This is starting to feel like starting over, again. Taking this job in January, 2022, was a kind of starting over. I had been working, of course, for the previous 22 years. But this was my first job job where I had to be at an office and reliably do a bunch of shit. Now the schedule has changed to 4 days a week, and it seems like it will work, but it has not been a very auspicious start to this new routine. A schedule mixup cost me a day, then a sinus infection made the extra 2 hours seem that much heavier. Getting up at 4am and making sense of the weekend subways looks like it will be an almost everyday adventure, everyday meaning weekends. I guess I knew this but now I know from experience that the subways are a slightly different world before 6am. No W train, a mysterious E train through Steinway Street, ghost trains that the MTA app claims are now arriving/now departing when they never appeared at all. A walk to Steinway Street won’t seem so irksome when the temperatures warm up. If I get there by 5:30 I might be able to get an E train straight to the World Trade Center stop, which is just steps away from the Cortlandt Street station which I’d been getting to on the W train. The advantage is that it is a no-transfer ride, as is he W, but I can’t use the W anymore because its first ride is not until 6:20-something.
I’m reminded of a woman I lived with for a while who worked events and would have to get up at 3am 2 or 3 days of the month. The MTA apps and website were all she had to go on and she would comment on how they were frequently misleading and flat out wrong during those hours. Now I see for myself how true this is.
I feel OK today, the sinus infection is almost completely gone but the hearing loss is stubbornly persistent. I can tell the hearing function is still in there. It squeezes through. But then it drowns again. I remember once saying that if I had to choose between deafness and blindness I would choose blindness. It’s a moot point, since I’m not expecting to face this choice anytime ever. But I had previously said blindness but now I don’t know. Without hearing everything there’s a certain chaos that can’t get out of my head. I’ve been hearing the musical ear syndrome totally inside my head. It’s not coming from the usual sources, like a radiator or an air filter or a bathtub drain. I’m hearing raucous bluegrass and seathing heavy metal tantrums all bubbling and gurgling entirely within my brainwater. The music is dry but joyful while also sloppy and nondescript. So much adventure to be had inside this head of mine. There were genuinrly moments where I turned to see what radio was playing or where the music was coming from. It comes from nowhere. It comes from the abyss that is my mind.
One of my pear stems went missing. It was on a window frame, on the handle one might use to open the window if that unusual scenario ever arose. Windows are not supposed to be opened in this building but I would assume there are individuals tasked with doing so for whateverlogistical reasons. In that context they probably took no note of the pear stem, unaware they had cast it asunder, an unknown casualty in the otherwise routine maintenance of an office building window. I believe that window could be used as an exit in an emergency but that’s not certain. It would explain the loss of my precious pear stem, though.
Yes, getting up at 4 is a new adventure for me. And having one precious hour stolen from me in the name of the useless daylight savings time ritual no one has the authority to get rid of I lost yet another hour of sleep and faced the seemingly absurd temporal scenario of literally having to go to sleep almost immediately upon getting home. It’s a lifestyle common to many people, I know. I’m just getting used to it.
Will I rise at 4am tomorrow? Or will I drift the grift and sleep ’til noon? Is 3 straight days off worth working 4 10-hour days?