The Ink-Pot and the Palette

What's the word for that state of mind where you can see the end of humanity coming, and you can feel the extreme similarity between humans and, say, ants? It's a kind of high, distant perspective that soars up away from the news of the day, shrugs about The Grand Ole Opry and sees the Gulf oil leak as a thin gray swirl on a vast ocean.

It makes it very hard to rediscover the fun of my hobbies or to feel the importance of my commitments, and even though riding my bike, for instance, has exactly the same power to trigger endorphins and get my heart rate up as it did last week, I can't quite remember the feeling an hour later.

Is it anomie? Existential angst? Nihilism?

Whatever it is, it seems to come from overexposure to news and ideas that I'm absolutely powerless to affect, and I need to come back down into the anthill, where my little perambulations and carryings of grains of sugar feel like they mean something, you know?

It's interesting how much you notice about a thing when you return to it after a long absence. In my case today, it was retail.

It's not that I never go in stores. I do. I sometimes buy things other than groceries. But I haven't been in a department store for YEARS, and I wandered into one this afternoon. Macy's, to be exact. The fancy downtown one.

( Crap. )

I managed to sneak invisibly back up the street to my office, where I've buried myself safely in difficult work all afternoon. Now I have to go ride my bike home in the dark.

Damn Macy's.

I kind of lost it at work today.

The day started well. My birthday, for one thing. Sunshine, for another. A pre-planned late morning--coffee at home, an hour of robe time.

Then I got to work.

I won't bore you with the details. Except this one, which took place in a meeting that I was required to attend even though I have four times as many trouble tickets to clear and four times as many users to support as any other team member, and the meeting was about how many trouble tickets we have and how important it is to get through them all every day:

Droning Boss of Haiku Inspiration (via conference phone from a remote location): [Charlie Brown grownup talk sounds] We have 83 trouble tickets in the system this morning [wah-wah-wah-wah] and we have a high priority on [issue that actually concerns me.]

Me: *feels blood pressure palpably rising*: There are some problems with that priority [explainy].

Droning Man: [interrupty] Wah-wah-wah-wah

Me: *tries again* *starts to see red* *looks at clock* *thinks about all the work*

Droning Man: What was that, Em? I can't hear you over this conference phone.

Me: *steam comes out ears* You can't hear me when we're both in the same room.

Twenty other people in the meeting: *stunned*

So, for the next two hours nobody talks to me--and can we blame them, really?--but one coworker tiptoes over and sets a jasmine pearls green teabag on my desk with a note about hoping my day gets better.

Pretty soon my actual boss comes to my desk and says she'd like to see me in her office when I have a minute. I am actually glad to be SO FUCKING BUSY that I don't have a minute all day long, so I won't have to hear the attitude lecture.

Then around 4:00 she comes to my desk and kind of sheepishly hands me a birthday card, and I realize, Oh! That was why she wanted me to stop by her office. She hates Droning Man of Haiku Inspiration too. I was just the Cordelia who said what everyone else was thinking.

No prizes for that, but I got through the day. Was home before 9:00 p.m., and I have two whole days off. The fact that that feels special to me goes a long way toward explaining my intemperate outburst. Excuse it, too? Maybe.