spontaneous combustion

Fridays are the worst day of the week for me, even more so than Mondays most of the time. It makes no sense whatsoever. I should be working now and I haven’t been able to get started yet. By the time Friday rolls around, I’m ready to blow a gasket. Maybe I have a mechanical integrity issue in my brain. They remodeled our offices, took away our walls and doors and gave us cubes with 5 foot sides and no doors. Now we hear everything each other says and does. By Friday, every last cough, sneeze, paper shuffle, phone ring, apple crunch, and drawer rummage noise sets me off. By noon, I’m wild enough to shoot, and by 2:00 I find myself pacing…as much as one can pace in a 6X6 square box. Fridays should give me all the motivation I need to finish my dissertation and graduate. I gotta get out of this place before I kill somebody (me?). Right now, I want to be Chief Broom in One Flew Over the Cuckcoo’s Nest – at the end of the movie he throws a desk (or something big like that) through a window and escapes. That should be me. Sometimes I think about crashing through my window and running off into the woods, disappearing forever…of course, there’s no need to break the window…I can just use the doors and windows like a normal person.

When Sarah was little, I used to tell her that if she left too many toys on the floor, it could cause spontaneous combustion and not only would all her toys be incinerated, but our whole house might burn to the ground. That motivated her to pick her toys up and put them back on the shelf. The truth is, maybe all those toys in my way were going to cause me to combust spontaneously…kind of like Fridays in my 6X6 cube/prison cell at work.