bad days and the road to recovery
the past couple of days would, for most people, be utter hell. luckily i find myself mostly impervious.
it was mostly all on thursday, actually. yesterday wasn't as bad.
Thursday
so, thursday, i had a . .. really bad day. and there was a cherry on top at the very end of it!
work was frustrating because i spent the entire 8 hour day writing a program (~270 lines, but that's including comments) in Excel's VBA script editor that would let us change some stuff that was done wrong before without having to do it by hand. it basically read in an htm file, searched for a certain string, replaced a part of it, and rewrote the htm file. i had it all functioning great, but i found out half an hour before the end of the day that i was replacing the wrong part of the file, and that while it was the right PROPERTY i was changing it wasn't the actual part we had to change to fix the original problem. and while trying to remedy that, i ended up breaking it. that, compounded with what i wrote previously about my day on wednesday, was really discouraging.
when i came home, my internet was being messed up. i'm still having the same issues i had before, and more often when the router is in the loop. so i had interwebs plugged straight into my comp, but i was still getting dropped from msn every 5 minutes and kept getting timeouts all over the place. that was when i decided to contact Cogeco, my dear isp [rolleyez]. due to great luck of the draw, i ended up with probably the dumbest support guy there. i spent 20 minutes trying to explain to him that i've already tried taking the router out of the loop and it hasn't made as much of a difference, and that just because he couldn't see anything wrong from his end doenst mean shit isn't fucked up over here.
i still hadn't eaten dinner at that point, and i was getting really annoyed with their incompetence. i even got up to the tech supervisor for that shift and told him the most telling fact that my connection is fucked up is that i get dropped from msn every 5 minutes. i forgot to mention that google and every other site, ip address, server, or what have you on the internet is also timing out. and he said "well msn is known to do that. what's the problem?" -- at this point i decided i had enough of their fucking bullshit and told him i'd figure it out on my own, bye.
i decided to call my sister to say hi, since she has no interwebs and my mom let me know that she wants to talk to me. she helped cheer me up, even if it was unintentional.
an hour or two later, i came to the discovery that my apartment is, in fact, infested with ants. i had a plate of food from dinner the night before. it was finished, but you know how there's always a couple of pieces of rice left over and maybe a small chunk of meat that you couldn't chew? well, i knocked the plate over and had to clean up the little mess it made. that's how meat got into the garbage. not even an hour later, i went to throw something out and noticed movement in my garbage. yep. at least 10~15 ants were crawling all over the tiny chunk of meat. i looked under the bag. at least 40 or 50 more ants were crawling around on the carpet. great. absolutely great.
i gave them a tiny chunk of ground beef to see if i could follow them but they were taking too long.
that's where my left foot normally is when im sitting here. they're very hard to see on this ugly-ass carpet. i've called the landlady, she said she'll call a guy about it. but so far i've heard nothing and i'm going to contact her again.
i eventually found a LOT of ants over by the wall opposite the couch between where the carpet meets the wall. armed with air freshener and vinegar, i went to town. but those smart fuckers, they started climbing up the walls to get away from it. sigh.
right.
so.
not a great day, huh?
well, cherry on top: i'm back to being single. and suddenly all the other shit that happened to me that day (the bad day at work, the intermittent net connection and dealing with stupid people, the ant infestation) really.. just.. stopped bugging me. i'd be lying if i said i didnt see it coming, and that's partially why i'm just fine right now and not in the darker place i thought i'd be in, but it's just kind of a shame. meh. life goes on, just with slightly less to look forward to in the immediate future.
i got to bed at 2:30am that night. and woke up for 6:30am on...
Friday
friday was the road to recovery. i'm almost tempted to plot a mood vs time chart but i just can't be assed to do that :P
yesterday was alright. at work i got my program working properly, and my boss said it'll come in handy for other things too. that was encouraging. we went to lunch because our administrative lady found a better job. the company didn't pay but i had pasta w/ a shrimp skewer. yum. the reality of my relationship being over struck around 2pm and the day slowed to a crawl from there. and it stretched till about 6pm where i hit my low point. and from there i was on my way back up the mood chain.
in the spot where my foot normally is, there weren't (and currently aren't) as many ants as there were the other night. i think regular spraying of febreeze air freshener and lack of garbage bag is helping to keep them at bay, but there's still a few crawling around there and many more elsewhere. im still sitting with my legs crossed or feet up. it's killing my knees, but.. im doing it anyway.
i made a new song yesterday evening. i'll make a separate post about that with more details, but until then here it is. that was a great help to elevating my mood a bit. i spent about 2.5~3 hoursish on it, and it was incredibly therapeutic even if it isn't the greatest song ever, and holds no emotion to it. i got in a good half hour of msn convos with like 4 different people thanks to the song alone. at that point i was back to being alright. not happy, but not sad or even mellow.
i decided to try calling my sister, to tell her about my new song since i think she'd like it and to wish her good luck on LSATs today although i kinda forgot she was writing them. it was a side-effect! i also called her because when we spoke on thursday i found myself feeling significantly better afterwards. POINT FORM! no answer, left her a message, microwaved dinner, she called, we talked a bit (~10 mins), i was a little happier.
i was going to go to ottawa next weekend. i bought my train tickets last week and, while, my motivation for going has changed (see the paragraph about cherry on top @ thursday), my intentions havn't. i wanted to go to ottawa to have fun. i'm still going to ottawa to have fun. my sister lives in montreal now (as of a few weeks ago) and i'm going to see if i can coax her into coming down to see me while i'm there. i'd like to thank liz for helping me come to the decision of still going, since she said she wants to hang out and rambled off some fun-sounding things we could do (and i know johnJOHNjohnJOHN wants to come as well!). i talked to liz on the phone too. it had been a while. she helped cheer me up bigtime. and, so, at the end of the day (~12:15am) i was back to being good. no longer alright or fine, or "bleh". but good.
i then stayed up till 4am playing computer games with e-friendz. we played a Half-Life 2 mod called Dystopia and a game i bought [OMG YES I DID] when it came out called DEFCON). we normally do this every weekend, but last night was especially fun. i think it's because i found my role in Dystopia. basically, the game has two components: real world and cyberspace. in cyberspace you can hack terminals that control stuff in the real world, like defense turrets, doors, missile launch systems and other stuff. but while in cyberspace, your real world body is .. well, busy at a computer terminal, and completely open to attack. anyway i won't get into too many details, but i've found that i really like the cyberspace component of the game and i'm really good at playing the Light class and killing people with my shotgun blowin' mofuggaz away wit mah boomshtick.
i think that's the first time in recent memory where friends have pulled through for me, and what a difference it made. whether you guys meant to help or not, you did. so thank you. god that was cheesy. blah!
well. that was a good hour wasted, and now i have to poo. excuse me.
it was mostly all on thursday, actually. yesterday wasn't as bad.
Thursday
so, thursday, i had a . .. really bad day. and there was a cherry on top at the very end of it!
work was frustrating because i spent the entire 8 hour day writing a program (~270 lines, but that's including comments) in Excel's VBA script editor that would let us change some stuff that was done wrong before without having to do it by hand. it basically read in an htm file, searched for a certain string, replaced a part of it, and rewrote the htm file. i had it all functioning great, but i found out half an hour before the end of the day that i was replacing the wrong part of the file, and that while it was the right PROPERTY i was changing it wasn't the actual part we had to change to fix the original problem. and while trying to remedy that, i ended up breaking it. that, compounded with what i wrote previously about my day on wednesday, was really discouraging.
when i came home, my internet was being messed up. i'm still having the same issues i had before, and more often when the router is in the loop. so i had interwebs plugged straight into my comp, but i was still getting dropped from msn every 5 minutes and kept getting timeouts all over the place. that was when i decided to contact Cogeco, my dear isp [rolleyez]. due to great luck of the draw, i ended up with probably the dumbest support guy there. i spent 20 minutes trying to explain to him that i've already tried taking the router out of the loop and it hasn't made as much of a difference, and that just because he couldn't see anything wrong from his end doenst mean shit isn't fucked up over here.
i still hadn't eaten dinner at that point, and i was getting really annoyed with their incompetence. i even got up to the tech supervisor for that shift and told him the most telling fact that my connection is fucked up is that i get dropped from msn every 5 minutes. i forgot to mention that google and every other site, ip address, server, or what have you on the internet is also timing out. and he said "well msn is known to do that. what's the problem?" -- at this point i decided i had enough of their fucking bullshit and told him i'd figure it out on my own, bye.
i decided to call my sister to say hi, since she has no interwebs and my mom let me know that she wants to talk to me. she helped cheer me up, even if it was unintentional.
an hour or two later, i came to the discovery that my apartment is, in fact, infested with ants. i had a plate of food from dinner the night before. it was finished, but you know how there's always a couple of pieces of rice left over and maybe a small chunk of meat that you couldn't chew? well, i knocked the plate over and had to clean up the little mess it made. that's how meat got into the garbage. not even an hour later, i went to throw something out and noticed movement in my garbage. yep. at least 10~15 ants were crawling all over the tiny chunk of meat. i looked under the bag. at least 40 or 50 more ants were crawling around on the carpet. great. absolutely great.
i gave them a tiny chunk of ground beef to see if i could follow them but they were taking too long.
that's where my left foot normally is when im sitting here. they're very hard to see on this ugly-ass carpet. i've called the landlady, she said she'll call a guy about it. but so far i've heard nothing and i'm going to contact her again.
i eventually found a LOT of ants over by the wall opposite the couch between where the carpet meets the wall. armed with air freshener and vinegar, i went to town. but those smart fuckers, they started climbing up the walls to get away from it. sigh.
right.
so.
not a great day, huh?
well, cherry on top: i'm back to being single. and suddenly all the other shit that happened to me that day (the bad day at work, the intermittent net connection and dealing with stupid people, the ant infestation) really.. just.. stopped bugging me. i'd be lying if i said i didnt see it coming, and that's partially why i'm just fine right now and not in the darker place i thought i'd be in, but it's just kind of a shame. meh. life goes on, just with slightly less to look forward to in the immediate future.
i got to bed at 2:30am that night. and woke up for 6:30am on...
Friday
friday was the road to recovery. i'm almost tempted to plot a mood vs time chart but i just can't be assed to do that :P
yesterday was alright. at work i got my program working properly, and my boss said it'll come in handy for other things too. that was encouraging. we went to lunch because our administrative lady found a better job. the company didn't pay but i had pasta w/ a shrimp skewer. yum. the reality of my relationship being over struck around 2pm and the day slowed to a crawl from there. and it stretched till about 6pm where i hit my low point. and from there i was on my way back up the mood chain.
in the spot where my foot normally is, there weren't (and currently aren't) as many ants as there were the other night. i think regular spraying of febreeze air freshener and lack of garbage bag is helping to keep them at bay, but there's still a few crawling around there and many more elsewhere. im still sitting with my legs crossed or feet up. it's killing my knees, but.. im doing it anyway.
i made a new song yesterday evening. i'll make a separate post about that with more details, but until then here it is. that was a great help to elevating my mood a bit. i spent about 2.5~3 hoursish on it, and it was incredibly therapeutic even if it isn't the greatest song ever, and holds no emotion to it. i got in a good half hour of msn convos with like 4 different people thanks to the song alone. at that point i was back to being alright. not happy, but not sad or even mellow.
i decided to try calling my sister, to tell her about my new song since i think she'd like it and to wish her good luck on LSATs today although i kinda forgot she was writing them. it was a side-effect! i also called her because when we spoke on thursday i found myself feeling significantly better afterwards. POINT FORM! no answer, left her a message, microwaved dinner, she called, we talked a bit (~10 mins), i was a little happier.
i was going to go to ottawa next weekend. i bought my train tickets last week and, while, my motivation for going has changed (see the paragraph about cherry on top @ thursday), my intentions havn't. i wanted to go to ottawa to have fun. i'm still going to ottawa to have fun. my sister lives in montreal now (as of a few weeks ago) and i'm going to see if i can coax her into coming down to see me while i'm there. i'd like to thank liz for helping me come to the decision of still going, since she said she wants to hang out and rambled off some fun-sounding things we could do (and i know johnJOHNjohnJOHN wants to come as well!). i talked to liz on the phone too. it had been a while. she helped cheer me up bigtime. and, so, at the end of the day (~12:15am) i was back to being good. no longer alright or fine, or "bleh". but good.
i then stayed up till 4am playing computer games with e-friendz. we played a Half-Life 2 mod called Dystopia and a game i bought [OMG YES I DID] when it came out called DEFCON). we normally do this every weekend, but last night was especially fun. i think it's because i found my role in Dystopia. basically, the game has two components: real world and cyberspace. in cyberspace you can hack terminals that control stuff in the real world, like defense turrets, doors, missile launch systems and other stuff. but while in cyberspace, your real world body is .. well, busy at a computer terminal, and completely open to attack. anyway i won't get into too many details, but i've found that i really like the cyberspace component of the game and i'm really good at playing the Light class and killing people with my shotgun blowin' mofuggaz away wit mah boomshtick.
i think that's the first time in recent memory where friends have pulled through for me, and what a difference it made. whether you guys meant to help or not, you did. so thank you. god that was cheesy. blah!
well. that was a good hour wasted, and now i have to poo. excuse me.