"I Don't Want Your Boring Life, And I Don't Want Your 9 To 5"

I started a summer job today, and let me tell you, it's a real thrill and a half. It pays well, and the people view me as some sort of Messianic figure descended from the vaulty towers of heaven itself for the work I'm doing, but not all the flower petals in the world strewn about my feet can relieve the absolute monotony and isolation of it all.

The good news is, I was promoted to an office an hour into my first day simply because I am amazingly wonderful; or perhaps because I need an internet connection, and the one in the corner of a cubicle they had me in was MIA (how you lose an internet hookup is beyond me, but it seemed to make sense to them); whatever the case, I'm sitting at a large cherry desk in my very own office with my heels strewn mercifully below me on the ground, and I have a stunning window view of, well, of an interior white wall, but still. I HAVE A WINDOW. And it's MINE, ALL MINE, YOU FOOLS.

Where there's good news, you know there's also bad news, or else I wouldn't have bothered with the modifier "good," I would've just labeled it "news," not knowing which sort of news it could possibly be. I mean, let's say one of my "news items" was that the giant shark in the fish tank behind me had burst through the glass and eaten my legs, and now I was legless and sopping wet with salinated fish water. Then the "bad news" I'm about to relate would actually be "good news" in comparison to my run-in with aquatic carnivores. Having no legs trumps most pieces of news in scales of badness, including illness, homework overloads, tax filing complications, and bad dates. [Does Jason try to woo you with the wilted stench blossoms he stole from your neighbor's yard, has he not changed his Spiderman t-shirt in three weeks, and is there a warrant out for his arrest? It could be worse -- you could have no legs!!] But I digress.

The bad news is, I have no legs. No, no, wait, let me start over. The bad news is, the door to my office is open along with the blinds on my window, so anyone walking by can peer right in, and they do this frequently. For a while, I wrote it off as normal office proceedings. I work in a busy place, which is a good sign, as all the industrious milling and scurrying about means a nice, fat paycheck for me at the end of the week. What I cannot write off is an overheard "Ahh, Breeegham Young, verrr nice. She a nice girrr. I gonna see how she doeeng." (They have accents, it's not just me trying to spice things up.) What also creeps me out is when someone walks by and stares in at me. Um, hi. I'm going to do my work and try not to think about your highly-skilled, MIT-educated, ultra-huge-and-extensive brain producing thoughts of putting something in my cocoa to cause my femurs to melt. This has happened to me five times so far (the staring, not the laced cocoa). It's started to wear on my nerves, to the extent that I now probably appear visibly chafed, which is fairly not cool as I'm already under powerful office flourescent lighting which does nothing for my pallor nor general complexion besides make me look inhuman and ugly. Ah, that must be it. I don't blame the little savages for staring; I'd stare too.

In alternate news, I'm getting sick of New England. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a very nice place, especially on tart autumn evenings while wearing a wool sweater and cuddling up to the spicy embers of a fire with the family and Jackie, the golden retriever puppy, and maybe it's nice if you like history and Bostonians and such, but really. Why must there be so many universities and research labs located there? It probably doesn't help much that New York and Ohio are both counted as New England states (which hurts me as much as it hurts you, or possibly more, if you were previously unaware that New York is a Mid-Atlantic state and Ohio is a Midwestern one, and so both very, very not New England states) due to severe vagrancies in the Territory database I am using; but it's not all bad, as I'm looking forward to getting down to Duke University on my list and checking "Mid-Atlantic" instead of "Southern." The South's not going to rise again so much as it's going to be sucked into the general province of Delaware. Haha, suckers. Please don't hurt me.