Observations [UPDATED]

*Coca Cola cans are only 25 cents in the vending machine! Big pharma is obviously subsidizing the hell out of them. I've already drawn plans to empty out the vending machine and sell the cans to my local Yemeni deli. I should make a tidy profit.

*Overheard on the paging systems: "Infectious diseases and liver ailments, conference 9B". I won't be going there anytime soon.

*I have to assume the thing with A, the comedian, is over. I sent her a text message yesterday and got nothing, following an email I'd sent her on Monday, (containing pictures I'd taken, for her show) and got nothing then, either. I exit this relationship as baffled as I've been during: from binge-eating to obsessive TV-watching, I couldn't tell you the first thing about what makes this chick tick. My only regret is that it's harder to find a replacement, so deep in winter. If you haven't secured a warm body by end of fall, latest, your winter forecast is pretty much bleak, cold and lonely.

I'm tempted to call her out on her disappearing act but that wouldn't really do achieve anything: I'm not even half-curious why she left, I don't particularly want closure or meaning for our time together; the only thing it'd achieve is it would make her uncomfortable. And I haven't been that petty and vindictive since 2002.

*Just saw my picture on the company intranet. Birds and scared animals are scurrying away in panic, as we speak. I look like a Mafia captain without the menace, just the triple chin and the hemarrhoids. I'd get into shape if I just plain didn't give a shit.

*Mood is slightly better today, but it's a fragile status quo. I'm going to have some kind of existential breakdown in the next few weeks and it won't be pretty. I've decided that if I'm going down, I'm going down swinging but I know that's mostly fake bravado: when my brain shuts down, nothing makes sense and it's like a black cloud just descends and sucks the life out of everything I look at. I'll be lucky if I can just get through this without doing anything really stupid like screwing up work or impulsively making a major life decision or becoming so ambivalent that I do something I can't fix.

* A co-workers name is B.J. Samaran. It says on his bio that he graduated college from Oral Roberts university. I can't be the only one who finds that utterly snigger-worthy..

* My Amazon wishlist is down to about $1800, which is dangerously, temptingly doable. Some of the items I have yet to buy: the complete Asterix collection (32 hardcover books), the Spike Lee Collection, the Woody Allen collection, The Greatest Hits of the Associates, The Film Noir collection (Double Indemnity, The Postman Only Rings Twice and Casablanca), The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, Manga: 60 years of Japanese Comics, The complete Vicar of Dibley, the complete Prime Suspect starring Helen Mirren, the original complete Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers and V, Illinois by Sufjan Stevens, Watership Down, the Aristocrats DVD and The Gashlycrumb Tinies by Edward Gorey.