I wake up with my sunrise lamp at 8 am and feel stuck to my bed like a fly on a trap. I have to find something to get up for so I put on a song called Good Morning Beaty Queen, which is embarrassing to admit but I feel bound to truth-telling in this entry. I try to not go on my phone yet because of how malleable and sensitive my brain is in the morning, but I often do. If I wake up with anxiety I will do some stomach breathing, which I learned from an App On My Phone.
For breakfast, I have a cup of Earl Grey and Weetabix with whole milk and honey. If I don’t have enough milk I’ll have toast with a lot of butter and marmite. I head into work and get ready to —and I don’t say this lightly —work.
At the office, I take the concept of hot desking extremely seriously. I am rarely in the same seat for more than an hour. I leave many chairs, sofas and floors, hot. I take breaks; maybe too many. I go on walks with people to either complain or talk about general matters of professional development. I make myself different drinks and peruse the snack drawer in case it has been replenished by Sarah. I fetch sparkling water for Niclas; I gossip with Eddie in the basement. I do my work how I think it should be done and people seem to be happy with it. I think I’m good at being rational and creative at the same time.
Me and Lina are going to a comedy show this evening so we walk there and get a drink on the way. They say they are starting 20 minutes late so we chat, when suddenly the lights come down and a guy starts singing a cover of Britney Spears’ Toxic but in a jazz style. I forgot it was also ‘jazz’ this evening. We are the subject of some shaky crowd work but luckily nothing too humiliating. A succession of comedians come on and bomb at various levels. I am so obsessed with live comedy even when it’s semi-horrible. In each comedian I see a different archetype of myself, begging for love on its hands and knees. I give it loudly by laughing and clapping and whooping.
I get home drunk and check if 1) I have a smoke detector and 2) it works, because I’ve been worrying about it for a few weeks. I have one, and it beeps when I press the button so feel I can cross that off my list of worries (right below Am I Clever or Stupid and right above I Saw a Silverfish in the Bathroom).
I sway around getting ready for bed and text the guy I’m seeing to call me. He says he’ll be 5 minutes so I check my work emails to pass the time. For some reason, I open the mailer from the holding company’s CEO that I get nearly every day. He’s talking about his trip to the stakeholder's meeting in Japan and has attached a link to a folder of photos from the trip. I open it and flip through them, wondering what hotel they stayed in and if the sky bar dinner they seemed to have hosted was fun. I think about whether people would have been endeared to me if I had been there. I guess I would have tried to be funny, which can go one of two ways, as we witnessed this evening.
Then I chat with Matt and drunkenly flirt and laugh a bit and send him a photo of me at work where I’m lying on a sofa with my phone while everyone else is working behind me. We both laugh and it’s really nice. I fall asleep easily and only wake up twice — once to pee and once to worry. I dream of the stakeholder’s trip to Japan.
✤✤✤
This is of course an homage to Greg Wallace (as many of my posts are). I am still thinking about his ‘A Life in the Day’ article that recently went viral on Twitter. I need to read one from every single person I tangentially know either from TV or IRL. I am obsessed with what people think will sound good to someone else when talking about their typical day. I got in a hole of reading them online and thought to myself how amazing it is that there are people who go through life with no awareness of what the general consensus of ‘weird’ is. Not like the classic definition of ‘weird’ as in counter-culture/going against societal norms. More ‘weird’; as in being off-putting or un-self-aware. People being insane is what gives life its rich tapestry though so I hope it long-continues.
Zoe xxxx
A wonderful sounding breakfast