So, while last week's article was busy being plagiarized, I was home alone.
(And who knew anyone actually read this thing? Knock me over with a feather!)
I only started my job in September, you see, so I didn't have a whole lot of vacation time this year. (Not that we Americans get much vacation time - ten days a year, to be precise. Even England gets twenty, and on the continent its thirty or more. Only in Japan is corporate culture as miserly.) Thus I flew back from our trip out west on Sunday the twenty-sixth, while my wife remained in California for another week.
A week which I got to spend any way I wanted, and which reminded me yet again why it's a good thing I got married.
There was, needless to say, a very great deal of videogame playing. I've gotten into World of Warcraft, and like any good MMORPG it is finely tuned to suck as much time out of you as it can. So that was pretty much my evenings. In fact, that was overly much of my evenings; I have to rise at six-thirty in order to get to work circa eight, and I was up past midnight every day.
So I was kind of dopey at work. Not that anyone was really there to notice. And the roads were empty enough, most rational people taking the week between Christmas and New Year's off, that I shaved a good fifteen minutes off of my commute time, which is usually an hour and fifteen minutes. But still, going to bed at one wasn't the greatest idea.
As an aside, on Friday the thirty-first I drove to work on the Beltway. Now, for those of you not in the D.C. area, the Beltway is effectively an automotive glacier. Any time but particularly weekdays between five a.m. and, say, nine p.m., it moves in geologic time. But my company had Monday the third off instead of Friday the thirty-first, unlike the rest of the world. I figured I'd take a chance.
Got to work in thirty-five minutes. Fastest time ever.
And I won't be able to do it again for another year.
Anyway. So, home alone all week. I ordered pizza three times, and didn't cook at all. Normally I cook three times a week. I did no dishes. I tidied nothing up. I didn't even unpack my suitcases.
Three times. And we don't have anywhere near us that makes good pizza.
Monday and Tuesday were great. I revelled in my freedom to be a shlub. The only even vaguely responsible thing I did was to feed the cat.
By Friday, I was moping around. Went to some friends' house for NYE and spent half the time whinging about missing my wife. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but I certainly brought it up a lot.
So, I pick her up from the airport on Sunday. That same day I did the dishes and tidied up. Monday (which I had off, remember), I went shopping, did my laundry, and still played several hours of WoW. (My wife came home sick from work, and made dinner. So I didn't entirely monopolize domesticity.)
I dunno. I'm just better when there's someone around I have to perform for. I don't need to impress myself.
But of course, I'm secretly already looking forward to Thursday, when she goes up to Philly for a conference and I will once again be free to play videogames and not have to do anything I don't want to.
I'm glad she won't be gone for very long.
- Sun Ra