02/09/2005 - 4:56 a.m. | you're smarter than most everyone, but most everyone don't care

Brytne's away message is, "i am the #1 sleeper!" This is particularly taunting, as I feel lately like I'm somewhere near the bottom of the list. I'm exhausted all day, but each night when I get in bed, both mind and body shift around endlessly. I do believe it is one of those dangerous cycles, my friend. I've been feeling nervous lately, tense, and I'm not sure if it's the lack of sleep that is making me anxious, or if the anxiety is making me lose sleep. This isn't even the normal anxiety that I was used to. I mean, I hated that old stuff, but I understood it, it was familiar, and sleep was a respite. The tension is in my stomach now instead of my chest (as it was), and it feels a lot realer as a result. On paper, everything seems more or less OK with life, but that's exactly it. Maybe it's just the paper. Must I actually use the word "fa�ade"? Classes are going fine, but they bore me to the point of hatred. I have a job at last, and I'm fairly good at it, but it makes me feel dirty, and the debt is still piling up like crazy. I have a few close friends and relationships but the constant urge to shove them all away. And even deeper underneath is the feeling that everything is winding down, and pretty soon I'm going to have to go out into the real world and lose everything I know now.

It's not that life isn't without joys. Certainly not. I could never be that apprehensive about things. As long as I can drum my Ted Leo on the way to cross the guard, or sing Old 97's parts as I ride home from work, or lose myself completely in silly zombie novels and episodes of "Boy Meets World" (Funny how my own problems are instantly trumped by Shawn pining for Alex Mack when she decides his bad boy reputation is not enough) or sit around and do nothing with Kyle and Shelly and Smacko, I really don't deserve to complain about anything at all. But hey, I'm a whiny fuck, so you're still going to have to deal with it. I just wish I felt a little less twisted up inside.

I should have won the stupid $25 Best Buy gift card for the law school campaign at work today, but fucking "Raguh" beat me to it, the shithat. I guess I don't technically know the fellow, but I already mentally refer to him as "that spaghetti sauce motherfucker." It's not so much that he wins almost all the top calling contests. I mean, if he were just luckier or had a better phone manner than me, I wouldn't even care. [This is doubtful, however, as I have kickass phone personality... in that still actually act like a person on the phone. I got into this crazy argument with this one guy. We were asking for money for the library - a shitty campaign - and he asks, "Well, do you give to the library?" So I say, "Oh, you know, a couple thousand every year." "You donate $2,000 every year?" "Well, I figure I'm paying thousands upon thousands of dollars for tuition. Some of that must be leaking back to the library, right? At the very least the $25 donation that you made ten years ago. And that's with my only source of income being this low-paying job right here." Somehow I got him to give 100 bucks. Ha! Another guy went on a psychotic rant about how I should be out protesting the war in Iraq, getting the federal funding from that put back into college tuition. "Get pissed off," he said. I made paper cranes but somehow got 250 out of him. It makes all sorts of sense!]. Unfortunately, this Prego fuck is a cheating bastard, and I want his brains falling out through his teeth. See, when we call someone and they think they maybe want to pledge, we send them a blank form to fill it. It seems Raguh, however, asks them if he can put them down for some set amount anyway. Because, you see, only the set amounts written down get counted toward our totals. Even if the people say no, though, he still marks them down for it, and thus it looks like he's amazing when, well, he fucking isn't. Dirty smelly Indian trick. You'd think they'd catch on to this, but I guess he found a pretty clever loophole, and it pisses the rest of us off. Probably because we didn't think of it first.

On the ride home tonight, I saw this Mexican kid walking by ISR with a backpack. He looked a little young for college, so I decided he was a 12 year old supergenius who probably hates his life. Wrote a song about it set to the Old 97's "Victoria Lee." I wish I could remember have of the about fifty or so verses I screamed along the way.

Probably the reason I am in this mood tonight: We watched The Aviator, and I must admit that crazy people will always seem better to me. Correction: Functional crazy people will. I mean, it's one thing to be a engineering genius or a brilliant poet, but it's far better to have cyclic periods of complete meltdown peppered with little tics of madness here and there, and the struggle (and eventual failure) of trying to appear normal. It just seems more heroic that they have this thing and that they're not always besting it.