Day 29

Today is the penultimate day of my 30-day blogging challenge. "Penultimate" is one of those big vocabulary words that Dan likes to throw around whenever possible, which is a trait I find super annoying. It seems to be a family trait: I remember his brother once used the word "disaggregated" in some sort of casual, non-scientific, non-data-set conversation. A conversation where "separated" would have made a lot more sense, if I remember correctly.

His brother is a graduate of Yale Law. Really smart, really successful person. Clearly knows a lot of big words. But I think theres a little more to be said for knowing when not to use them.

Opening this entry with an attack on Dan's curious and pretentious vocabulary choices, however, is a misleading choice on my part, especially where yesterday's entry somehow meandered into rant territory about an argument we'd had. Dan and I are not arguing tonight. Tonight, I am suffering from a general malaise.

Or rather, I am suffering from a malaise most closely associated with some changes at work that I don't feel at liberty to write about freely in any context that might be tracked back to me, pseudonym or not. I don't think anyone's looking, but it wouldn't be particularly hard to figure out who I really am from this, or to find this if you were looking for things about who I really am. If that makes sense. Regardless, my work life has changed, very suddenly, and has become significantly less enjoyable and fulfilling for me.

I can live with this, except that enjoying my work life was a really important distraction from the fact that I don't really enjoy my home life.

I don't do well on any day where I don't get a good chunk of time sitting in front of the TV while eating: most nights it's dinner. Tonight, dinner got rushed and was sub-par and we ended up watching a particularly disappointed episode of the daily show: two of three, well, thirds of it were really disappointing, so, assuming the first, Jon-Stewart-covers-headlines-directly-to-the-audience part was fine, I probably got all of seven minutes of my rejuvenative food-TV ritual in, and it was heavily interrupted by both the baby and the dog. So maybe that's the real source of my dourness.

I suspect, as I so often do, a hybrid of things.

To salvage what's left of the very little time before I really should be asleep, I'll probably curl up with my phone and search the internet for some way to feel more interactive with Serial, the new spinoff podcast from This American Life. Are you listening to it, imaginary reader? It's so good, so addictive.

I don't want to waste my time explaining it. Just google it. Or better yet, just download the first 7 episodes, which are currently available. You have to listen to them in order, it's an ongoing story. I'm too tired to give you a hyperlink, maybe I'll edit in later.

Day 29. The penultimate day. If you were to disaggregate this body of work, you'd get 29 separate posts so far.

On with it.