Maybe it’s the cold, maybe it’s still post-holiday despair, maybe it’s the fact that I never really committed to taking vitamin D this winter even though I knew better. It’s just that lately, every day I’m at work and for nearly all the time I’m at work, I’m sitting there thinking “jesus christ, so many idiots.” It’s the clients who can’t figure out how to send e-mails properly, it’s the other departments that have been fucking up for so long because there’s always someone to clean up after them, it’s the people in my own department who remind me every day that there’s a reason why sensational journalism, moronic advertising, and shitty bands exist. Every day I sit there and overhear the dumbest conversations imaginable between people so vapid and weird that they don’t know the difference between “reality TV” and “actual reality.”

I realize that it shouldn’t affect me the way it does and as I guessed, it could be a number of reasons why it’s affecting me so strongly now, but day after day after day of sitting in that mire of abject buffoonery and I’m wondering how long I can hold out. I can’t imagine being able to listen to these people for another year, not before something just snaps in my brain and I a) lose my fucking mind or b) give up and drop down who knows how many levels to being the kind of person who truly cares about what the Kardashians are doing and still can’t figure out how to use Excel.

At least it’s something like 20 degrees outside so I have a reason to not go out after work. Instead, I come home, dig some cat shit out of the litter box, do some dishes, cook dinner, and take care of a bunch of domestic stuff before I sit slack-jawed in front of the Internet or Netflix until I’m too tired to sit upright. Because even that helps. Kind of. And it really shouldn’t. Chores and brain-dumbening screens should not be the solutions to forty hours a week of idiot exposure. It surely can’t be helping. And yet it’s the only thing that feels better, because really, after dealing with that kind of shit all day, I am exhausted. I’m exhausted by the mental acrobatics necessary to try to understand the thought processes involved in these conversations, I’m exhausted by the deep breathing exercises I started doing because there’s no other way I won’t say something shitty, I’m exhausted by trying to make myself as small as possible in the break room because I just want to look at fucking Twitter, okay, I don’t give a shit about what you’re reading in US magazine so please, please, please stop telling me.

This is coming from a person who’s about a billion shades of dumb, by the way. I’m dumb about lots of things, I’m judgy about even more. But if I’m feeling particularly dumb or judgy, I keep it to myself (sometimes if only long enough to get home and put it on the Internet). I don’t talk about it. At work. In front of people. Out loud.

I can’t stand the gym but I’ve been fantasizing about joining some 24-hour facility with a punching bag, just so I can beat the shit out of something in the middle of the night instead of what I’ve been doing, which is missing that golden window for sleep and staying awake for another hour or so, having imaginary arguments with people and getting too heated to fall asleep.