Eventually my brain is bound to expire. It’s like milk that way, only in my case the date was not set far in the future the way most folks prefer, very different from the serendipity they will dig through cartons toward the mysterious world beyond the dairy case to obtain. Mine is like the lone quart left in a gas station snack shop, ink stamp smudged almost beyond legibility: Did that say ’09’ or ’06’? If you’re desperate, you’ll buy it anyway and hope for the best.

Whatever you do, you don’t leave it on the front seat of your car in August, practically begging for some sort of souring process to accelerate, perhaps leading to solidification. Likewise, I have little enough facilities to draw upon as it is and here I am lighting them afire with reckless abandon: Write for this site here! Contribute to that forum there! Maintain a similarly themed site of your own! Avoid neglecting your long-standing outlet! Then I arrive at my actual job and I’m expected to maintain a rapport with various co-workers via—guess what—written communications and then I recall that I have solicited people to contact me via email and IM so I must meet or exceed their expectations lest my future solicitations go unheeded. Further I am chastised by my like-minded acquaintances for not being hip to the game when I fail to maintain my Twitter profile and resort to archaic communication methods like phone calls rather than text messaging…

It is as though my phalanges and have begun to crust into crude claws and my vocal cords have withered like grapes on a vine or are mutating outward from my throat into hideous mandibles. Meanwhile, as mentioned, my mind has slipped into a state that is undoubtedly dangerous where the surface wrinkles contract and smooth over. The result will be either the development of telepathic powers or, more probably, the reduction of higher function leaving me in a state of reactionary instinct.

Essentially, I am becoming an insect.

Fortunately, even insects can fashion bullet points, of a sort.

• I managed to screw up rather badly at work. My job can be boiled down to its hot molten core as such: Detect problems before they manifest to our customers. Suffice to say that when a customer then contacts me to inform that there is a serious problem on our platform, I’ve basically failed in some key fashion. There were, as you might expect, certain extenuating circumstances. But those are probably merely enough to save my job, but certainly not my face.
• My commute is actually lengthening with each passing day. I leave a little bit earlier each morning and yet I arrive at work a little later. At this point I believe I’m up to two and a half hours in the morning. My nighttime commute is a steady hour and fifteen minutes, but I keep hoping there will come a point when there are literally no more humans left to stand between me and my destination. I did not anticipate that humanity is apparently reproducing at a rate that exceeds my car’s maximum speed.
• Nik is currently between jobs and being understandably choosy about what she decides to take on next. This has given her ample time to serve as a sort of post modern housewife for the last few weeks. At first she was timid, and approached her role as “fabricator of the evening meal” with trepidation. Steadily, though, her confidence has grown and last night she cooked a pork tenderloin whose equal I had not previously encountered. This is significant because while Nik has always been competent in the kitchen she has rarely ventured into a territory I found literally delectable and—this is most significant—experimental. Not only was the dinner last night scrumptious but it was unfamiliar to the extent that it almost felt illicit.
• An interesting bit of trivia: If you take a job that requires you to sit for ten solid hours and you interpret this missive literally, then marry that activity with an increased appetite for Kettle brand potato chips and Keebler Fudge Stripe cookies, you will gain weight. I discovered this through several clinical trials and now must reset in order to begin the control testing. My method for this is the same as it ever was: Regular exercise and a greater attention to what I eat. Part of my exercise routine involves comical-looking machines that I consider to be my arch nemeses; the other part involves playing an innocent looking sport called racquetball. There is not so much innocence there as you would assume. It doesn’t help if you’re a 5′ 7″ water buffalo on the court, however. I managed to run directly into a concrete wall playing this game last week and I got, for my efforts, a goose egg on my knee which turned into the most colorful bruise you’re likely to see. I suspect it’s all in the nearly perfect eggshell white of the canvas. I don’t go out much.
• Nik bought the DVD set of The Office, Season Three. I caught a few episodes here and there last year but wasn’t that impressed. My expectation was low because of this as I entered, but I came out the other side with my faith in the show’s writers renewed. You know how most shows have a central relationship that is in turmoil or question and you are supposed to root for the characters involved to work it out? Often to prolong the drama the writers will introduce a third party, another character, to stand in the way. Nearly every time this third character is abhorrent and so obviously written as a foil to the relationship that the whole exercise feels false. In the Office they did something similar but in a stroke of brilliance the foil is not demonstrably more or less likable than the central figures which generates something that feels authentic. Recall, for a moment, that I’m referring to a sitcom.