Do you know how long it's been since I have slept throughout the entire night? 11 days. Yep, I haven't gotten more than maybe 5 hours of sleep a night for 11 days. I am rotting from the inside out and I am beginning to get scared. My eyes are yellow, I get fevers several times a day. I get dizzy. I threw up 4 times last night. When I do sleep, I have nightmares. I wake up sweating and then can't go back to bed at all so I either just sit there on my back, watch tv or go work on personal projects in the dark computer room.

I know I'm not the best person to live with. Ok, I'm probably the worst. It's either my way or the highway but god damnit, I really can't live with people. The only roommate that I really 100% got along with was stoner dave but now he's leaving which is another sad story on it's own. I just want to sleep. I come home, eat dinner, and then go straight into my room for the rest of the night.

Maybe it's just the past month getting me down but I really need to snap out of this rut because I'm becoming quite mentally unproductive. Do most of you realise that almost 95% of the population is "working for the weekend"? That's kind of sad don't you think? Everyone wants to breeze through five whole days just to have fun for two? Why can't you want to get through the weekend just to get to the week?

I realised the other day that a majority of my job responsibility is making call flows that people at AOL read to rebut customers who call and want to cancel their accounts. Yes, I make the sheets pretty to look at by the slime who work at AOL call centers who try to keep customers using their dated, piece of shit online service. I don't even use AOL. I stopped using AOL 10 years ago. I hate AOL. But it pays.

It pays? How is that a good reason to waste 40 hours of my life a week? I know people who document Orca whale migration for a living. I know someone who gets to spend rich people's money customizing their european autos. I make call flows. Sometimes I make 20 a week. Occasionally I get to make a poster... with a callflow on it. *sigh

I remember when I was a lot younger, I would take the metro into DC. I think the first time I hopped the train by myself, I was 12. Tenleytown was the stop to be exact. I would get off the train, take the escalator up to the outside world and my grandmother would be waiting for me. We would walk the 15 blocks down wisconsin avenue to the toy store which was privately owned so it wasn't a fuck-all huge place like Toys R' Us. I would pick out a model kit or a lego kit and we were on our way. Then it was a block down the road to GC Murphy & Co which used to be a real deal five and dime store. Like one of those stores you see in ads from the 50's where folks would go to shop as well as catch a meal at the diner inside. We would pick out a few more bath toys, bubble bath or hairnets for my grandma and make our way down the street one more block to this place called the Zebra Room. I would order a small cheese pizza, she would order the club sandwich. As we ate, I would look out the window as the hustle and bustle passed everything by. I was so excited to see so many people and cars and hear so much noise. It was off to the Giant supermarket where we would get chicken nuggets, salad ingredients, vanilla ice cream, root beer and a small frozen tube of tangerine juice for myself.

Four more blocks down the road, we would finally reach our destination, The Chancery. Smack dab right in front of the National Cathedral. Grandma would say hello to the lady working the front desk with a switchboard straight out of the 50's with wire RCA plugs and everything. We would get in the elevator made of wood (that I always thought would break apart on our way up to the 8th floor) and go inside her small two bedroom apartment. She would make some tea as I would watch the Channel 7 news. She would immediately make dinner for me while I sat at the table watching her do her thing. I would cut off a finger right now just to have one more of her salads. She served them in one of those wooden bowels and fuck if it wasn't the best salad I have ever had in my entire life to this day.

Afterwards I would take a bath in her tub that was surrounded by tile that was probably 30-40 years old. I would finish and she would come in and fill up a glass of water to wash all of the bubbles away. After that I would go into the living room again to make my model kit while she played cards right next to me. She loved solitaire. She would go through a deck of cards a week she played so much. It was so calming to hear her shuffle those cards while I continued on making my model kit of a Ferrari GT California.

Bed time would come around so we retired to her bedroom with I Love Lucy beds. She would take the left one, I the right. She would read those horrible tabloids because a fellow tenant down the hall would always give them to her after she read them. So while grandma read, I watched TV or made cool downhill ski slopes for my matchbox cars with the bed sheet. I would sit up and bend my knees to make a hill and then slid cars down the path. Over and over again until I was tired. 9 o clock would roll around and grandma and I would go to bed. I would tell her I loved her, she would return the favour and we would sleep. She always kept the window open and as I laid there, I would hear the sound of traffic on the street below. Ambulances or fire engines would roll by and it would make me smile. I loved that sound. It wasn't the same as new york city by a long shot. It was calming to me. Just to hear everything on the bust street below. I slept like a baby when I was there.

I was going to end this story by saying that that the five and dime and the zebra room had given way to a starbucks and popeyes chicken. I was going to say that I had to move my grandmother out to a nursing home and would never see that apartment building again. I was going to say that I would never be able to eat that god damn perfect salad again for the rest of life but I won't end it that way.

I will end the story by saying this... I love my grandmother. I never truly appreciated all that she did for me until today and after writing out every detail of my visit to her, I must say she busted her grandma ass just to make me happy and I will always be grateful for that. I will always be able to go back and remember how happy I was going to see her. I mean, what else do grandmas do but spoil the shit out of their grandkids? I would have to say she did a wonderful job doing so.