My New Technique

TL and I were sitting at lunch today, and there was a woman sitting at the table in front of us who was turned completely around in her seat to stare at me. So instead of cringing and feeling self-conscious and irritated, I decided to do something different. I gave her an uber-perky smile and waved. She scowled and turned back around. A few minutes later, I noticed her staring at me again, so I flashed said perky smile, waived, and said “hi!” in a loud and chipper voice.

She didn’t look at me a third time.

TL was a little baffled at first, but then I explained the situation and he started laughing. There’s something kind of refreshing about reaching this phase. Can’t guarantee I’ll always be in the mood for it, but it sure felt good.

He and I seem to have a good balance – the days I’m about to lose it, he is calm, cool, and collected. The days he’s about to crack, I can hold down the fort and calm him down. Which is fortunate, because if we ever both lost it, we’d really be in trouble. But so far, we’re holding everything together. Good days and bad days, after all. Even on our less productive days we are, for the most part churning out text and data, putting out fires, and keeping the project running – but we are both badly in need of a break.

However, work awaits. The only way to get a real break is to finish. So that’s what we’re doing. If we didn’t actually care about the quality of what we’re cranking out, I suppose we could finish easily. It’s this darn thing called “ethics” that makes us care, and unfortunately that take a lot more work. Even J's work turned out to be pretty good, so I guess we won't be shooting on him.

In proofreading our housing section, I’m largely skimming, only scanning for grammatical errors. But I came across something that’s just remarkable in terms of providing some contrast. You can rent a nice 3 or 4 bedroom apartment downtown here…for $75 a month. That completely blows my mind – and I’ve been living here for several weeks now – it’s not like I don’t know about relative costs and all of that. But it’s just unbelievable.

Did you know that “education” is one of those words that starts to look wrong if you look at it long enough and are tired enough? Education, educational, educationtastic, etc.

My brain has begun the war of attrition on my intellectual capacity.