Lots of Monkeys

I’m sort of in a strange situation with the ladybugs in my office. I have dozens, maybe nearing a hundred or so of them in my office, hanging out near the sources of light.

They get in somehow, but then they can’t leave, due to the fact that the office is enclosed. So they manage to get inside the florescent light enclosures and then starve to death. They don’t bother me at all, other than the fact that I feel I have to rescue two or three of them every now and again.

The window in my office never had a screen installed, so I can cajole a few of them onto an index card, open my window and gently evict them into the open sky. At least I know they’ll fare better than the rest of their mates.

Their dry husks slowly littering the floor of my office, only to be swept away by the cleaning staff tonight.

Then the cycle begins anew.

I sit on the bus, face emotionless after being brushed by fat girls’s thighs and glasses repositioned by somebody’s backpack. I’m just glad I have a seat.

The university starts to fill the windshield and work gets closer although to be honest, it’s the furthest thing from my mind.

I get off the shuttle and start walking towards the building that may or may not be my office in a few days. At this point, it just doesn’t matter. I’ll be reassigned no matter what I do.

At step eighty-seven, I push against the ankle brace a little too hard, and there’s an uncomfortable tightness underneath my skin. I slow down a bit. Last thing I want is to be back in the immobilizer.

Overall, it’s good to be walking again, and that’s the important thing.

The 30th is when I get the immobilizer off, but so far I’ve learned a lot of things since I’ve injured one of the ligaments in my ankle.

Things are suddenly very far away. There are times when I look at a crossing signal that has fifty seconds remaining, and I think to myself, that I just can’t make it. As a related note, thirty seconds is not enough time to cross Connecticut Avenue.

I walk everywhere. I walk to work, I walk to the grocery store, I walk to the Metro when I’m going out to dinner downtown. Not being able to walk for long distances has really hampered my ability to get anywhere, or do important errands, like groceries. Taking the Metro to work is killing me. It is maddening to think that I’m taking a bus to the Metro in the first place. Then I think about how I’m going further away from Tenleytown, just to get back to Tenleytown so I can take a work shuttle—it’s very frustrating.

The two flights of stairs in my office take me a ridiculous amount of time to traverse. I can do it, just not as quickly as I used to since I’m being very careful.

Finally, humility and anger. I was on Connecticut Avenue catching a bus from the metro. It’s too late for me to get a seat, and the front seats are packed with suits from downtown. So I’m stuck standing, which not entirely impossible, provides me with some discomfort. Then an older woman asks me if I would like to sit down, and I immediately take her up on her offer. It’s an awkward feeling for me, because she’s older, and it’s ingrained in me to offer my seat up to people like her in a packed bus.

However, there were people my age and younger taking up those seats before the bus was even full. Even better, no one offered a seat to the woman who gave up hers. Poor show.

I’m so sick of commuting, and I’ve only done it for a week and a half. It’s bad enough that the busses are unreliable, but then I have to be witness to the human condition for an hour a day?

Less than two weeks remaining, and you can be sure that I’m counting down the days until this immobilizer is off.

That is a really beautiful sky right now.

I suppose it’s one of those things where you just have to keep on doing what you’re doing and just get through it. I had planned on a quiet lunch.

Some chicken noodle soup, an olive roll. Nothing too extravagant. Besides, my throat was bothering me and it was the only thing that sounded good.

When I got to the tables, there were a few people there. Not my favorite, I do prefer to be alone when I eat. I had to settle with a table that was comfortably between a couple of people on their lunch break.

I had taken a bite out of the olive roll and had a spoonful of soup, with a little bit of chicken on it when I started hearing part of the conversation on my right.

It wasn’t intentional eavesdropping, but there wasn’t any thing else for me to listen to. No incidental music. No traffic. No cleanup in aisle eight chatter of a normal grocery store. Continue reading →