March Sweeps - Day 406

Well, I sort of shot myself in the foot today.  I had another headache and it made me super sluggish (it was snowing steadily outside all day long, the wet and gray kind of snow that turns to puddles and mud as soon as it hits the ground and makes the world look the way Frodo saw it when he put on the One Ring), and the library was going to close, so I grabbed my laptop, got in the car, and drove over an hour before it closed.  But when I turned on my laptop, it decided to do another system update (the same thing I suspect that skragged me a couple of weeks ago with the sound), and I had to sit for twenty-five minutes as the computer updated itself, just reading Facebook posts on my phone while I waited.*

I made the mistake of opening Instagram on my phone, and even though it was on Silent, a fuggin' Megan Thee Stallion song started blaring (at full volume) that had both the p-word and n-word in it, drawing the view of everyone on the Quiet Floor.  Cute, huh?

Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In March: 1329

I managed almost no words in the library today, but who cares, no big deal.  But I want more.  I want to be where the people are.

In a bit of other news, I finally found a Star Wars collectible I have no interest in owning.

Push-ups Today: 66
Push-ups In March: 1295

And somehow, though I wasn't wasting time watching TV or surfing the inter--was I?  Is that where the hours went?--the day was over.  I got my run in, I got some sit-ups, got some push-ups, got some dinner, and recorded my lines for an audio drama I was asked to voice.  It's a five episode commitment, and to my surprise, I am the second lead, sort of a Ben Kenobi to the main character's Luke.  I'll admit that I was hesitant last week when I got an email (we all did) asking that we not do any accents for our characters, but to speak with our regular speaking voices (I had planned on doing a sort of Giles from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" voice for the mentor role, when reading through the character bio, and had to disabuse myself of that notion).

Ultimately, I chose to do a much lower, scratchier version of my own speaking voice for the character, who is very principled and never uses contractions.  I decided to record all the episodes at one sitting, so I could keep the voice straight, and discovered that doing a scratchy voice makes me cough and completely effs up my throat, causing me to abandon the chapters of my own work I was going to record tonight, which would have gotten me a few words of writing, instead of the nearly nothing I'm left with while typing this.

Oh, and this is the latest I've blogged this year (it's 4:10am right now), and maybe since I started doing this.  I drank some Coke Zero at around eleven, because I was falling asleep at the computer, and now I'm wide awake.

In related news, I went all of January and February drinking only diet soda.  I finally found one I like the taste of (Coke Zero, which may not technically be a diet soda, otherwise they'd just call it Diet Coke), and tried my best to only drink that in this new year.  Then, last week, I went to the storage unit, where I have several twelve packs of soda, none of them diet, and was momentarily struck with Whatthehellism, and opened a regular Pepsi to drink.  Now, I had been warned that, after only drinking diet drinks, the regular sugared kind would taste super syrupy and way too sugary, so I was a bit worried, but I chugged it down anyway due to being thirsty. 

And it tasted like poison.  Not like sugar water or when you mix all the flavors of soda together, but like there was something wrong with it, like the mix was off at a convenience store fountain nozzle. 

It reminds me of a guy I knew a few years back who had no experience drinking alcohol but went out to a bar with a bunch of work friends, and was given some kind of drink that tasted exactly like rubbing alcohol smells.  He nursed it, tiny sip by tiny sip, utterly miserable, while his friends drank down margarita after margarita, beer after beer, rum and Coke after . . .  

Finally, his coworker Kristina said, "What is wrong with you?--You're still on your first drink!" and he said, "I've only managed to get about half of this down--it just tastes so bad."  And Kristina said, "Give it here."  She took a tiny sip, and spit it out onto the bar floor.  "Jesus!" she exclaimed.  "This isn't a Tom Collins, there's something wrong with it!"  The guy just shrugged and said, "I didn't know what it was supposed to taste like."  

She marveled at his stupidity, and was not at all surprised when, a few minutes later, he was out in the parking lot, violently ill, puking all over the tires of his friend Brandin's car.  Poor bastard lost his driver's license that night too, and had to pay to get another one (though maybe he could've used having left his ID at the bar that night as an excuse not to go out to another club with the coworkers, no?).

Anyhoo, I went back to Coke Zero after that.  I only wish I liked Diet Coke instead, because there's a store up the road that sells cans of it four for a dollar that they can never get rid of, whereas literally every other drink they sell (including Tab.  THEY SELL TAB, for Bossk's sake) sells out immediately.

In other news, I told my cousin on Tuesday that HALLOWEEN III is the most underrated movie in film history.  Care to agree?

In other non-news, I guess I should go to sleep now.

Words Today: only 406
Words In March: 11,396

*I guess I could have written in my notebook, gotten some words in that way.  Whoops, now I think of it.