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12/20/00
Scientists have confirmed that yesterday sucked...

I was really starting to think it was just me. That I was just having a bad day. But it indeed turns out that yesterday wasn't just Omar's bad day, but the world at large had a terrible day. Just look at the evidence:

• According to public records, a bunch of people died. This made a lot of other people sad, maybe even angry if they were owed money by the deceased, and just caused a lot of misery. Except for the people that wanted to die. That's totally cool. Otherwise, there was an exceptional amount of death that nobody really wanted.
• According to MSNBC, which is where I get all of my surface, and usually not very interesting, news, an ICY ONSLAUGHT has hit the United States. This of course means that a bunch of people, especially those that have to be outside, have to freeze their asses off for a while. This is bad, especially for people who don't like the cold.
• ITEM: Also, on MSNBC (they are a crack news organization, and I don't just mean because of the crack consumed), "Bush lays groundwork for cabinet." I got all uppity about it because I thought, "This is suppposed to be news?" And then I realized that they weren't talking about a Bush home kitchen renovation project. It's still bad, I think.
• Catherine Zeta-Jones is married to Michael Douglas, and while I think it's icky and wrong on many levels, I can't bring myself to hate her, despite her obvious betrayal of me, the person she was supposed to at least date for a while before settling for Mr. Black Rain. The truth is I'm pretty annoyed at the hypocrisy of people who hate Anna Nicole Smith for marrying that 90-year old tycoon, yet who fully support Cathy marrying a man so old that when they bury him he's going to have seniority in the graveyard over dinosaur fossils.
• Sandra Bullock had a big movie premiere in town for her film vehicle Miss Congeniality. (By "vehicle," they usually mean, "a movie that you should drive away from, very quickly, in a fast vehicle.") She invited Benjamin Bratt and his girlfriend Julia Roberts. She also invited Julia Roberts' mouth, which had to be sent via a separate cargo plane. I didn't get invited. Bitter? You bet I am.
• The Dallas Cowboys threw another game and had to hear about it all day yesterday. Man, they're so good, they can just sit back and let all these other teams win so they won't be totally dominant and inspire jealousy. That team is a class act.

So, yeah, I had a pretty awful day yesterday. How awful? Let's just say that by the end of the day, I just wanted to pack up my things, quit my job, move to Seattle and work in a Starbucks.

I was really stressed out. I had way too much stuff to do, and not enough hours to do it all. This happens a lot, but it's accelerated because of the holidays. Shopping, cards, planning a trip home -- all these things have been added to the usual tall pile and it just overwhelmed me suddenly.

I got snippy with people, even my parents. I wigged out. In the middle of everything, Windows decided to not work and I spent several agonizing hours trying to get Windows ME (stands for "Messy Endeavor") reinstalled.

I went to rehearsal for an LCP fundraiser we're doing Dec. 29 and because of how busy I'd been and with work, I hadn't memorized my lines by the date we were supposed to be off-book. I embarassed myself stumbling through a skit, asking for every other line. We finally had to stop rehearsing the skit.

I kept getting phone calls and e-mails that needed to be responded to immediately. I had to run to the post office. Stuff kept coming up. I hadn't slept enough and the coffee I drank in the morning (after hunting for a half hour for sugar) made me jittery.

AAACCCCKKKKKKK!!!!!!

I freaked out. I admit it. A year and a half of working at a Whataburger as a teenager made me almost impervious to stress and to letting people's moods affect me. But, damn. Every bad driver, every annoying phone person, every computer glitch and Internet lag just served to make me more annoyed as the day progressed until by nighttime, I'd given up, my chief desire being only to crawl on the couch and go fetal.

I had one (and only one) even vaguely suicidal thought: I considered watching Leno. And then I slapped myself hard on the face, threw some cold water on myself and yelled, "For God's sake, get a hold of yourself man! LIVE, DAMN YOU, LIVE!"

So here I am. Living.

A friend of mine told me a few days ago about several people in her office who were having really bad years. We're talking death, disease, accidents. Really amazingly tragic and depressing stuff. It's sad that it takes that kind of "someone else's tragedy" to make you feel better about your own life. It's sad that we can find perspective in our own situations and that comparing your lot in life sometimes is the only way to work yourself out of a funk.

Things really aren't so bad. They could be much, much worse. And the things going on are all products of things that make me happy, despite how much work it all becomes. I'm overwhelmed because I want to be.

None of it is so bad.

And hey... I'm not the one who has to have sex with Michael Douglas.

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"Don't even think about it, Charlie Sheen."