An Endless Cycle

Last night I stayed up playing a rousing (literally) game of “Sleep/Not Sleepy” until about 2:30.
The rules of the game are very simple: when I’m up doing things I’m half asleep and barely able to keep my eyes open, but as soon as I get into bed I’m wide awake without even a hint of tiredness.
It’s a game I play nearly as often as some people play WoW or Everquest. I’m not sure why, as I don’t enjoy it, and ultimately there’s no way to win.
But whatever. At least once I finally did manage to force the tiredness to follow me to bed I drifted off with only a minimal amount of thinking about The Omen or the other movie that’s only a idle thought away, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, which would have made sleep a near-impossibility, especially at that time of the night.
Plaintive, insistent whining a little after 7 am let me know that the chick upstairs apparently got an early start to her day (either that or the dog has become so needy that he even whines and barks when she goes to sleep), and I was forced to think about just how happy I would be to end that dog’s miserable excuse for an existence. At this point I don’t think that I would even feel guilty afterwards. Besides, the dog is probably wouldn’t mind dying if it would mean being free from the bipolar prison of being suicidally depressed when she’s gone and manically happy when she returns.
The worst part is that now whenever I hear the dog whining, barking and howling, it brings to mind that song that goes, “Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone,” which is yet another reason to hate him, given that the song sucks and I don’t know it very well, so I find myself with a song that I don’t like and only know a few words to stuck in my head.
(Hmm, after looking up the lyrics it seems the song is even more applicable to the dog’s plight than I’d originally thought)
Eventually the dog shut its bark-hole and I managed to drift back to sleep, finally rousing about an hour later than usual.
To make up for that lost hour I didn’t sit around and do quite as much nothing as I usually do in the morning, and actually ended up heading out into the world at around the same time I would have if I’d gotten up earlier.
The Safeway across from where I used to live in Ashburn remains the cheapest place in the area to get gas, and I needed to go to Wal-Mart, which means going to Sterling because I won’t go to the one here in Leesburg, so I made a stop there first.
It was about as uneventful as gassing up usually is, unlike last week.
Last week when I was at the pump I looked about me with a frown as I saw that all of the other patrons were overweight housewives in their forties when I noticed that the SUV in front and to the left of me had a Wisconsin license plate. This stood out because you don’t often see Wisconsin plates around here, and I grew up around Wisconsin, and, in fact, lived on the opposite side of two of its borders (in Michigan and in Minnesota).
Still, the license plate alone would hardly have been noteworthy in and of itself.
No, what stood out was the driver, a young woman who was a fine example of just how well the Mid-West can make them when it puts its mind to doing so.
As I was leaving I tried to get another good look at her as I drove past but was foiled in my efforts by a soccer mom who decided that talking on her cell phone was more important than not plowing her minivan into my car, and so I drove off with only the memory of the fleeting glimpse I’d caught of her while still at the pump.
Meanwhile, back in the slightly more recent past, I filled up my tank uneventfully and made my way to Wal-Mart to pick up, among other things, a Father’s Day Card, as I’d erroneously thought it was this weekend.
While trying to find a line to stand in it occurred to me that immigration reform might be a really bad idea as there are never enough registers open at Wal-Mart as it is, so I can’t imagine what effect further depletion of the cheap labor ranks would have on my shopping experience.
Then again, maybe it would balance out by reducing the number of customers as well.
In any case, all I know is that will be strange – as it always is – to go home next month and find that all of the people working at the stores and restaurants look like me (though probably fatter) and sound like me (though their actual command of the English language, for all that they are native speakers, probably won’t be that much better than most of the immigrants I encounter out here).
Speaking of home, yesterday I got a call from my friend Kevin who it turns out is living in the apartment above my niece Jourdan and her friend Lauren. That’s not too surprising of a coincidence, though, as the phrase “It’s a small world” is pretty much always applicable to the UP.
After I left Wal-Mart I realized that I needed to stop at a grocery store and pick up a few things, as I never got around to doing any real grocery shopping this week. I didn’t really need to, as last week’s cooking has resulted in a freezer that’s jam-packed with leftovers.
I was going to pick up a frozen pizza for lunch, but then decided that I’d just go to the Super Target to do my shopping and get a pizza from the “Pizza Hut Express.”
Accomplishing all of that, I came home and headed out to the hammock for some chillaxing, which was interrupted by someone who decided to dial my number rather than the number of the person he wanted to talk to.
And that’s pretty much been my day. I haven’t really had the energy or desire to do anything constructive.
I spent much of yesterday performing some hard drive hygiene, as a while back I discovered to my horror that I’d completely filled up my 250 GB external hard drive.
Before you say it, no, it’s not all porn. Most of the space is taken up by comic books and pictures. Okay, technically some of the pictures do qualify as porn, I suppose, but most of them are just standard celebrity/model pictures that I use as reference material.
And of course my drawings take up a major chunk of space, especially given that in many cases I have multiple versions of the same image.
In the end, between moving things off to DVD and making some decisions about what I really need to keep, I freed up about 50 GB, and there’s still a lot more that I could move off the hard drive, but I just don’t feel like messing with it.
Of course, as soon as I freed up all of that space I was immediately online surfing for new reference pictures and starting the whole cycle all over again.
Honestly, the easiest thing to do would be to just buy another big external hard drive, though that’s not the cheapest thing to do, and ultimately it would just add to the physical clutter of my desk.
I actually have a 120 GB external hard drive lying around, but it’s jacked up in some fashion that resists my efforts to un-jack it, so I’m reluctant to entrust any data to it.
I considered buying a networked drive, as that would allow me to put it anywhere in the condo, but they’re kind of pricey.
So I guess that one of these days I’ll just have to get back to shuffling my files off to DVD and CD so that I can fill my drive up all over again…