Evanescence

Whenever someone (or even a cat) dies around me, I dwell for a while on the evanescence of it all. We're born, we live, and then we're gone. There may or may not be something after this life, but for those who remain behind, we the departed are remembered for what we did and how we acted.

So something dies and I think "I want to have a greater impact. I want people to remember me, and generally fondly. I need to treat people better. I need to be a better person. I need to live a more meaningful life."

Until a week later, when I blurt "Man, this living meaningfully stuff is HARD; can't I just take a nap instead?"

* * * *

I'm noticing a pattern at work. Any time anything heavy needs to be moved, or someone has to crawl around on the floor to connect something, or someone needs to climb on top of something to get something, I'm the slob on duty. I don't mind, because even though I'm still technically post-op, I'm still more physically capable than all my co-workers put together. But there's that phrase, post-op. The other day I was carrying a large computer from the early 1990s, one of those old-school computers that was made mostly of metal and weighed about as much as the average woman. I bent and twisted to put it on the floor and something in my ribs went "Oh no, you didn't just do that, did you?" I'm still paying for it, and if anything it hurts more now than it did at the time.

But that's the price we pay for carrying women and/or computers around the workplace. Women are more fun to carry, but computers don't scream as much if you run them into the doorjamb.

The system software people in the adjoining cubicles were carrying out a Most Excellent Jabber today. One of them in particular is extremely loud. How loud? I was listening to the song "Justifiable Homicide" by Dismember on my iPod at half-volume, and I could still hear her over the music, and that's death metal, for crying out loud! I'm not saying that she talks too much. That's a value judgment that I'm not prepared to make. But she does talk an awful lot; that much is safe to say. But it's days like these that allow me to get to know the deeper recesses of my iPod better. Today, for example, I listened to "Night Driver" from Tom Petty half a dozen times. I'm mostly neutral on the subject of Tom Petty, to the extent that I hardly ever think about him at all. But by gum I rather liked "Night Driver" and I suppose I should be thankful in a backwards kind of way to those horrendous motor-mouths in system software for allowing me to get to know this song.

Is it considered rude to suddenly stand up and shout "Shut up! Just shut up! Just shut up, for God's sake! Shut up!"? I'm starting to have giggly hand-rubbing fantasies involving tasers and duct tape, and that's probably not good.