A Typical Day:

I wake up at noon. I hear the yells of the construction workers who are building an apartment complex 8 feet from my window. One day they were speaking german, and now I think they're speaking spanish. The man yells, "Celso! Celsoooooo!", with such intensity that I fear he is injured. The matter of his injury is important to me on two counts. The first is that it would mean that I would need to get out of bed to look out of my window and see his mangled form. The second is that the only Celso I ever knew was a gay man from Portugal who would wear canary yellow corduroys. He might be with them, and hungry.

Ignoring the screams of the migrant worker, I sleep on until close to 1 p.m. At this point I get up and go over to the computer and look for jobs. Finding some that are satisfactory, I send out my resume(s) and try to butter these employers up (this relates to the later activity of sitting around and hoping for emails).

TV comes next. I watch some sportscenter or Cold Pizza, perhaps The Soup, but usually I can't find anything that is really enthralling. I'm not quite hungry yet, so I decide to read or look for more jobs. This is what I've come to call the duldrums. Like Celso's ancestors, I often have the wind knocked out of my sails and end up waiting around for something to happen. This usually takes until 3 p.m., when I decide to eat something.

On today's menu we have things such as left over rice and beans or a fried Spam sandwich. The latter is actually not that bad, but people cringe at the very thought of it. This takes a little time, maybe a half hour. If I have any reason to leave the house today, this is when I'll do it. Usually though, I don't have anything to do.

Now we skip ahead to dinner. It's the same as lunch, but with more complexity. I can go out or eat in. Eating in is fun, as I love to cook, but it is hard to get good ingredients for little. Also, our oven doesn't work, so baking or broiling something is night impossible with what we have. Eating out is fun, but costly, this being New York and all.

Food leads to TV, which then leads to sitting around and waiting for an email or a phone call to somehow give validation to my life. When these don't come, the IMing starts, or the writing...anything that is remotely stimulating to my mind and fingers. Sometimes late night drinking takes over this, but that too is costly and usually leads to a headache. Once the drinking or other thing ends, I usually slump off to sleep. I brought my sheets home to CT to wash them. I forgot to bring them back. My room, in general, looks very unlived in.

Tomorrow will more than likely be the same. Hopefully something gives.

-ccmas