thursday june 06 2002    |    5:58 p.m.

my job is so bad for me in so many ways. witness:

          1. retail feet.
          2. stress headaches.
          3. chainsmoking at every available opportunity.
          4. knotted neck and back muscles like nobody's business.
          5. excessive, reckless consumption of coffee
          6. misanthropy
          7. bitterness
          8. poverty

and, last but by no means least,

          9. compulsive book-buying (read money-spending, conspicuous consumption).

i had two and a half hours to kill after work on tuesday, between clocking out and waiting for my mother to get off her job and come pick me up, and so naturally i started wandering the store. i just couldn't help myself. the bargain section at our b&n is so damn good. it's luscious. especially the cookbooks and home improvement and reference sections. i got wine for dummies and a veritable bible of whisky, entitled whisky: the water of life. believe it. five bucks and seven bucks, respectively. then i made my way out of bargain and picked up empire falls by richard russo (rationalization: pulitzer!), and picked up the cd of wallace stevens readings that i'd ordered weeks earlier.

that was tuesday.

yesterday my michael palmer (NOT the dude who wrote mortal prey -- this is the other michael palmer) books came in. i'm making it something of a mission to get as much of his and of professor kluge's back catalogs now that i'm there, since most of their books are out of print or hard to track down. anyway, so i got sun and notes for echo lake.

that was wednesday.

and then today i was totally ogling london by peter ackroyd, but luckily, luckily, the $45 price tag gave me enough pause to refrain. that's still $31-plus-tax with my employee discount. dude.

see what i mean? it's rough.

i talked to some old ladies about books today. i like that. i wish it were more about the book-talking old ladies and less about the assholes screaming about how unprofessional we are because we ran out of the freaking investor's business daily (which they charmingly refer to as "ibd") or because we're out of the latest dr. phil book. U G H ! i am filled with workplace angst.

the past week's highlights, because i damn well please:

          1. PETER MURPHY. i will teenybop all i want.
          2. physical contact with peter murphy. see above.
          3. poplife with j, especially the radiohead moment.
          4. treating my poor, long-suffering retail feet right yesterday. the bath & body works salt rub rocks.
          5. the fact that the girl in front of me at peter murphy was wearing marc jacobs perfume, and the fact that i identified it, and that i pointed it out, and that she was also delighted. i don't care if you think that's frivolous. i was psyched.

i think that's it. not bad for one week, though, right?

so now i have two days off, thank god, in which i plan to go to the kitchen (club, that is), get the new peter murphy album, finish my damn job applications, smoke, and sleep. lofty goals. but i'm happy.

it's all about lists.