I swear I'm not an arsonist!

Living the life I've lived thus far, and experiencing a good deal of what I've experienced, I'm of the belief that disaster kind of follows me around. Kind of like a tempestuous mother following her troublesome offspring. Usually disaster follows me at a safe enough distance, but every once in a while it'll make like that mother, and slap me right up side the head... just to kind of remind me that it's still there.

Come to think of it, I think it's been following me a little too close for comfort for about a year. I mean yeah, there are good days and fun times sprinkled in there for good measure, but on the whole, I look back at the last year or so, and what stands out the most is that disaster is looming large in the background. (But I digress...)

So what's this about being an arsonist? Well, I've noticed that disaster has been following me around in elemental form for quite some time, and the element that seems to be most heavily favored is FIRE... When I was a little kid, I can distinctly remember we had a chimney fire, and while I don't think our house was in great danger of burning down, I'm sure it was possible. In middle school, I nearly burned my house down... but just ended up with some nasty burns on my leg. (They have since healed to be pretty much completely invisible.) In high school I was friends with 2 people who lost their homes to fires. I can remember at some point going to a dairy queen for an ice cream cone, only to realize that the car wash next door was on fire, so we sat and watched it as it self-destructed. So last year, when I lived with one of my standard, crazy former roommates, it seemed only natural that the building being remodeled across the street caught fire, and was bad enough to require 17 Chicago fire department trucks to douse the flames. And then there was the electrical fire in the laundry room last week, and then a few days ago, an abandoned house down the street caught fire... You starting to see a trend? I'm telling you, disaster is following me in the form of a box of strike-anywhere matches and a can of gasoline!

You think god is trying to tell me to shape up, or I'm going to burn for all eternity in the fires of hell?

Anyway, I've got alibis for most of those incidents... So I swear I'm totally not an arsonist!

======================================

In other news, WHERE THE HELL HAVE ALL OF MY PONYTAIL HOLDERS RUN OFF TO? I swear I used to have literally like 400 of those stupid things. And now I've got like 12! (And for someone who doesn't make a habit of giving out ponytail holders, that's a HUGE difference!!)

======================================

In other - other - news, today was a really crappy day at work. There was something wrong with my work computer (related to an out-going e-mail of spectacular size) so everything was running SUPER SLOWLY. I'm serious, it honestly took me over 30 minutes just to open a file, make no changes, and just re-save it to a different location! SERIOUSLY! 30 MINUTES! (On an ordinary day that would take less than 2 minutes.) So the fact that we have a big presentation to our biggest client tomorrow meant that the slowed computer came at something of an awkward time. And every time I got one thing done, five more things had been added to my workload... I literally only left my desk for 15 minutes to go pick up my lunch, and I still got out of work more than an hour late. (If all days were like this, I have no doubt that I would develop some sort of nervous tic... my mom seems to think that I would develop some spectacular kind of tic, on the order of Tourette's syndrome... Which is totally plausible now that I think about it.) So when I got home, had dinner, and was VERY VERY tempted to shower and go to bed, but I thought to myself, "NO! You forgot to write a post for your devoted readers last night... You might have had a bad day, but you can't leave them with nothing to read for two days in a row! That's just CRUEL!"

So there it is!