2 bins and 3 stacks of stuff—books, DVDs, sheets of barcodes, review journals, scraps of paper with nonsensical numbers jotted on them, pink slips (a highly formalized system of recordkeeping which, for all intents and purposes, is making up for the fact that I spent more than a year working for the library while I was in law school retroactively converting about 8000 books into a system that wouldn't load into Innovative...so none of those items are in the NIC cat. now. So when someone checks one of them out, the barcode scans as "not in system". Pink slip is completed and turned in to Technical Services. We input a record and wait for the book to come back. When it does, we decide whether to keep it. Imperfect, but we're getting by.), applications, Demco and Showcases catalogs, etc. It took about 15 minutes to find one piece of legal pad paper. My desk isn't a square acre or anything, just a regular, crappy, institutional desk. Must clean! Tomorrow!
5. I get more done when there's no one around than I could ever think of getting done when there's another person in the room. For one thing, there's no illusion of being organized, and I don't have to remember not to swear. Has anyone noticed that I swear? Yeah, I swear.
6. When I started writing my thesis I thought I was an idiot and that every word I wrote was crap. As time went on, I realized that I'm actually brilliant, and most of what I write is inspired and thoughtful and worthy of publication. Certainly it's no wonder that I won first prize in the 1999 Nathan Burkan Memorial Competition at ASCAP (the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers). Now that I'm spending the majority of my conscious hours when I'm not slogging away at the salt mines that are my library editing my own pabulum in response to my committee's harangues, however, I acknowledge that I was much closer to the truth when I began. One out of every ten words that I've written in my thesis is easily strikable. Another one is debatable. And maybe three of the remaining eight are pretty good. S'not so bad.
7. Nothing like the tenth migraine in twelve days to give me perspective on life.
8. Valentine's Day sucks like the vortex of a thousand Mondays.
9. Eddie Bauer was having a catalog sale and I was going to buy something. Didn't really care what, just wanted to buy something. Opened the catalog, looked through it, and found... two things. First, a leather messenger bag. Gorgeous, brown, not overly distressed but not too grown-up looking, either. Definitely not a briefcase (eew). But the strap was miniscule and I knew I'd blow it out the first time I tried to schlep more than a couple CDs back to work on the same day that I brought in cookies to share. For $195 it should look like it would stand up to Rubbermaid. Sigh. So, onto the second item - a pair of linen pants. Loose, flowy, plain waist and rather wide legs for me but not super huge and sloppy-looking. With a cardigan they might even look dressyish. (!) $59. No crime. Offered in flax and black. I pulled them up on the website and looked at them for a long time, alternate views, larger picture, each color, on a model.... Nope. Couldn't do it. I can't even waste money to cheer myself up anymore. Booo.
10. What's the difference between being open and feeling the need to confess? Is anyone going to tell you, anymore, when you've done the latter rather than living up to the former?