Another Day, Another Dollar...

So I was here at work all day on Saturday. 8 hours, really, but come on, that is really all day, isn't it? Luckily, I was alone in the building after four p.m., and I turn into a raving lunatic. I broke both of my two favorite pens and yelled and screamed at the computer at the top of my lungs. Not only did the author feel the need to rewrite his first 10 of 24 chapters, but at 4:30, the electric blipped off, losing about 5 chapters worth of work.
**Enter broken pen number 1.
Then, nearing the end, I decided to start printing this job. It wouldn't print. I tried another computer. Still wouldn't print. Tried a third computer. Still, nothing.
**Enter broken pen number 2.
Called Karen. Fixed corrupted font problem via phone. Began printing. Then I find out the last 40 pages of appendix are all art pages. After fifteen minutes of spooling on the first page, I stubbed my toe on the big metal pole that supports the building behind my desk.
**Enter fifteen minutes of yelling and a quick trip to quickie mart for cigarettes.
Come back. Finish printing without further incident. Leave at 6:30. As I'm leaving, Boy calls and says he hasn't had anything to drink all day because there isn't anything in the house to drink. I ask why he didn't run to the convenience store LESS THAN A MILE FORM THE HOUSE. He said he was trying to save gas.
**Enter childish name-calling and a cigarette.
I stop at Weiss for water, ice tea, soda, and Kool-Aid mix. I want to make sure my vases are covered with this "Nothing to Drink" plague we are experiencing in Bowmanstown. Leaving parking lot of Weiss, an old lady decides to pull out in front of me and go 25 miles per hour down route 100.
**Enter a broken blood vessel, much foul name-calling, and a general sense of helplessness at this cruel ending to my day.
Finally get home.

Tired, angry, bitter, I decide to finally watch the movie "Camp," which, I have to say, I loved. I'm not big on musicals, so I didn't have high hopes, and it's not really a musical in and of itself. It has a lot of songs as it's about a bunch of teens in a theater summer camp.

And I realized of that much enjoyed movie that I had missed the okay to be gay as a teen movement by about fifteen years. If I was born fifteen years later, I could have taken a boy to the prom. Oh well. Spilt milk. My life probably wouldn't have been much different anyway. I still would have been the shy, chubby kid with acne too scared to ask a girl out, let alone a boy. I think by the time we enter teenage-hood, our personalities are pretty much set in stone. In the teen years, we spend our time trying to find the limits of our potential while figuring out how to deal with our shortcomings. Then we spend our twenties blaming our parent's for our shortcomings while riding the quasi-success of any potential we found in our teen years, spend our thirties raising children in what we think is the exact opposite of what our parents had done, our forties dealing with miniversions of ourselves called teenagers, out fifties getting blamed by them for their shortcomings, and sixties through nineties looking back at it all and laughing, and finally enjoying life. Hopefully, anyway. That is how it look from my perspective, at least.

But the movie made me smile. And I slept well that night and didn't even think of work on Sunday until Rich said, "What are you going to have for lunch tomorrow?"

But that's another burst blood-vessel story for another time.