Posts Tagged 'work'

• Waking Up

Published October 23, 2010 things 9 Comments
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Even in the most optimal of conditions, the transition between sleep and waking is a bitch. After an uninterrupted full night’s rest on a weekend with no obligations, for me it starts with disbelief. I am not ready to be waking up yet. I expected that I would sleep until Sunday, or at least until the sun started setting. Yet there I am, returning to consciousness, the sun bright and boring a hole directly into my brain. I try to keep my eyes closed and ignore the fact that I have returned to consciousness prematurely.

Then a countdown to the Point of No Return begins. 02:00:00 hours until I reach the Point of No Return. If I do not get the appropriate jolt of caffeine by then, my whole day is ruined.

I try to remember my last dream and force its continuation. I was in a palace eating an apple. What happened next? What happened next? The dream just turns into a conscious wandering of thoughts, a daydream of procrastination.

01:47:33. I ignore the fact that I really, really, really, really have to pee. It’s an emergency. I have to take my morning piss, or my bladder is going to burst. No. This is not time to wake up yet. I can do it when I wake up.

I go back to trying to dream, but since I have no choice but to control my own thoughts since I am actually awake, my thoughts can’t help but turn to work. How long do I have before I have to go back to work? How much time is there left in the weekend? What is the most urgent case in the pile of work on my desk, and how am I going to finish it? I remember awkward social situations, and imagine alternative scenarios where I could have done something differently. Then I realize, this is stupid. I’m awake. Acceptance.

00:49:06. A stupid internal struggle ensues, where I weigh the consequences of opening my eyes. I remember that I have to pee, and so dammit, I open them. I stare blankly at whatever is in front of me, still trying to hang onto that last dream. I remember some other dream I had in the middle of the night, and think back to it wistfully. I was on a boat traveling through a canal that ran parallel to the main street of an English town. There were candy shops everywhere, and people were speaking Arabic. I was hopping on and off of the boat, stopping at candy shops, playing with porcelain trinkets, talking to people and remembering being in this town before.

My bladder burns.

Dammit, I have to get up. I stretch my limbs and then leave them splayed out, wondering if this is really happening. Then I realize I can’t actually see anything, and it only feels like it’s not reality because I haven’t put my glasses on yet. So I feel around the nightstand until I find them, I wear them, and there it is. Reality and consciousness, in focus. I stretch again. I stand, and stagger to the bathroom for my morning piss, and then after I finish, I go back to bed.

One last try. Maybe I only had to wake up because I had to pee so bad.

00:17:29. At this point, I may go back to daydreaming and fail at falling asleep, or I might actually fall asleep again, and wake up sometime in the afternoon. Either way, when I get up, I will feel like shit. If I fail at falling asleep, it’s just a race to reach the coffee maker. Not making it means a headache until the next time I wake up, no matter how much caffeine I have. If I fall asleep again, I will wake up feeling like my head swallowed my pillow.

Then there are the less optimal circumstances, where I didn’t sleep my heart out until I couldn’t sleep anymore. They are the mornings where I have to set an alarm. Where the alarm has to be set a half hour before the time I actually want to wake up so that I don’t sabotage myself with pushing the Snooze button every nine minutes. Those mornings feel bad in a very different way. The cloudy, stuffy-head feeling is not there, but the headache, albeit different, is.

I have no recollection of sleeping, going to bed, or setting my alarm. No wait, I do remember doing that. But that was about 10 minutes ago. Did I set my alarm incorrectly? I look at my alarm. No. It’s correct, and I’m about to run late. But I still need to sleep. Getting up at this point can only be compared to the effort one exerts after having that magical jolt of adrenaline that only happens to humans when their loved one is trapped underneath a car that they are somehow able to lift off of them. The only things motivating me are the nap I tell myself I will have at the nearest possible time, either on transportation, at my desk at work, at home when I return from work–it doesn’t matter, I will have a nap–or the coffee that I need before reaching the Point of No Return. With my knees bent, I slowly stomp to the bathroom like Godzilla through Tokyo, dizzy with exhaustion and trying to hang onto my balance. I brush my teeth with my eyes closed, hoping that I am just dreaming about brushing my teeth. I don’t wake up.

A day that starts this way can very well unintentionally end early. Which brings me to waking up from accidental naps. I wake up with terror in my bed, diagonal, not remembering how I got there, unsure why I’m still wearing my clothes, and unable to recollect my own name. When I am able to calm myself into having somewhat coherent thoughts, I look at the clock. 7:30. Shit. I’m late for work. But wait. Why is it dark outside? The world ended? It’s 7:30pm. I fell asleep in the middle of the day. I am sticky, my head is throbbing, my neck hurts, and I know I am not going to sleep before 2:30 or 3:00am tonight. Which means I will wake up after three hours and start this vicious cycle again. It would have been better to just stay asleep until the next day, but of course waking up doesn’t work that way.

*Photo from phombo.

• Recurring Work and School Dreams

Published August 21, 2010 things 6 Comments
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It is not fair when I exhaust myself at work all day and then go home, sleep, and dream about work. Because when I wake up, I have to go to work. So it’s like I never left. And I really do need long spaces of time–at the very least a meal and a good night’s sleep–before I return to that dysfunctional godforsaken hellhole. Work dreams completely cancel that space of time out.

School dreams are even more outlandishly unacceptable because I finished university in 2006 and graduate school in 2008. Yet the dreams I have until now seem to indicate that I still have anxiety about graduating.

One of the more common dreams that cause me to wake up in a cold sweat, gasping for air and trying to comfort myself with the knowledge that I already have a degree is the dream where I forgot to go to math class for an entire academic year, and now I’m supposed to graduate. It’s always math class. Sometimes I am in community college, sometimes I am at university, sometimes I am in graduate school, but every time there is a forgotten math requirement, or one that I never knew about until it was too late. I will have enrolled in the class and found it too challenging and then simply omitted to attend, either because I had intentions of going but forgot, or because I thought that I had dropped the class but accidentally didn’t.

There is a lot of running and trying to find the classroom through a maze of a building. When I finally find it, I am usually about an hour late and receive a brief, displeased look from the professor. But she barely acknowledges me and continues discussing something absurdly mind-numbing that everyone else seems to understand effortlessly. Her indifference feeds my panic. She does not care that I am an unfamiliar face and did not attend class for the entire semester because she will let the exam do the fucking so that she doesn’t have to.

Sometimes I am trying to locate the math book, occasionally from a locker (which I never had after high school in real life), sometimes borrowed from a reluctant friend because I never bothered to get the book. The math book is always thick and ominous with one of those brown paper bag book covers over it. It is always full of the neat, purposeful pencil marks of someone who clearly knows more about math than I do.

One of my forgotten math class dreams had a car chase in it. But it wasn’t an awesome, slick, high-speed car chase. It was a pathetic, downtrodden car chase. There was this white guy and he was supposed to be my dad. My real dad did not exist in this dream. White guy dad was abusive in that he would try to beat the crap out of me for no reason. I am incapable of fighting back in dreams. I can try, but regardless of the force behind my punches, upon contact they are barely felt. The white guy dad chased me to this Volkswagen dealership, and I thought fast and jumped into a used Golf from the 1990s and asked to “test drive” it. Then I tried to zoom off and make a great escape, except I discovered that the car was a piece of shit. Abusive white guy dad saw me and did the same, chasing me in some similarly shitty but slightly-less-shitty Volkswagen. It was a pretty slow, ridiculous chase. Like being chased while riding around in clumsy bumper cars. But since the car he picked out was slightly less shitty, he managed to catch up to me.

This whole chase was a multi-task where I was supposed to be waiting in a line at the community college bureaucracy to figure out my math requirement situation. The wait was going to be forever, and so white guy dad entered the scene in the meanwhile. That was stressful because I had to kiss ass to be in that line.

In addition to the relief of waking up from this kind of dream and eventually realizing that I passed math and have a job, there is something disappointing about expending the effort of running, fighting, thinking fast, attempting to do math, risking my life for the sake of a book, enduring the condescension of professors, and stressing about whether food and shelter will be in my future, only to find that my efforts were in vein because none of it was actually real. Having to get up and go to work to have real struggles and strain my brain after an epic odyssey with math in it is unnecessarily wearying.

• Adulthood

Published July 19, 2010 ideas 1 Comment
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Adulthood is basically childhood without parental supervision. While that sounds cool because it seems that you can do whatever you want, whatever you were not allowed to do when you were a kid, it’s really not very cool at all. Sure, now I can watch the Simpsons, use swear words, be friends with people who are a bad influence, smoke, listen to my music loudly–all things that I was not allowed to do when I was a kid (but probably did anyway). But without parental supervision, adults are basically a bunch of irresponsible brats…without parental supervision.

Since I am supposedly an adult, I can eat all the cookies and ice cream I damn well want to whenever the hell I want to. That’s right, even for breakfast. And I have done that before, because there is no one to stop me. I have woken up hungry and without moving from my bed scarfed an enormous cup of vanilla ice cream in its entirety before doing anything else. Awesome, right? Wrong. If my mom had been here to yell at me about eating “good food” before “junk food” and the importance of a good breakfast, I might not have wound up writhing in bed with the heinously painful, nauseating, rumbling stomachache that followed shortly afterward.

I can also stay up as late as I want, which also sounds cool, but also isn’t.

Because I have a job.

So it will be evening and the boyfriend and I will be sitting quietly, perhaps I will be surfing the net and he will be reading a book, or vice versa. Then I will notice that he looks a little too comfortable. So I’ll shove him a little. He will ignore me, so I shove him again, harder this time. He continues to ignore me. I give him a final shove that almost makes him topple onto the floor and so he pins my arms behind my back and tickles my sides until I scream and finally breathlessly apologize, not because I am sorry, but because I want him to stop torturing me. Then when he finally stops, I use the pause to grab his throat and stick my fingers in his ears. Soon we are chasing each other around the room and swiping at each other, shrieking and retaliating, and before a winner of this war can be declared, my head explodes with sudden pain, and the boyfriend grabs his own face as we collide idiotically into one another. Game over. We nurse our injuries and glare at each other while giggling hysterically at our incomparably juvenile clumsiness.

Then we realize it’s 2:00 a.m. I have to be up for work in four hours.

If my parents were there, they would yell at me for making so much noise so late at night and tell me that I have to go to sleep because I have to wake up early in the morning.

If there were more moms yelling at their damn adult offspring for their nonsensical actions, bad behavior and all around fuck-ups, a lot of things would probably be different, in a good way.

That douchebag at work would probably be much less of a douchebag if his mom was yelling at him to play nice with the other colleagues. If that were the case, then his supervisor could write a note to her and tell her that her son is spending too much time staring at pictures of girls on Facebook when he should be working hard so that he can actually earn that salary he makes every month. Otherwise, he could be in danger of getting fired (that’s like expelled, but it goes more with the analogy, you see).

If the idiots on the road had any kind of parental supervision, they would probably drive more carefully, if not out of decency or for the sake of safety, then out of fear that their parents might take their driving privileges away.

Parental supervision might water down some evil dictators, too. I bet Omar El Bashir’s parents would not be too happy if they knew that he was caught committing genocide again. A crisis as complicated as that in Darfur could be solved by a little deprivation of Internet, TV and video games and a few stinging whacks on the ass.

But no. People pretty much stop listening to their parents when they figure out they are not afraid of them anymore. And if that doesn’t happen, then they stop being told what to do when they think they have reached “adulthood” and are capable of making their own decisions.

Most people are not actually capable of making their own decisions. Most people are rambling morons. They really just need their parents to yell at them and tell them what to do, and even if they don’t like it, be threatened into doing as they say with a good, resonating whack on the ass.

*Photo from My Job Chart.

• The Filing Room at My Work

Published June 18, 2010 places 1 Comment
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The UN building that I work in is a converted hospital. Set in a prison-like compound in an unknown residential area in the middle of the freaking desert, it is a four-story building with security barricades in the front, a ramshackle outdoor waiting area on one side beyond the gate, and a rooftop cafeteria. There is a lobby on the ground floor and apart from a couple of meeting rooms, the rest of the building contains offices that were probably once rooms bright with too much white light where people were poked with needles, had cotton and gauze jammed into their orifices, and were otherwise prodded and harried into humiliation.

My office is in the basement, a dungeon of despair where mobile phone signals cannot be detected. Next to the stairs is the cockroach-ridden, Kafkaesque Filing Room. It contains decades-old files on tall shelves that are in rows so close to one another that a bulimic supermodel from a famine-stricken country would have to walk sideways to reach the other end. It was originally the morgue.

I should mention that the Filing Room is a fucking disaster. Files are “organized” by a file number over the year the file was opened, but it looks like an ADD chimpanzee learned how to count and then organized it while trying to multi-task a flashy quick-paced Japanese arcade game. You walk one way thinking you are following some kind of order that someone set logically, and then suddenly you find yourself following the lost train of thought of someone from a completely different cultural and linguistic mindset than the person you thought you were starting to get. It’s like slipping into a time warp into another era at the same time as entering another geopolitical dimension. But dizzier.

The first time that I went deep into the Filing Room, something strange happened. My brain felt like it disconnected from the inside of my skull and went numb. It was a similar feeling to when you are on a rollercoaster and your head gets fuzzy because you’ve been upside down too long. It was similar to a symptom of claustrophobia, but it was like a hypoglycemic claustrophobia. My head didn’t stop spinning until I came out again.

That shit be haunted as fuck.

Usually there is a staff member assigned to the Filing Room, so I have not had to go in there often. However, last Thursday, due to a training outside of the office that took half our staff, I was left to fend for myself. Just like teen horror films start, the first thing that happened was that the electricity didn’t work, so I was in a fucking haunted converted morgue in the dark alone. That also meant the air conditioner was never switched on that day, so it was hot and stuffy. People who are alone in these horror films inevitably get slashed. So I summoned a co-worker to accompany me, and with the light of my mobile phone, and with our shadows long and menacing against the walls, we ventured forward through these dusty aisles of death. Like the first time, my brain disconnected and I got the spins again. Trying to ignore an absurd ticking sound, which was probably the fucking Tell-Tale Heart itself, we followed 2003 and then abruptly found ourselves in 2005. Then we went to 2001 and 2007 before finally arriving at our intended destination: 2006. For some reason the numbers started going backwards at that point, and as Alice fell down the tunnel into Wonderland, we fell into the file that we were looking for somewhere near the floor. After that I booked it as quickly as someone walking sideways could, and breaking a sweat, I came out gasping for air and weeping in my co-worker’s arms because she and I lived to see our families again.

*Photo from Bob’s Blog.

• Involuntary Bodily Functions that Out You

Published June 6, 2010 things 3 Comments
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It’s really not cool when I’m in a restaurant with a friend and I order the dish with the picture of four chili peppers next to it on the menu and then am asked by the waiter or waitress, “Do you want that spicy or mild?” And then I reply enthusiastically, “Very spicy!” To which he or she cautions, “Are you sure? It’s really spicy.” And so I scoff and say, “Psh, bring it on, I’m from California, which is practically in Mexico; we cover jalepeños in hot sauce before setting them on fire and swallowing them whole every day for breakfast.”

And then my dish arrives, and after a few bites my nose starts running. If I blow my nose I will definitely be outed, so instead I try to sniff subtly. But soon I’m sniffing like a cocaine addict during allergy season.

“Are you okay?”
“…Yeah…”
“Are you sick?”
“No, no.”
“Are you crying??”
“A little bit, this dish just brought back some fond memories for me and I got emotional…”
“Why didn’t you just order the mild?”
(Blowing my nose into a third napkin) “MECAUSE I CAM HAMDLE IT.”
(Shit fire for three weeks).

Or when I’m at work running around at an impressive pace, showing everyone how absurdly efficient I am. I am a machine. My productivity is through the stratosphere. I could work at this pace until next Thursday without tiring out. And then I forget to eat, because I think that I can just live off coffee, which is part of what makes me so hardcore. And then suddenly I’m in the middle of a serious meeting where everyone has gone quiet, and my stomach decides to be contrary: “BRAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWRRRR. BBBUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRR! OOOUUUUUUURRRRRR, EEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAR, UUUUUURRRRRRRR AAAAAHHHHHUUUUUUUOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRRR?” And refuses to stop until I put something in it, reducing me to the status of a hungry animal in the wild searching for prey. Only not very high on the food chain because I am too weak to hunt, so I have to eat whatever leftover scraps I can find stashed inside my desk from two weeks ago and breathlessly scarf it down like the starved vermin that I am.

Or I will be confidently strutting around in my 97% cotton, 3% spandex long-sleeved work shirt, and then Cairo will become 43°C/109.4°F. I can still be dainty and wear a long-sleeved cotton-spandex shirt in this heat. So I maintain the confident strut, figuring that I am a girl, and girls don’t sweat, they just glisten.

Can I let you in on a little secret? Girls don’t always just glisten. Sometimes they get giant sweat circles under their arms where their estrogen used to be.

*Photos from UE in NOLA, Multifamily Investor and How Stuff Works.

• Ass-water and People Who Leave It

Published May 16, 2010 people , things 3 Comments
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How should I put this? Here in the Middle East we’s likes our bidets.

You know what they’re for. Now, I don’t have a problem with bidets or hygiene. In fact, I mostly have a problem with lack of hygiene, not that that is what bidets promote. No, don’t get me wrong. Bidets are for hygiene. Regardless of your preferred hygienic…practices…bidets in theory are at worst well-intentioned. But ass-water, which I believe was a term first coined by Mister Aedan (or was it arse-water?), is definitely not hygienic. There are a lot of things in bathrooms that make me want to cry. Few things more than ass-water left behind all over a toilet seat. I don’t really know what to do with someone else’s ass-water. When You Have To Go You Have to Go, and so there are very few options. You can hover over the ass-water with the intention that you will not come in contact with anything, but there is that risk of a possibility of losing your balance, dipping too low, and coming directly in bare-skin contact wi–*sob.*

…

Or you can wipe away the ass-water with an enormous amount of toilet paper, hoping that since it is dry and invisible to the naked eye, it is no longer actually there. There is something very wrongly cleaning-my-pet-turtle’s-cage about wiping someone else’s ass-water off a toilet seat, especially when that someone is a human, which it should usually be. Almost.

*Photo from Wikimedia Commons.

• The Three Taxi Drivers I Had the Misfortune of Encountering this Morning

Published May 3, 2010 people 2 Comments
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I did not actually ride with the first one as he refused to drive Downtown because “it only makes 17LE on the meter.” The advantage of this situation for me is that his own stupidity, which he will have to live with for the rest of his life, is punishment enough for what happened right there.

The second one deliberately chose the slow lanes of traffic while a road was backed up from an accident, probably to make the price on the meter go up. Being stuck in traffic caused me to miss the work bus I was trying to catch at 7:20. At some point he noted that “it is only 7:00,” as if to imply that there is still time and it will be okay. He did not yet actually know that I was catching a bus at 7:20 until after he made this statement, so I really don’t know what “it is only 7:00” was supposed to mean. But I could have strangled him and no one would have known.

Third guy was to take me from Downtown to my work since the work bus was long gone by that time. He didn’t like the fact that we were going somewhere far away, yet he agreed to drive there. He kept asking “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” and then when we were almost there, he pulled the taxi over on the side of the road so that he could walk off into the desert somewhere and take a piss. I work far away from Downtown, but I don’t work that far away from Downtown. It’s a commute, it’s not a road trip across the country with no rest stops. He also took a really long piss. An abnormally long piss. A piss so long I considered suggesting to him that he have his prostate checked for “complications.” When he was finished, he strolled back to the taxi with a we-have-all-day gait. When he re-entered the taxi, my eyes became microscopes and I was suddenly able to see bacteria crawling all over the seats and the gear shift and the doorknobs and his money.  Then he mumbled about how difficult and exhausting this odyssey was, which, you know, I was really able to sympathize with when I have made this back-and-forth journey approximately 350 times and he had to do so once and get overpaid for it. The guy has a point, after all, what with the lack of toilets along the way past megamalls, chain restaurants, gas stations, coffee shops, residential areas and hotels, today’s intolerable 24°C/75°F Cairo weather, the clamor of passengers dozing in the backseat, and their unrealistic demands of arriving at the destination to which he agreed to go.

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