February 18–19, 2002 — The reasons why you stayed

More work. Only a couple more days, though, and then I have two consecutive days off for the first time in awhile. And apparently I get paid on Friday, too, so it will all be worth it soon. (I received a cheque yesterday for that freelance job I did a little while back, so I’ll have enough money to have t-shirts made in a week or so. Now I just have to decide if it’s worth it and if people will buy them.)

But yes. Work. My boss is gone for the week, having returned to her home in Edmonton for a break. Before she left, she told me that I was really starting to come out of my shell, and she asked if I was getting any better at dealing with social situations. I’m not sure that I am.

Work is definitely changing my personality, though. It comes and goes, but it’s fairly obvious when it does happen. I started to figure that something was amiss when a coworker commented, “You sure are perky today.” Which isn’t really a comment I’m used to hearing, to say the least.

The changes seem mostly limited to work, though. It sort of reminds me of how I used to feel when I was doing impromptu public speaking on a somewhat regular basis in high school — I could turn myself on for a few hours and be mostly extroverted and able to talk to people, but I would be completely exhausted and miserable afterwards. I’m not completely sure about the miserable part, but I have to go to sleep fairly soon after arriving home from work, which is pretty early compared to my 4:00 am bedtimes of a couple months ago.

But maybe I’ll get used to it.

I’ve still been having a lot of strange dreams, too. A few nights ago, another one jolted me awake, something that I’m still not quite accustomed to. This time, I was trying to jump a rather large body of water, one that was filled with enormous, swimming cobras. In the real world, I probably wouldn’t consider jumping a river filled with poisonous snakes as big as me to be a good idea, but it seemed sensible enough in my dream.

Needless to say, I didn’t quite make it, and I woke up as I was being ripped apart by a pair of giant cobras. (That they were poisonous seems a bit of a moot point in retrospect given that they ripped my body in half long before I could possibly have died from their poison.)

I was vaguely curious as to what the standard interpretation of a dream like that might be, but then I kept running into web pages about “Snakes as phallic symbols in dreams” and I got kind of annoyed with the entire dream interpretation industry.

In other news, I’m visiting Kerry in Oshawa on Friday. (She goes to school in Waterloo, but is home for reading week, which she is spending recovering from having her wisdom teeth removed on Monday. I, meanwhile, am keeping my fingers crossed and hoping that my wisdom teeth are fine the way they are and will never need to be removed. Oh, to dream...) There’s a Cuff The Duke show in Peterborough that night, too, that I’d like to tag along for. Either way, I’m very much looking forward to the start of my weekend, even if it only lasts until 3:00 pm on Sunday.

So. I think that’s about it. Two more nights of work and then I might have something more to write about beyond wheatgrass shots and smoothies. But no promises.