Tonight I was going to go to Cafe Bassam and attempt to be approachable through careful wielding of mid-drift and manuscript, but instead I lost my nerve and am home, with some vanilla smirnoff trying to deal. Shyness is an intense propensity - when one has been steeped in it for so long, it becomes harder and harder to go out. It is just so easy to stay here where I am comfortable and safe and can listen to music and write and curl up in my pedicure chair with a down comforter and generally veg.

I mean, really, I work all day, I wake up at 7:30 and go to a non-profit where they pay me nothing and I research customs regulations and why someone lost a package of "The L Word" dvds they were trying to ship to our field office in Honduras. WTF? You can't track the USPS! I don't know what happened to your goddam dvds, I mean, if I'd had the presence of mind to FedEx them this wouldn't have happened, but I'm told to cut corners and be cheap so we can feed more babies in Ethiopia, so I sent it priority mail and they completely vanished off the face of this earth. I'm sorry. Stop calling me about it, I need to get my eyebrows done. And, no, I don't know if the hotel in Malawi has a view.

Anyway. Sorry, work stories are boring. So I'm stressed out, the same as everyone else in this world that hates their job and feels trapped. I applied to a million grad schools (well, 7, it felt interminable) this winter, and hopefully one of them will rescue me and take me off to a place where I just have to produce vivacious text about my sordid life and live in a garret with a twin bed somewhere...

I need to get out of here...