I left work about halfway through the day. A sharp pain was starting to develop on the sides of my head, and I was generally sore all over. Even while chewing or swallowing, there was a tremendous pressure from the head of my mandibular condyle to the inner ear. Most likely, I was starting to run myself down; the last time I felt like this was after an all-night shift at the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy, and I ended up running a fever and missing two days of work there. Shirley convinced me to take an extra strength Tylenol (with codeine), which is something I rarely do. I’ve always believed in paying attention to the pain signals that the body gives off.

Trolley and I, with the assistance of Aaron, moved a significant portion of chattel through the week, translating into late nights and miserable days. Every previous night, I’d verbally consider sleeping in the next day knowing how hard it would be, and as Trolley noted, I’d never end up doing so. Even this morning I couldn’t sleep, so I got to work at ten past seven, more than half an hour early. It’s good to know that I was able to be stronger mentally than physically, something that has always been difficult for me to balance. Usually it feels like my body is giving out first, but afterwards, I realize that I could have handled more. This time, my body is actually telling me that I’m overworked. I think the key is convincing myself that physical discomfort is just a temporary feeling that can be ignored.

It’ll all be worth it once I’m settled down, which will most likely not be until I get my closet doors installed. I’m replacing my white ones with mirrors, and since the closet runs the entire width of the wall, they all need to be custom sized. It’s the last thing that’ll be done before I really feel like I’m in my own home. The mirrors should make the room look twice as big and appropriately darker. I got the quote today, and it’s just under two grand, tax in, including installation. I decided to go ahead with it, since it’s actually cheaper than I expected, so they should be arriving in 6 to 14 days.

Next week is haircut, getting custom-fitted venetian blinds, Christine’s birthday dinner, and a lot of unpacking.

Wow, it was a rough day. It started off well enough, because I was in what one would call a better-than-average mood before I had even arrived at work. Shirley had stopped at Timmies to get an everything bagel with herb and garlic cream cheese for breakfast, and decided to also buy me a large coffee, which I found, hot and steaming, on my desk this morning. It was the first coffee I had in weeks, and it sent my heart racing after the second sip.

I finalized a two-page ad for a local quarterly newsletter, due for publication at the end of the month. The only problem was that, for the last few years, we’ve had a reservation of only a single page. The middle two pages of this publication are reserved for the most important messages from the organization that runs the publication itself, and are most likely the first two pages looked at by its readers. My boss, besides being the best fucking boss in the world, was also ambitious enough to request the middle two pages (I think of Michael Corleone asking if his credit is good enough to buy out Moe Green). At his behest, I made a call to negotiate the booking of space. I had been prepping for this since Monday, being unsure of how to approach the person at the other end of the line in order to maximize my chances of getting the two most lucrative pages in the booklet. They didn’t know how old, or young, I was, because they couldn’t see me, and this was helpful. I believe that age has worked to my disadvantage in the past for tete-a-tete negotiations, because I can see in the faces of older people how hard it is for them to take me seriously. At the end, I offered to reserve two pages instead of one (something which they didn’t know we had every intention of doing, no matter what the result), in return for the middle of the booklet. I was able to get the middle for this month, but unfortunately not for any subsequent issues. We wanted to hit the local area hard with the energy in our latest marketing campaign, and being the first to take the middle of the publication, even if only for a single issue, was good enough. I told my boss, he shook my hand, and verbally congratulated me.

Then I quickly fixed up and finalized the mailout for this month, to be printed on our new cover stock, a great idea by Shirley, because the thickness and brightness of the stock make everything look fucking slick. By this time, the caffeine was making me jittery. I had slept alright the night before, but I was starting to feel tired, especially in the eyes.

I started to work on a one page flyer to go with a special invitation sent out to over 600 clients and potential clients across the city (which also ties in with the advertisement in the local publication mentioned above — fucking wicked). My boss gave me the material yesterday, and the problem was that it had to be approved by him before the end of the day, because he’s leaving the country on business tomorrow.

I worked through most of the day on the flyer while tons of other miscellaneous things-to-be-done popped up spontaneously, like label printing, printer fixing, and back-up troubleshooting. By this time, the caffeine had worn off, only to be replaced by what felt like exhaustion. Near the end of the day, after getting the flyer mostly done, while colour correcting and space adjusting, CorelDraw started to really, REALLY fuck up on me. If the printing companies we dealt with would actually spend some money on higher end vector graphics software, I wouldn’t have had any problems. Instead, I tried to print a file from CorelDraw, and it either spooled forever, or told me that there was not enough memory to print (with my 1 gig of DDR RAM). If I tried to save, it either gave me an error message about not having enough free space, or crashed, and in the process, made the current working space blank and saved it. CorelDraw seems to lose stability if any other programs are running, such as Outlook Express or Winamp, while there are graphics above 300 dpi in the workspace, and I had over a dozen. In the end, I got the flyer finished, but not before repeating an entire series of steps, several times, due to crashes while fine-tuning.

My nerves were shot by the time I stepped outside to walk to the bus stop. For the first time in months, I listened to my on-the-go playlist. I started working on it since the week of UPS crashes in November (which would bring the entire system down at work, including telephone access), for days just like this.

I was given the opportunity to purchase a new machine (with my choice of parts) at work and put it together from scratch, something I had never done before. I’ve dabbled in cases ever since I played games (the driving force behind much of my computer knowledge), but never actually assembled an entire box from parts.

It’s amazing to see how far along motherboards, and even cases, have come now. Overclocking can be done through software, as opposed to opening the case and fiddling with jumpers. Fan speed is automatically controlled for a balance of silence and cooling. Rail mounted drive bays make hardware configurations much simpler. Thumbscrews eliminate the need for screwdrivers for a simple dusting. Firewire ports, ethernet connections, video support, even 5.1 surround are all built onboard, for the option of extremely clean, roomy, and cool cases, even if they are rather simple.

I managed to put the system together without having to re-seat a card, clean a connection, or wiggle a power cable. My machine is now a P4 3.2E (I suppose all higher end Pentium chips now automatically come with hyper-threading), with a gig of DDR RAM, a 200 GB serial-ATA HDD, and a 128 MB ATI 800XT Pro video card. I also requested another 17″ flat panel, and received it the next day, so I can take advantage of the dual display goodness.

Work was good, but now it’s just better.

The days can go on with regularity over and over, one day indistinguishable from the next.

—Travis Bickle, Taxi Driver

Every day I think that I’ll catch up on sleep at night, but I never seem to get the chance. I have time here and there to write, but things don’t come out properly when I’m tired. Even on the weekends, when I expect to be able to sleep in, I’m always off somewhere, doing something. It’s such a change from how I was living last year; no school, no job, no girlfriend, with all my friends still attending university. I lost all sense of time.

I’m busier than ever at work, and it’s a great feeling to know that I’m responsible for so much…for meeting deadlines, for completing projects, for coming up with solutions to peoples’ problems. It’s a lot of stress, but it’s a great challenge. Being forced to work with a lack of sleep has made me more accustomed to thinking while fatigued, something that I never thought was possible. I used to need a proper eight hours a day to think, otherwise I could only operate at a basic level. Only one day in the last month have I felt rested. The fact that I’m still going and getting things done is a big deal to me. And now it feels like I’m finally working towards something, in my relationships, in my career, even in my equity and assets.

I remember Pat telling me to enjoy my unemployment, and I did exactly that. I appreciated every minute of it, and now I appreciate every moment that I have something to do. I appreciated the freedom of being single, and now I appreciate the comfort of being with someone.

I’m learning more things at work than I had ever imagined was possible. Now I understand things like the importance of making a budget, the loopholes to look out for on a lease, the difference between writing an asset off as an expense or depreciating it, or even something like the economic factors considered in setting monthly goals. There are also general work things I never knew about, like how to deal with salesmen, how to leave messages, what’s considered a good health plan, government regulations vs. union regulations, etc. I’ve even had to learn how to be a print production coordinator for marketing/PR materials. Then on top of all of this, I’m learning about the entire esoteric dental industry, from the personalities of dentists and denturists to the manufacturing process of everything from crowns to cast partial dentures to hawley retainers, just so I can understand the target audience and understand what I’m marketing.