Hermit

Well I've taken one step further in maintaining strict isolation from the outside world, and if you've been around me a while, you probably share my unease with this move. It tends to lead to keening in the shower after months of almost zero human interaction, which leads me to go to Ibsen plays and pant noisily over anyone who shows me a scrap of attention. Amusing sport for some, I'm sure, but I'd rather not have a replay of that particular little meltdown. I mean Ibsen's cool, and all. But you just can't always count on there being a production nearby when the keening starts.

To sum up: I have been working from home for lo these many months, and hap- hap- happy am I. As my favorite tired joke goes, ya can't beat the commute, and I've never worked with a better set of co-workers. (Brief digression: I have a Was Not Was cd from I think the early nineties that has a song whose lyrics are, in part, "I was transferred to the moon -- worse pay, better hours. I was transferred to the moon -- worse pay, better fellow workers," which about sums it up nicely.) Now, I'm not a total misanthrope, I like people, I'm just perfectly happy to be left alone to work, and not have to deal with "office" politics (like I've ever worked in an office -- HA!) but you get my drift.

But I still had to drive over to the next town to the UPS store to ship the projects back to New York, which has sometimes proven to be a precarious journey, as my eyes are often dried out and bloodshot from hours of meticulously poring over pages and pages of text, and I probably forgot to eat for a while there too, hence the shaking. Well, those days are past, my friend.

I've just set it up for UPS to not only drop off my packages at my front door, but to pick them up at home as well. Yeesh, if I wanted to, I could turn into quite the little psychotic recluse. So I tried to counterbalance this step by going to town hall and volunteering for a bunch of very high-profile and influential town committees, like the Downtown Revitalization Committee, The Library Board, and oh, a few other committees that I think review the work of other committees. Sort of meta-committees.

Because although there may not always be an Ibsen play afoot, you can betcha there will always be mind-numbing committee work to be done. And I'm on the job.