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Wrong Side of the Universe
24 November 2004
4 13:12

Some days, I really do believe that getting out of bed in the morning is the worst idea ever.

The misery actually began last night. Though I'd been looking forward to my shift at the bar all week, by the time I finished running my post-work errands and got home, I was a bit tired and didn't particularly feel like playing the piano and singing for potentially six hours. The bar was more full than I've seen it on a Tuesday night when I arrived, but for all the notice that the patrons took of the performers, we may as well have not even been there. I thought perhaps it was just me, but as the evening progressed, it became apparent that neither the bartender nor the waitress was able to reach these people, either. After making over $100 in tips last week, I hadn't even cleared $50 when I left at 4 this morning, and $20 of what I had went to the driver, as there was no way I was waiting for a bus across and then a train uptown at that hour. I was asleep in the back seat before he even reached the FDR. I have no clue what time I arrived home, as I just collapsed onto the futon in the living room and slept after setting my alarm clock.

I don't know what time I set the clock to alarm, but clearly, it was ineffectual, as I woke at 8.45 this morning. I phoned my boss, apologised for over-sleeping and told her I'd be in as soon as I could get here. "As soon as I could get here" turned out to be two hours later. It wasn't even 9.30 when I left the apartment, stumbled down the hill in the miserable drizzle, and managed not to fall down the ten or so stories worth of stairs into the 181st Street station. The train arrived after a few interminable minutes, and I almost immediately settled into an uneasy sleep in my seat, which lasted until we reached Canal Street. At Broadway-Nassau, I de-trained, as usual, finding the walk to Wall Street more tiring than usual, and entered the Exchange, feeling like a zombie, through the main entrance, which I do not normally use. I stupidly set off the metal detector by walking through it with my enormous umbrella in hand and descended to the cafeteria in the basement, where I intended to treat my late-for-work and zombie-riffic self to the biggest Dunkin' Donuts coffee I could get and some sort of breakfast pastry. There was no one manning the register. I contemplated walking off without paying for the coffee I'd already poured myself, then thought better of it. I stood and waited, consciousness ever waning, behind two specialists (a.k.a. traders) who merely wanted tea bags.

Everything takes longer when I'm late or in a hurry. It may be worse when I'm in a hurry, because then, there's a sense of hope and a sense of danger; I might actually achieve my objective in a timely fashion, or I might nearly kill myself bolting up the stairs and onto the platform just in time to see the doors slide shut and the train pull out of the station (speaking from more than one experience). When I'm already late, there's a certain sense of futility involved, which invariably contains an element of rage -- rage which is really directed at myself for my own ineptitude at doing ANYTHING in a time-efficient manner, but which expresses itself in growling, muttering and snarling at everything and everyone in my path. This morning, the rage was absent; I was simply too exhausted.

After what seemed an eternity, I managed to pay for my two doughnuts and my enormous coffee and traverse the obstacles of several stairways and doors and a fair amount of human traffic, munching one of the doughnuts on the way. As I walked through the door at the bottom of the staircase after the automatic revolving door after the other staircase, though, it swung back and hit my left hand, in which I was carrying the enormous coffee with my remaining doughnut (strawberry frosted) on top. The catastrophe was instantaneous, the carnage widespread. The polystyrene (we use an obscene amount of the stuff around here) coffee cup was demolished -- cracked down the side, flung against the adjacent wall and deposited by Mr. Gravity on the floor. The strawberry frosted doughnut landed face-down in the resultant lake of coffee. I used a phone in the hallway to call Facilities Management and alert them to the spill.

I hadn't tasted so much as a sip.

r

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