Sasha Is a Monster

9 pm: For the 8000th time, I’m trying to find a workaround for the fact that scheduled posting doesn’t work in the latest WordPress release.

9:15 pm: My hosting service had informed me previously that the workaround provided in the WP bug tracking system doesn’t work. But, just to be certain, I drag my cyber-ass to the WP bug tracking system to check out their patch.

9:20 pm: Apply patch. Test patch. Patch doesn’t work.

9:30 pm: Leave bitchy note in WP bug tracking system to inform them that their stupid patch doesn’t work because they’re all stupid and could they please get around to fixing their stupid product some time this stupid year?

9:45 pm: What do you know? The same patch I tried 20 minutes ago? Works now.

The dental tech is picking at my teeth with her awful metal picker.

“How’s your recession?” she asks.

She’s talking about my gum recession, I realize eventually — the combined result of braces at an early age and irregular flossing — but my first reaction is to be like, “Dude, it’s your recession, too.”

One of the comment submissions I caught today, on an old Pam Anderson thread.

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Child pornography on DVD, call me +19193452302
or write me on e-mail bjames@wellmanproducts.com
Sex with children, animal.
Real RAPE!!! with kill.
great choice, is happy to answer all your questions
my phone +19193452302 (any time)
e-mail bjames@wellmanproducts.com

Perhaps best of all, when you go to wellmanproducts.com, it appears to be some manner of aerospace material contractor. Clicking on the “What We Do” tab offers this information:

Wellman Products Group offers products and services that combine to form some of the most advanced components available for friction-related assemblies.

You can’t make this stuff up.

… is that I’m not a naturally unhappy person. I’m not a naturally stressed-out person. Stress is not a condition endemic to me. There are external circumstances — created by me — that stress me out. That fifty-pound weight that sits on my chest is not something I have to pray for God to remove or that I need to meditate into non-existence. I’m twenty-six years old with no children and no husband. My life is exactly as I design it, each and every day, and I can actively elect to create a life without stressful conditions. It sounds absurd, but it hadn’t really sunk in until tonight that the Stress is not inextricable from the Sasha.

I was talking to a friend casually. She asked what I did this weekend. “Nothing,” I said. “It was my first weekend off in …” and I was about to say two-and-a-half years, since that’s when I started Evil Beet. But I stopped myself. Because before Evil Beet, I was working full-time and going to grad school nights and weekends. And before that, I was going to college full-time and working nights and weekends. And before that, well … before that, I was fifteen years old. I haven’t allowed myself to structure a life that I can fucking breathe around in over a decade. I almost burst into tears right there, trying to answer a small-talk question about what I did this weekend. The sadness just gathered like a dress, pulled toward and in from all sides.

There’s such a freedom in it, though. I don’t have to feel this way. That’s nice.

Where you can get an entire winter wardrobe to the tune of $302.96 and a Europop Madonna cover.

Added bonus: Middle-aged, balding security guards to help me remember not to steal an $8 cardigan.

A man distraught because he could not find work shot and killed his mother-in-law, his wife and three sons and then killed himself inside a home in an upscale San Fernando Valley neighborhood, police said.

Authorities said the man had an MBA in finance but appeared to have been unemployed for several months and had worked for major accounting firms, such as Price Waterhouse.

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