The Hot Dog Bun That Broke The Camel's Back

After doing the requisite amount of sitting around doing nothing this morning I made my way to the shower and ventured out, however briefly, into the world in order to do some grocery shopping.
I didn’t buy much but still managed to spend over $30, which was kind of baffling.
After getting home I made lunch and found myself overcome with the frustration that can build up when every last goddamn thing you do, whether the result of the perversity of the universe or personal incompetence, inevitably becomes a life or death struggle.
Adding condiments to hot dog buns should not be a task roughly equivalent to the Thirteenth Labor of Hercules, and yet today found me standing in the kitchen going absolutely bat-shit as the buns refused to stand up, stay open, and not fucking fall apart.
Let me be as clear about this as possible; all I was trying to do was to add ketchup and relish to a few hot dog buns.
That should have been extremely simple and should not have resulted in me standing there with ketchup and relish all over my hands, crumbs all over the counter and floor, and a plate of mutilated buns silently mocking me as I choked on my frustration and did my best to avoid smashing the shit out of everything in sight while screaming in rage at the uncaring heavens.
Of course the goddamn hot dog buns weren’t really the issue; they were just that last little shove that nearly sent me over the edge.
There’s an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer attends a self-help class. The instructor says to the class, “Life is hard, am I right?”
When everyone in the class agrees that life is, in fact, hard, he responds, angrily, “Wrong! Life is easy; you suck!”
So at the heart of it all is the single, all-important question: why do I suck at everything?
I know that life just should not be this difficult, and I realize, too, that for the most part I’m the one making it so difficult.
So what do I do about it? I have no clue. If I did, I wouldn’t be standing around in my kitchen trying to avoid going totally bug fuck crazy over hot dog buns, would I?
And beyond that it’s an area that I don’t really feel like delving into right now anyway.
In any case, after averting the meltdown I took my mutilated hot dogs into the living room and sat down to watch the remaining episodes of Batman: Beyond.
After finishing that I got to work on the flier for the holiday party that my homeowner’s group is throwing in a couple of weeks.
I had an idea that I thought would be kind of cool, but then realized that it was an idea that would work really well if printed in color on quality paper by a professional print shop, but that would not work so well when printed in black and white from a laser printer and photocopied, so I modified things a little and came up with something a little more suitable.
I don’t really like the end result, but I realized that the reason I don’t like it is because it looks like exactly the sort of flier that would be printed up for a community holiday party or some similar event, so in this case the fact that I don’t like it is a good thing.
I still need to send a proof of it out to the group to get their thoughts on it and to spur them into providing me with the remaining information I need to complete it (the actual time of the party and who people should contact to RSVP, along with the contact information for said person).
While working on the flier I realized how much I miss doing that sort of work.
Too bad that desktop publishing jobs pay shit compared to what I do now and that the job market is oversaturated with people much younger and hungrier than I am and whose skill sets are much more current than mine.
So with that being said, let me ask you to refrain from latching onto my saying that I miss doing that sort of work and seeing that as an opportunity to start encouraging me to “take a chance and follow my dream” or something similarly nonsensical.
First up, it’s not my dream. Sure, I like doing desktop publishing work, but it can get old in a hurry. Second, even if it were my dream, as pointed out above, there are plenty of reasons – reasons that carry much more weight than some hippie notions about “self-actualization” or any of that kind of crap – not to pursue such a dream, such as the fact that I like being able to afford to pay my mortgage.
I suppose I could look into picking up some kind of part-time work on my days off. I tried that a few years ago and it didn’t lead to anything, and my skill set is, obviously, even less current when it was then.
Plus there’s always the loss of “sitting around time” that would be involved in taking on a part-time job.
Speaking of which, I have tomorrow off, which increases my available sitting around time for the week. Now that I’ve watched all of B: B, I have to find something to do to fill that time.
Oh, I know what I can do: absolutely nothing, just like I’ve been doing all week.
That should be fun.