The Lox
Sometimes, when I’m at my parents’ house, our 14-year-old dog will just lie there on the ground, sleeping. My parents like to say that she’s lying there “like a lox.” That’s right — like a piece of smoked salmon. I have no idea where the expression comes from, but it seems to work, and that’s sort of how I feel today. Like a lox.
Last night I was online chatting with someone until about 2:45 in the morning. It wasn’t supposed to be that long — we began chatting at 11:00 at night and the hours just went by. In the meantime, my upstairs neighbor — who I think is about 20 and is an asshole — came home late at night with two of his female friends and I could hear them talking and laughing and watching TV and playing a videogame or something. The walls and ceilings in my building are shoddily constructed. They barely block out noise. Really sucks. I’ve talked to him before about the noise, but he just doesn’t care. I’ll have to put on some Clintonian smooth moves or something, make him want to turn down the noise because he likes me so much.
At any rate, after finishing the chat I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed, but I couldn’t because of the noise. Finally, I found my earplugs, plugged them into my ears, tuned my radio to static, and managed to fall asleep around 4.
At 9 I woke up, called in to work and said I wasn’t feeling well and would be in late… I slept until noon, got to work around 1. Today at work we were having a multicultural pot luck lunch or something, so I stuffed myself with food. Now it’s 3:30 in the afternoon, I have a legal memo I’m supposed to turn in on Friday that I’m way behind on, and what have I been doing? Writing e-mail, talking with people, and now I’m blogging. I just have a mental block on this particular memo — I can’t seem to concentrate on it. It’s actually no great tragedy if I don’t finish it on Friday, except that I’ve had so much time to work on it and it will seem odd if I don’t turn it in by then.
If I had my way, I would spend my day surfing the Internet, reading about the news, writing, blogging, reading blogs, reading books.