While I normally don’t post week-in-review blogs, this is the first time since Sunday morning that I’ve been able to sit down and form coherent thoughts of a personal nature. This may be thanks to getting a full 8 hours of sleep last night, which may not sound like a lot to some people (college students, the unemployed, etc.), but I usually get around 5 and yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of sleeping for only 3 out of 36 hours. If you ever want to feel drunk but don’t have any money for alcohol, just stay awake. It works the same way.

Here are the following things:

1. I reviewed the Bright Eyes show the other night. The piece was posted on Tuesday. When I submitted it, I noted that the set list may not have been entirely correct. I was sure that I was missing a song in the encore, and there were a few song titles that I guessed at after Googling the lyrics I scribbled in my notebook during the show. I also expressed my general distaste for set lists, because to me, there’s something about sitting in the dark and waiting for the next song, or betting on the encore and being exhilarated when it’s one of your favorite songs. I know that usually, the kinds of people who read concert reviews are doing it for the set list, but I’d just rather not participate in that kind of hipsterish information hoarding. I also don’t feel like anyone one person should have to know a band’s entire catalogue. The only shows I can imagine going to where I’d know every song is the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, you know?

But the bullshitty set list I didn’t think would be published was published, and of course I got a song title completely wrong. The actual title made far less sense than what I’d typed as a placeholder, which tripped the Internerds’ “FALSE I MUST CORRECT YOU” alarms. No one was mean but it’s really bad form for the writer to respond, so when I found myself getting frustrated over it last night, I turned off the computer and went to bed early.

2. I also followed a group from the 48-Hour Film Project. That one hasn’t been published yet, but at least I didn’t have to Google around for information to get wrong later.

…um, I should probably tell you that I’m not pissed about the set list or the fact that it was published, because I’m really not and I do love that I get to write for KDHX in the first place. When I was talking to one of the filmmakers on Saturday, she told me that she wondered how long she would be able to just make films before having to get “a real job.” I told her that I had a real job and it sucked, and I did the writing for free because it made me feel like a whole person. And let me tell you, readers, that there is something amazing about saying that sort of thing out loud. Not just because it affirms why you woke up at 4:30am on a Saturday to hang out with people you don’t know, and not just because you admitted something personal (which you don’t normally do) to a person you don’t know (who you’d normally never meet), but because it makes you realize that you are no longer the person who wants to be in the band or in the movie because you have found your purpose with this much smaller thing. When you hear yourself say the words that in essence mean “yes, this is it, this is the best way for me to spend my life,” you have accomplished a feat of Self. I may get some things wrong and some people may say bad things about that and no one is paying me at all, but this makes my real job so much more bearable, and those tiny celebrations when something I wrote gets published so much more valid.

3. A new group moved onto the floor in my office building. From what I can tell, it consists entirely of women who stand around the break room and talk about diet foods. One of these women makes the same salad every day. I haven’t been close enough to scrutinize all the contents, but I do know that it contains spinach, jack cheese, peas, blueberries, and tuna. Today I watched another woman eat olives from a can, and I’m usually treated to another woman’s latest recipe discovery from the back of a macaroni and cheese box.

I used to feel bad about re-heating curry or stew in the break room microwave, but now I’m pretty much like fuckit because their shit is way more gross.

4. Some people are genuinely stupid, and to some extent, I have come to terms with this. The genuinely stupid people can’t help being stupid. Their stupidity is a biological defect caused by genetics or drug use or the wrong kind of television. I don’t enjoy spending time with stupid people because, whether it’s their fault or not, there is only so much nonsense I can handle before I must go and force myself to watch documentaries about math (a topic on which I am genuinely stupid, but at least I know that the concepts exist), but I can tolerate their presence because I know they’re not trying to ruin my day.

What I cannot come to terms with are the people who choose to be stupid, especially the ones who only do it on a whim and stubbornly resist anyone’s effort to help them. Often (at least in my office), these people are the ones who can’t fucking listen.

I don’t care that you don’t want to hear it, because I don’t want to say it but your fuckery makes me have to. I don’t care that you don’t think you learn that way, because you are a goddamn adult and we don’t get to choose how we learn things anymore, we just learn them. I don’t care that you’d rather wait to talk, either, because I fucking hate repeating myself and I don’t care that you prefer the sound of your own stupid voice. If you are incapable of listening – which means you are incapable of following instructions or articulating intelligent thoughts or being a person I don’t want to strangle on a daily fucking basis – then you should not be working here, specifically, you should not be working 6 feet away from my desk because I am tired of listening to you.

5. I’m reading Gabrielle Hamilton’s Blood, Bones, and Butter. If I continue to love this book so much (especially the dispatches from restaurant hell), someone’s going to have to remind me of all those nights I came home with swollen feet and raw hands and an overwhelming hatred for humanity when I worked service. Remind me, please.

6. I’m also reading Todd Robert Anderson’s Don’t Act: 101 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t, and even though I have now fully realized that I’d rather write about movies than be in them and that it might be rude to laugh so hard at a grown man crying, this book is really fucking funny and the perfect way for me to go to bed when I get angry at people on the Internet.