even Starbucks had direct deposit

There is one large reason I want to leave my job (the connection to BF’s parents and all its messy tendrils), and a hundred itty-bitty reasons. The shitty computer. The coronary-inducing parking lot. The dead cockroaches I find a few times a week during the summer. The broken front door. The rude downstairs office neighbors. The continual spraying with Lysol that happens every time someone is sick, which makes me choke. The total failure of temperature regulation (85 degrees in the winter, 65 degrees in the summer). And, likely the biggest and dumbest of all these little reasons, the problem with payroll.

If OG is too busy to process automatic payroll three days before payday, we get live checks instead of direct deposit. She is too busy about half the time, so about half the time I have to deposit my check and wait several days for it to clear instead of having the money right there and available on the morning of payday. While I know that this is how people dealt with their paychecks for many, many years and direct deposit is a brand-new convenience in the scheme of things, it has become so prevalent that I don’t think I’m out of line for complaining about this. It’s a serious problem for me, because of the cascade of automatic payments that get made after payday out of  my account, and because I like my payment to BF for the mortgage to be, I don’t know, ON TIME.

It’s happened again this payday. This is like four times in a row. I’m fucking tired of it.

The book I’m reading right now is The English Patient, which I’ve never read before. I also haven’t seen the movie, which, I know I need to see it, sooo romantic, yadda yadda, don’t bother to tell me.  The thing is…I’m not really enjoying the book much at all. I feel about the same way I felt when I watched Pandora’s Box (halfway down), as if parts of my brain have died or deserted me somehow, as if I’m no longer capable of understanding Art and Literature. But this book is so opaque, so poetic as to be difficult to decipher. Events are vaguely sketched instead of drawn, and dialogue is sparse. Maybe I’ve just become more attracted to specificity in my reading material over the years. I want to know just how long they had their affair, and just how each of them felt about it. You can leave me to draw some conclusions, but for God’s sake not all of them. It’s beautifully written, and I know that the author did a good deal of research in order to evoke all the surroundings realistically, but I think he went too far in the other direction in the writing part, and left the reader floundering in his language a little.

But perhaps it’s just me, and my brain has in fact deserted me. It won a Booker, after all. Although I’ve only really liked one Booker winner that I’ve read, The Blind Assassin. At least one that I read, Vernon God Little, was downright awful.

I spent a goodly amount of time cross-stitching last night. I’d forgotten just how soothing it is, how satisfying. There’s immediate visual gratification, but it’s nevertheless the saaame thing over and over and over, stitch after stitch after stitch. Aaahh. I actually can’t wait to get home and get to it again. Unlike knitting, it’s not an activity you can do for a lengthy period of time without it taking a toll on your eyes and neck, but I still love it.

I smell a slow day ahead. Maybe I’ll pull out my thumb drive and write a little…