triskellian

This news is slightly belated, in that most people I've seen recently already know, but it's now official, so I can say in public without fear of jinxing myself: the rather marvellous institution I work for has agreed that I can spend the duration of my masters working one day a week, and, crucially, go back to full time afterwards :-) (This is, it only now occurs to me, almost an exact reversal of the last few years of my life when I was working four days a week in term time and spending the other day being a student.) I was prepared to quit entirely, or apply for a full-fledged career break if I had to, but I'm very relieved that it hasn't come to that. It does make it all scarily real, though, even while giving me more of a safety net than I had any right to expect.

smiorgan has lent me some CDs of wordless ambient music to play at work (on headphones of course, because playing music on speakers in an open-plan office is evil), to minimise the amount of time I spend in a simmering rage with my colleagues because they dare to talk to each other while I'm editing.

It's working, but it's having a strange effect on my perception of the world around me. The best way I can come up with of describing it is that it's like being in a film, with mood music as the background soundtrack. Mostly it's gentle, swooping, soothing music, which is having a wonderful effect on my usually irritable and sarcastic self, but occasionally it turns slightly more sinister and/or dramatic, and coupled with the large skyscape outside my window makes me think I might be in an eerie arthouse film, where the threat is never entirely clear, and the problem never entirely resolved. When I turn the music off, the world seems too quiet.

Everyone overslept, or had bad dreams. Computers are misbehaving in many different ways. My argumentative tendencies are even worse than usual, and I'm finding myself automatically disagreeing with everyone, about everything, on general principles. I'm not sure I'm capable of being civil to the people who piss me off, so I'm not speaking to them at all. I've had three cups of tea at work, which is three more than usual.

Every now and again, we have days like this. Everyone's stroppy, everyone feels as if non-sentient objects are conspiring against them. In half an hour, I'm going home, and I hope my car feels inclined to cooperate.

typomatic used to claim to be able to use telekinesis. This took the form of pointing at the thing he wanted moved and saying 'TK' over and over again until someone got fed up and passed him the thing.

The girl who sits opposite me at work is called Kay. It's far from uncommon for someone to be doing a hot drink run, and to wander up to her desk and ask 'Tea, Kay?'