procrastination, old-school style

As I spend my not-so-highly paid time writing a blog post, in addition to checking email every 15 minutes or more, reading others blogs, searching for a store location near me, etc., I have to wonder...how did people procrastinate at work before the internet? Or even before computers, since even young'un me can remember a pre-internet-infestation time of computers replete with the quick minimizing of solitaire and minesweeper windows at the sound of a boss' footsteps on the industrial-grade carpet.

My only indication so far is from one of my favorite songs by The Fall, "An Older Lover etc."

Get ready for old stories
Of teenage sex
From the early sixties
Under cover
Behind office desks

when elsa can't park, elsa gets cranky

It is a lovely day, i am no longer in the midwaste, i have recently been notified that i will be getting a raise at my job, and yet i am cranky as fuck. This is because the same Southern Private University that will be paying for my increase in pay chooses to mock my sense of all that is just by refusing to let me park. Now, i'm not talking about free parking - that would be asking an awful lot from any institution run by obscenely affluent white men in suits. However, at Southern Private U. it is virtually impossible for any visitor to pay to park, even in the designated visitor's parking lots, because the one visitor's parking lot near anything on campus one might wish to be near is always either full or "reserved" for some special event that usually involves aforementioned obscenely affluent white men drinking expensive scotch and watching Hot College Chicks All-Anal Action VI in the fancy board room. Of the last 6 or 7 times I have desired to park in the visitor's parking lot, I have successfully parked there exactly 0 times. Each subsequent failed parking attempt results in a fit of rage greater in intensity and shorter in calmness to crankiness time, today's incident resulting in shouted declarations to the nearby shrubbery what I wished to cover the visitor's parking lot with flaming napalm. "Why," I beseeched the shrubs, "Does this university seem to have such a flippant attitude towards its visitors' parking needs? Why was this parking lot, built only two years ago, designed with a seeming ignorance of the number of people who actually wish to park there, in combination with the fact that visitors are rarely actually allowed to park there, unless they are affluent white men who wish to watch pornographic videos in the fancy board room?? Could they not have simply added a couple more stories to this structure? Or dug underground? Or have built an elaborate network of canals to be navigated by gondolas, thus eliminating the need for auto traffic and consequently auto parking, also increasing the romantic factor and uniqueness of the university?"

The shrubs could provide no answer.

food i have eaten so far today

1. Bowl of Vanilla Creme Frosted Mini Wheats. Sort of like eating a bowl of normal frosted mini wheats with diet vanilla coke instead of milk. Nasty, but not as nasty as the other cereal option at my mom's house this morning, Peanut Butter Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Plus the Mini Wheats give you fiber with your nasty, which I prefer to the 12 Essential Vitamins and Minerals of the Toast Crunch.
2. Travel mug full of coffee with sugar. This also came from my mom's pantry, and fortunately her taste for the most disgusting breakfast cereals on the market is countered by a keen particularity when it comes to breakfast beverages. This particular pot of coffee was made from beans special ordered from a tiny place in the Appalachian hamlet/Confederate hold-out of Lexington, VA that roasts their own beans. This bean is called "General's Blend" (named after Granddaddy Lee) and is the complete shit. The stuff was so fresh it's practically made me high.
3. Plate full of Chex Mix (Traditional). An enourmous bag of this stuff has been sitting around at work, and I have come to determine that one of the key seasonings is crack, as I have developed a crack-addiction-like need to eat platefuls of this stuff around 11:00am for the last three days. And I must be building up a tolerance to the stuff, because today it took two plates to provide the same shudder of sudden electrolyte imbalance I got from one plate of salty goodness two days ago. Combined with the General's crack coffee, I feel as though I'm about to hatch into some sort of lizard creature, not unlike the little girl in 80's mini-series "V."

Go English!

Just passed onto me from a fellow transplant, it seems that the bright legislators in my home state of West Virginia have just passed a law making English the official language of the state. Fortunately I don't have to feel too much shame for idiotic, xenophobic elected officials: most of them didn't realize they were signing the bill into law since it was tacked onto an innocuous bill about parks and recreation in the last moments of the legislative session by state Sen. Larry Edgell, a proponent of U.S. English, "the nation's oldest, largest citizens' action group dedicated to preserving the unifying role of the English language in the United States." Most of them didn't realize what they had done until the AP picked up on it, and I can't even find any mention of it in the local papers. So now I just have to feel the shame for idiotic, inattentive elected officials. And that whole mountain-top removal thing.

behold, the sharpened pencil

Once I had a dream that I was sleeping in my parents's house. In the dream I awoke to find that the house had been broken into by a burglar who made himself known by singing in the kitchen on the first floor. My parents and I were rather afraid and convened in their room. My dad proceded to arm my mom and I with the nearest available weapons to battle the singing burglar. Mom got a straight pin and I got a very sharp pencil. From then on my weapon of choice has been the very sharp pencil, and my suburban superhero persona "El Sacapuntas," The Pencil Sharpener.

This should not be confused with my much longer running woodland fantasy persona, Warrior Princess, which I still kind of prefer because in my estimation it involves me wearing fringed buckskin pants. Hot.