It's What I Got (I Said, Remember That)

You know those science-fiction stories/Twilight Zone episodes? I think the story I'm thinking of is Mars is Heaven, by Ray Bradbury....everyone goes to Mars, but on Mars is a place just like home, where your old dog never died and your childhood sweetheart is married to you, and as soon as you relax the tentacled aliens come and eat you? Or the Stephen King variant, Rock n Roll Heaven, where all the dead rock stars are the evil oligarchs of a little town you only find by getting lost?

I think that the tentacled rock stars are going to come out of the woodwork any time, because work? Is heaven.

People are nice to me. They consider me competent. They aren't constantly checking up on me to see if I'm doing what's right. They offer instruction instead of criticism. Most of them have known me since I was a kid, and while that gets mildly annoying, it's a heavenly sort of annoyance. They let me show them how to find things on their computers and do things with their software. They pick me up lunch.

I have my own office. It's kind of blank and uninteresting at this stage of the operation, but I have it. I think next week I'm going to bring in my Van Gogh and hang it up to relieve the white wall.

My dad is his usual grumpy self, stomping around and being satisfied with his own level of competence and dissatisfied with everyone else's, but I learned how to deal with that from the time I was fifteen onward. It's not the MOST intellectually stimulating thing ever: file, do mail, answer phone, type, file, do mail, skip trace someone, file, show S. how to clean out her cache, walk to the courthouse, drive to the federal courthouse, lather, rinse, repeat, with plenty of sneaking cigarettes and blatant misuse of the Internet. Work is always going to be something to be avoided when possible (like, for instance, right now), but work that doesn't make you feel cheap, degraded, incompetent, or just plain stupid? This must be Mars, because it's utterly alien.

School is good: civil trial is boring and my teacher is a dick, general law is interesting and my teacher is hilarious, wills and trusts is interesting when the material isn't already two-strikesing it. Paralegal studies only lasts an hour and a half once a week, but I like it.

The house is lovely, the cats are lolling around like they think this is Egypt 5000 years ago, plans for the Bizarre Bazaar continue apace, I've catalogued 375 of my books on LibraryThing thus far, and my main complaint in life is having to find shirts that cover my bicep tattoos. I'm going to teach Guedra at AppleOak next weekend at their request. I am going places with folks to see and things to do, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I have become popular, despite all my youthful protests as to the impossibility of such an occurrence.

Plus, I'm getting my septum re-stretched tonight, thank you, Kevin. And I got a magical piece of paper from the court yesterday, telling me my charges are dismissed and expunged...or, as N.W.A. famously opined, "Fuck tha police." I win, they lose, the world goes round and round and round and the world goes round and round.

Life's pretty good. I'll check back when I can. Mars is great, wish you were here.