dira | (no subject)

Last night, I drove up to MediaWest (only an hour on the freeway, if you drive really fast!) and met

irene_heron and someone whose LJ name I did not catch, for dinner and hanging out and generally UNCLE-y fannishness. It was - I hate to sound unenthusiastic, but I'm really tired, and I think you all know what I mean when I summarize it this way - it was that total con experience, and wonderful. Even (especially) the moments with Sith and with

crimsonquills when, having discovered another DS fan, there was a moment of hesistant - and almost actually tense - negotiation over which Ray, but it worked out all right.

Except, you know, the part at eleven o'clock when I said, "So, I'd better walk back to my car and go home, because I have to work tomorrow." Sith looked horrified - Oh, god, tomorrow's Friday? I thought it was Saturday! - and she and Keely and Nix walked me out to my car and gave me hugs and sent me home, where I managed, counting snoozes, to get very nearly six hours of sleep before I had to get up and get ready for work. I have to say that it's actually vaguely puzzling to me that I'm exhausted as I am - six hours of sleep is sort of normal these days. Although maybe it should be more of a surprise that I'm not just this tired all the time

Happily, the shower schedule at my apartment means that

iuliamentis and I, once dressed, have a half-hour to sit on the couch and stare at our computers before it's time to leave. Since I wasn't actually feeling mentally functional enough to read fic or the news or anything potentially cognition-requiring like that, I popped in an episode of My Life as a Dog (the one with the hundred dollars, y'know?) - at first I was worried it was going to be another horrible Johnnyless episode but then there he was! In his shirt with the wacky bird print on it that Zoe probably bought him for some occasion and it instantly became his favorite shirt and it's been washed a hundred times and the hem is starting to fray on one arm, but he stitched it back himself, without telling Zoe, so that he could keep wearing the shirt forever, and, um, I guess we all see where my brain goes when I'm tired. So, anyway, lots of squee.

Then I came to work. On Friday mornings I work in the Uni's Museums Library, which is made up of nine rooms scattered through the Natural History Museum and its' research wing. Staff get into the Museum at eight, but it's not open to the public til nine - so at a quarter to, when I headed out of the Museum's main room to the nearest drinking fountain, I found myself standing just outside the entrance to a darkened exhibit wing. It was like a huge cave, some of the exhibit cases barely visible in the glow that seemed to be coming from a random spot behind one of the cases. I walked in, in the big lumpy dark, thinking about Blair Sandburg, Daniel Jackson, about what it would be like to grow up with spaces like that in your life, and found that the light was coming from a window, behind a case and under a stairway, that must have been propped open all night. I couldn't see an easy way to get back there and close it, so turned around and walked back to the boring ordinariness of the library and my very boring work.

I went out for a coffee break (except I don't drink coffee, and caffeine on the whole seemed like a bad idea, since the post-caffeine crash was sure to render me unconscious) and walked down the street. The overcast makes it very obvious that there's a roof to the world, something holding us all down here, so that being outside felt colder but not fundamentally different from being inside. I found myself half-singing the Tori Amos cover of Leonard Cohen's "Famous Blue Raincoat" to myself as I walked. It's been stuck in my head for the past few days: New York is cold, but I like where I'm living, there's music on Clinton Street all through the evening... I was going to go to the comics shop (nothing wakes you up like the Batfamily) but it's not lunchtime yet, and they weren't open. I went into the Starbucks, instead, and ordered the hot vanilla thingie which I'd had - or at least thought I'd had - there before, in hopes of warming up and thereby waking up, without that whole caffeine crapshoot. I'd already burned my tongue on it before it occurred to me that a drink consisting almost entirely of, y'know, warm milk might not really be the best choice for someone trying to stay awake. I drank half, finshed my scone, and then threw it out.

When I got back to work, the person in charge here still hadn't returned, although I left for my fifteen minute break twenty minutes after she left for hers. The student employee commiserated with me over wanting to go home (she, in fact, is not even supposed to be here today) and remarked that at least, with this job, once you get the required stuff done you can just read stuff on the internet. I was tempted to ask her what she was reading - the computer I work on here has the address of ff.net's HP listing in the history bar, and if she was the one searching for good HP-fic I could steer her better than ff.net, forgodssakes - but I just nodded and went back to, y'know, reading things on the internet.

Also, it appears that "What the jesus fuck is wrong with you?" is something I picked up from a former roommate, and not some common pop-cultural source like I'd been thinking. So. You learn something every day.

And now, I should probably finish processing the new monographs. Yes.