Despertar

july 14, 2008

At midnight, I was dead asleep. I was paranoid, because I had missed the previous two eight o'clock Monday morning calls (one because of travel complications, the other because I was in the ER), and oversleeping through this one was not an option.

I woke up at five forty-five, took a shower, discovered the only clean underwear I had left were thongs. Fantastic. Who doesn't love wearing a thong to work? I got dressed (supertight black and gray skirt, black fitted tee, silver jewelry, black heels), checked Writing.com for bonus entries, was thoroughly shocked by the accuracy of the first guess in my inbox.

When I started the walk to the train, I temporarily traded my back heels for the flip-flops I keep in my tote bag for just that reason. Because I was wearing a skirt, and possibly because my legs look better this summer than they ever have in my life (thanks, million-mile walk I have to do daily!), I got harassed incessantly on the way to the train station, mostly by this group of idle twentysomethings I always see sitting on the porch of one of the government-subsidized homes just over the Oakland border.

I got on the train a few minutes after seven, and started panicking about maybe being late to the eight o'clock call. I read thirty-four pages of Angels and Demons, which, now that I've reached the heart of it, is way better than I was giving it credit for. A churchy woman carrying a Bible got on at 19th Street and interrogated me about my literary choices until she got off at West Oakland. It was surreal to the point where I wondered if I had imagined her.

At the Embarcadero station, I saw some kids stealing rides by breezing, unpaid, through the emergency exit.

I gave twenty dollars to the Chinese man who plays the erhu by the escalator. I see him every day, and I had never given him money before, and every time I see him I think of Tina saying homeless Asian men remind her of her dad, and that makes me sad. I had actually intended to give him a dollar a few weeks earlier, but the day I was going to do it, I caught him setting aside his bow to openly pick his nose, and I was too grossed out to chance hand-to-hand contact.

I got to the office well before the call started. Before my boss, even. The call was a long, repetitive gripefest about the same problem that's plaguing the same site we've been tearing our hair out over since day one. I passed notes back and forth with Allison, who doesn't want me to leave this weekend. She's afraid it's going to be really awkward, just her and our socially clueless male supervisor working together in the office, driving around on work-related field trips. She's right; I don't envy her.

Immediately following that call was another one, this one for the whole office team. I couldn't deal. Instead of my work notebook, I brought my Sims notebook, and diagrammed family trees till I ran out of names, at which point I promptly fell asleep. I woke up exactly when it ended to discover that Allison had dozed off, too. I didn't blame the boss for making fun of us.

When I got back to my desk, I texted Justin to tell him Angels and Demons is restoring my faith in his book recommendations. I texted my cousin with logistics for our scheduled dinner date later.

I had been procrastinating severely on the special education presentation I had due that afternoon. I settled in, put my iPod on shuffle (not above it anymore) and settled into knock out as many viable slides as I possibly could before three. The research and outlining was already done, so I spent the most time choosing ClipArt that wasn't too hokey. There isn't any, of course, so the result was a slide show you'd expect to see at an elementary school assembly, but my boss doesn't know how to do it himself, so he reacted as though he couldn't wait to submit it to the Academy for judging.

Speaking of judging, I did some. I chugged through a bunch of Following entries, indulged in some behind-the-scenes gossip with Aaron and tried to clear a pathway through the ever-worsening thicket of my inbox. (Which reminds me, if you email me and I don't email you back, I'm sorry in advance, but if it's not pressing, I probably put it in my To Do Later folder. Not to be confused with my To Do NOW folder, where I put stuff like people's bonus guesses, rescheduling requests, questions demanding answers, et cetera.)

On my way to Union Square, where I was going to meet my cousin, I called Justin. He was watching the pilot episode to Arrested Development! My joy was unbridled. I hurried off the phone so he could enjoy it. I am desperate to find someone, anyone, who likes it enough to plow through all seasons in two sittings, like I did.

My cousin, who was traveling on business and had a free night, and I went to Asia di Cuba, this ridiculously expensive restaurant inside the Clift Hotel. There was a minimum charge of seventy-five dollars per person, which made sense after we discovered that the least expensive appetizer was thirty-six dollars. The food was more delicious than I can even describe.

Over dinner, I drank two pomegranate martinis and quizzed my cousin on his love life. I told him to call my parents, who had each texted me upwards of five times throughout the day to remind me to deliver that message. He never calls, even though he lived with us for about seven years after his mother died. It hurts their feelings.

Even though this was the second time he had had to drive me home from San Francisco, he got lost on the other side of the Bay Bridge, and I was too buzzed to help much. I can only assume a divine miracle eventually landed me at my own front door, my keys magically in hand.

By that time, I was drunkish and sleepy. I came in, stripped, flopped down on my bed and tried to hold a conversation with Aaron, who said something about how I seem to drink more on the West Coast. I remember half-assing a rationalization, then hastily ending the chat when I realized I couldn't keep my eyes open, hardly.

I maintained consciousness just long enough to type a two-paragraph email to Justin, about wishing he were there for this-or-that (hot air, of course; I would have been asleep in two seconds, regardless), and fell asleep at the record-breakingly lame hour of nine-thirty.