SILENCE, EARTHLING!

That’s me, pretty much every day as soon as I leave work. I have to talk to so many people and hear so many other people talking to so many people that when I leave, I don’t even want to know that conversations exist. Call me at your peril; since I am physically incapable of pressing the “Reject” button for some reason, I will answer the phone but provide only terse, one-word answers to anything you might say. I will sound unenthusiastic about everything except getting off the phone, which I will try to do repeatedly. I am awkward, uncomfortable, and inhospitable. An excellent girlfriend when Graham calls during a break from work, and I hope you can sense the sarcasm here because I’m laying it on pretty thick.

My job is one of the reasons I don’t go out much anymore. It’s not just the long hours, although waking up at 5am has something to do with why I’m not closing down 3 o’clock bars anymore. It’s the forced socialization for nine hours a day, five days a week. When you spend that amount of time having to interact with people who are, by and large, mean to you, all the fun gets sucked out of hanging out with your friends.

But there are a few exceptions, such as Jake’s birthday party later tonight. I hardly ever go out on Fridays because it’s the one night when I can be in bed by ten and sleep a full nine hours in a row, but he is one of my oldest friends and he did drive me to my birthday party so I guess it was worth it to get home, take a shower, have a 10-minute nap, and then wake up to drink a pot of coffee and be sad when I looked at the backyard before going out.

Along one side of my backyard is a line of young trees. The branches are very thin and bendy, and while they can get kind of wild, they’re pretty in the summertime, all exploding with green and full of birds (cardinals, sparrows, doves, and these little blue finch-like things) and squirrels. Occasionally, though, the next door neighbor (or maybe the guy who owns that building) decides to make nature his bitch and CUTS THE TREES DOWN. When I left this morning, there was a verdant wall of lively shade in my yard. This evening, it’s an ugly line of waist-high, chopped-off sticks. And these birds keeps flying over and whirling around in the air like they’re confused, and the poor squirrels that would normally use the trees to jump from the phone wires don’t know what to do.

It mostly makes me depressed to know that I won’t be buying a house on my own in the foreseeable future, but then I imagine owning property next to an asshole like that and I’m all “I see what you did there, Universe.”

I’m going to have to Marty McFly-in-a-biohazard suit this guy. I can tell.