Saturday night when I went home I was in a bad mood, as it had been a long, long day. Because of my black mood and the fact that my shoulder had been hurting all day and seemed likely to continue hurting in the morning, I opted to “sleep in” until 5 on Sunday morning and skip my usual workout.
To add to the feeling of “being naughty” I decided not to pack a breakfast or lunch to bring with me.
In fact, I was correct in my belief that my shoulder would continue to hurt, so that mollified any guilt I might have felt about not working out, and the fact that on Friday my paycheck had included twelve and a half hours of holiday pay along with sixteen hours of overtime assuaged any guilt I felt about wasting money on buying my lunch.
On the topic of guilt, though, my mother called me shortly after I got home last night to let me know that she and my dad would be gone all day today, as today is their anniversary.
If you were to ask me, “When is your parents’ anniversary?” I would be able to tell you, without giving it any thought, “July 25th.” However, that knowledge and the knowledge of the fact that the 25th was rapidly approaching never managed to connect, and so the thought, “My parents’ anniversary is coming up” never occurred to me.
My mother advised me not to feel guilty, though, as she would prefer that we all (myself and my siblings) forget it and not bother giving them gifts.
For the record, it’s their 46th anniversary. Not bad for two people who met on a blind date.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a lot of extra money in my last paycheck. As it stands, I have enough to buy that Tablet PC I’ve been wanting without having to do any real damage to my savings (particularly since I’ll be racking up forty hours of overtime next month thanks to my JavaScript and CSS classes).
So basically there was nothing stopping me from going on line and buying the thing.
Yet I didn’t do it.
Further, I really didn’t even feel compelled to do so. Yeah, I want it, but evidently I’m not exactly chomping at the bit to buy it.
It occurred to me that if I waited a couple of months (in September I have three paydays), I could buy a more expensive, higher-quality, and full-featured Tablet PC.
That’s not the real reason I’m holding off, though.
Basically, I just have a feeling that as soon as I spend that money, something is going to come up and I’ll be hosed.
In fact, I have the feeling that something is going to come up anyway, and the money I have won’t be enough to cover it.
It’s not really a premonition or anything, just a general feeling of unease about having (to a very limited extent) more money than I know what to do with.
I guess I’m just too accustomed to living paycheck to paycheck.
Of course, there are more things out there that I want than I could afford to buy, so honestly, I do know what to do with the money; I probably just don’t know where to start.
But as much as I want those things, the urge to hold on to the money is pretty strong.
As it stands, I’m pretty sure that I will buy the Tablet PC at some point.
Just not yet.
This afternoon I had to go in to work for a training session. As I needed to go out in the world and do some things anyway I had headed out this morning with the intention of just idly killing time until the training session without having to return home.
So I left a bit before 11 and made my first stop of the day, which was to get the haircut that I’d put off getting on Wednesday.
That carried me until about 11:30, at which point I walked over to my optometrist’s office to pick up cleaning solution for my contacts.
Like it does every time I head to my optometrist’s, a small part of me was kind of hoping that this would be the time I would bump into “Stone Face.”
As per usual, though, she wasn’t there, as she has probably moved away (no, not to get away from me; it was something she was already talking about when I first met her).
The “Stone Face” thing refers to the woman in question’s overall lack of expressiveness, and is in now way intended to indicate that she was unattractive. Far from it; she was gorgeous. Given how attractive she was, the fact of her absence was exacerbated by just how unattractive, individually and collectively, the women actually working in the office were.
From there, despite having watched “Super Size Me” last week, I headed over to McDonald’s for lunch. I figured that I might as well, and I harbor no illusions about my lunch being “healthy” just because I got the grilled chicken.
After that I headed to Wal-Mart and picked up a few things.
I killed as much time there as I could, but it was still only a little after noon by the time I got out, and I didn’t need to be at the meeting until 2:30.
There were a couple of places I could have gone (the mall, Best Buy, etc.) to kill some more time, but I just didn’t feel up to it, so I just decided to do my grocery shopping, which I’d planned to do on the way back from the training session, and go home and wait until it was time to leave for the meeting.
So that’s what I did.
There’s an episode of “The Simpsons” in which Krusty, alone in his house, goes to the refrigerator and asks, “Champagne or Slim Fast?” He then grabs one of each, pours them together, takes a drink, and says, “Ahh…that passes the time.”
That’s what came to mind when it occurred to me how pathetic it is that I can’t find anything that I want to do out in the world to pass the time for three hours…
In any case, there are some shows on my DVR’s hard drive that I should watch. I’ll probably be back later with more.
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