Patches of Blue in Steel..

..is what the sky looked like from the train leaving DC this evening.

Long day: I went in early to make up the time for Friday, and it was just one of those achy sort of days where everything goes so slowly. Meetings, data entry, processing, sorting, so on and so forth. I am almost done with a load of stuff from the National Court Reporters Association. Woo! Very useful people but they insis in putting their transcripts in these fancy little packety things, only of course these have to be removed and the material placed in something archival-friendly.

One of the women got a call from an irate veteran who was worried his memoirs had been destroyed. Why? Well, they weren't online. And never mind only 4% of the collections get digitized anyway, or that he wasn't even looking at the website properly. Once he'd been reassured his stuff hadn't been destroyed, he wanted to know if we wanted more copies. It was one of those darkly funny moments, like tourists who insist on halling their children around sight-seeing at rush hour in the rain (yes I saw those this morning too).

I also almost got hit not once but twice by dumbass bus-drivers not paying attention. Hint: red light means you stop, blinky person means I go. This is not quantum physics. This is blinky lights. GOLDFISH get this.

I also got a "questionaire" from my insurance company wanting to know what my other benefits/care company was. Um, none? Cos I pay through the butt for you?

Blah, and I have oodles of stuff I need to do but don't feel like doing, but instead I want to play on my journal.

I like to watch what people read on the metro. Most people have newspapers or copies of The New Yorker/The Atlantic/Harper's/Impressive Uppity Glossy, and then just as many have library books and pulp novels and things. Today I saw an old woman reading a book about intercessory prayer (that's when you say "please god do this"), and a middle-aged man reading something about emotional something or other. Is someone fixing to have a breakthrough? I don't read on the Metro myself because I can't settle in to the book if I'm waiting for my stop, so I just watch people instead.

Well I think I'll be good and try to do something studenty. I have four essays to read by Thursday, and if I were *really* good I'd get a start on my bibliography for that research paper I have due in six weeks. *cough hack*

Tell me to be good...

The Social Illness

Does this mean me procrastinating is an illness too? Neat article from Spiked-Health:


"Wellness has become something you have to work on, something to aspire to and achieve. This reinforces the presupposition that not being well - or being ill - is the normal state. That is what our culture says to us now: you are not okay, you are not fine; you are potentially ill. The message seems to be that if you do not subscribe to this project of keeping well, you will revert to being ill. [...]Being potentially ill is now so prevalent that we have reached a situation where illness becomes a part of our identity, part of the human condition. "