Rainy Days and Thursdays

I have finished what I was supposed to do, so I am lolling at my desk, updating this, listening to subdued conversations take place all around me (today is Thursday, it is quite a buzzing day here) and trying to read the paper all at once. Talk about multi-tasking. Now, if I stop up my ears with earphones and listen to Nella Fantasia et al. I will be able to concentrate on reading the paper. Except that I am not reading the paper. I am updating this.

The past few days have been weird. I get so tense that I end everyday with a blinding migraine. So blinding that I can barely drive home. Now I know that these guys are going way easy on me and have only given me easy stuff to begin with. So that means I am stressing myself out for nothing.

Yesterday, first thing in the morning, I asked a colleague if he had Panadol. No, but he had Vitamin C tablets, the kind you dissolve in water, which he said always gave him the requisite pick-me-up. So I took two. Then, he asked around and found some aspirin for me (can anyone be nicer?).

After lunch I stopped by at Borders and picked out a volume of Edna St Vincent Millay. I read the famed Renascence and then turned to my favourite (maybe because we did this poem in university):

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet know its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

I don't know if you've noticed but the last stanza so to speak about her boughs being more silent than before is sort of a mirror of a Shakespeare sonnet which begins thus (or should I say thusly?):

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

Anyway, because I'm weird I stroll along on my solitary way repeating phrases to myself like "where late the sweet birds sang" or "what lips my lips have kissed" or "in sooth, I know not why I am so sad."

Is it any wonder that nobody wants to hang out with me and I get weirder and more isolated by the minute?

Anyway, so yesterday I finished the stories that have been weighing me down and causing me all this stress and I left the office for the first time without a migraine. Which was kind of good because it had been raining intermittently and there was a massive jam outside.

Which meant I couldn't take Arnold for his evening walk (he was not happy about that) and ended up sprawled on the sofa watching numerous episodes of Big Bang Theory instead.

Oh the humanities!

Classic Sheldon!

So I interviewed someone I thought was nice but I am revising my opinion in the face of his not answering my email to clarify something or to comment on what I sent him. I have to really learn to detach from these people and understand that PR personalities are just that. PR. Puff of smoke. Nothing underneath.

Sigh.

I could use a drink tonight.