July 18th, 2001.  Thursday

 
    This morning, as she does every morning, Nora woke me up every ten minutes, to yell at me to turn off the alarm that snoozes for nine minutes. She usually does
this with a shove on my arm or a smack on my head.  On about the 5th repetition of this today, she started to laugh maniacally.  She said that when she hit me on the head this time, she for some reason expected the alarm to shut off instantaneously, like the snooze button was actually my head, and hitting it would stop the noise.  I'm somewhat amazed by the level of conversation we're capable of when both of us are groggy and half asleep.  This happens quite a bit I think.  It'll be 5 in the morning, and for some reason both of us will be awake but not making a sound, but then we'll just start talking about something that's funny to us at that moment. I think i engage in this more than she does, but when i do, she's right there.  Then after 20 or 30 seconds, i'm right back asleep again.  It's a nice bit of night time entertainment that I'm not accustomed to.  And it's kind of nice.
    Still, neither of us is sleeping particularly well lately.  Even nights when we go to bed early- early for me, anyway- around midnight, we both still wake up
totally exhausted. Of course, that's probably a logical side-effect from staying up and having sex till 4 am.  Oh wait, that was a dream. Anyway, we can't figure out what's causing all this tiredness.  She of course thinks it's the air conditioner, and always complains that it's drying her out.  How that makes one more tired, I'm not sure.  Me, I think what I always think whenever I have prolonged periods of unfulfilling sleep:  I, or we in this case, are being abducted by aliens in our sleep.  The idea was planted
in my head by an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Basically, these aliens from another dimension kidnap some of the Enterprise crew while they're asleep, do horrible experiments on them like detaching and re-attaching arms and whatnot, then wipe their memories of this incident.  So the crew members are all tired during the day, to the point that they start having terrible halucinations, and they can't figure out why they're so tired.  Finally, a group of them tries to figure out what's going on, and they recreate the scene on the holodeck.  It's a very creepy episode, and it gives me nightmares.  Anyway, whenever I have these periods of poor-quality sleep, i naturually think it's the work of sinister aliens, from this dimension or another.
     Anyway, today is my brother Galvin's 21st birthday.  It's very strange and very scary to me that 4 brothers are now over 21.  We can all go to a bar
and drink and talk about how old we all are.  Terrible.  Truly, honestly, terrible.  I was going to, in celebration of this terribleness, wrote a detailed list of terrible things my brothers have done to me, and funny things I have done to my brothers, but I couldn't pick any specific incidents, and I've kind of lost the enthusiasm to do so. So I guess I'll wait till the next birthday.  Garrick's.  I can never rememeber when it is. October 17th, I think. It's for some reason one of those birthdays I can't seem to remember.  Which is something I normally do very well.  Anyway, moving on...
 
 

I got a little email from Caryn this morning, saying:

  and yeah, i read your webpage. not impressed by the fact that you managed to bypass all of helping me move and stuff. not surprised, but not
impressed.

    This hurt me somewhat, so i emailed her back, saying I just KNEW she'd mention the fact that I didn't write about helping her move into her new apartment on Sunday (after injuring myself at the gym earlier, no less. But i fought through the pain). She replied:

    I KNEW you knew i'd mention it. i only mention it because a) i haven't even seen you in weeks and b) reading about your usual activities  (sitting around your house with nora, doing anything with your ex) is what you always write about. it just indicates (consciously or not) what's  most important to you. the journal reveals more than you'd think, young  chow.

    I suppose ol' Caryn has a point there.  Though I wouldn't necessarily say that what I write about is most important to me, but what I'm thinking about at that exact moment.  In fact, I often CAN'T write about what's most important to me, for fear of prying eyes.  It goes without saying that of course Caryn is a valued friend, but I suppose sometimes things that go without saying should still be said from time to time. A mistake I've made a lot in the past year or so.

---

    I am home now.  I must say, every day gets seems to get worse and worse.  I say "seems" because when I stop and think about it, in the big picture, things is good.  But this fucking job, and how tired I am, and how riddled my arms are with bug bites is really starting to get to me.  But enough about me.  No, really.  Well, maybe a little more.  But wait, something else first;
    Jed came home today, angry, as usual, and told us what specifically was making him angry today.  He had to write a letter to someone he and his boss had a meeting with last earlier in the week.  he began it with something like "thank you for taking the time to meet with Garrett and me."  When he showed it to his boss, his boss told him "Looks good to me. Except you just need to fix that one mistake.  It should read 'Garrett and I.'"  To make a long story short, after Jed kept insisting that it should not be "garrett and I," and his boss kept disagreeing, saying "think about how people talk. It sounds wrong saying 'me'" one of the other people in the office piped in with "I have to say Jed, it should be 'I.'  Or 'Garrett and myself."  Oh, these people.  Oh, poor Jed.  I've always told him he needs to be writing all this down.  it's gold.  I can't imagine how furious I'd be if I were in that position, where a room full of imbeciles think they're all right, just because the whole room is full of imbeciles with the same wrong opinion.

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