Flashback on the freeway

I merge onto the freeway and notice the personalized plate on the station wagon in front of me: GOJIRA1.

Suddenly, I am back on our honeymoon, on a misty tropical morning on Oahu, inland from the beach, in a wide grassy valley, watching young women from the Japanese contingent of our tour party jumping in and out of the twenty foot wide / three foot deep Godzilla footprint (left in commemoration of the filming of the 90's era Matthew Broderick movie), photographing each other, laughing, and screaming the creature's native name: "Gojira!! Gojira!!"

All day, today has been like this

I hit print. I wander around to the other side of the cube farm to pick up my print-out. Someone is standing in front of the all-in-one printer, body language of despair, squinting at the information panel on the machine. "I just need one copy," he says.

Printer info panel is saying the printer needs a part replaced -- I walk my coworker over to another machine which can provide his one copy.

New machine supposedly orders its own replacement parts before it needs them, which helps circumvent the one person in our office whose job it seems to be to Not Order Things (name a supply, she'll not order it).

Part needed: "photoconductor." Boxes available in storage closet: "photoconductor kit", "photoconductor unit", pre-opened "photoconductor kit" which looks suspiciously like it has been filled with a used part and put back in the supply closet, instead of being shipped out for recycling.

I pull the pre-opened box and the "unit" box, and by the time I get back to the machine, miss not-my-job-to-order-things is on the scene. I present her with the two boxes, and leave her to it.

As I step away, I hear her say, "I don't think we're supposed to replace this part by ourselves." If true, this means calling the help desk and waiting a few hours for a tech to arrive. Meanwhile, my print-out is hanging half-printed in the output shute.

"I don't know; I don't have an opinion," I tell her, walking away.

The moral of the story is that this was a depressingly boring little story, with no moral. Ce la effing vi.

Coffee, anyone?

I'm not sure if I just fell off the wagon, or not.

If I did, I hopped.

Just not sure how to characterize the decision, which was quite deliberately aforethought, to put a scoop of real caffeinated coffee powder in the mug with my normal sugar&caffeine-free powdered drink.

De-caffeinated is the New-normal, since (gets out calendar to check)...oh, geeze, since January 23rd. I didn't realize it had been that long -- I was thinking it was March.

So now, an hour after beginning to slurp the verboten substance, my eyelids are flicking open at regular speed, instead of sticking shut and then slowly floating up to only halfway open again. On a morning when I found out a co-worker friend died yesterday (after a long illness, as they say), I...couldn't stand feeling that way...realized I had a great excuse for succumbing...said to hell with it and had an f-ing cup of real coffee, so screw you.

Realizing (in real time) why writing about learning of someone's death is so often packed with cliched phrases. You look inward, and try to put words to your inner state, and what comes out are cliches. 'Cuz this is what it feels like / everyone feels this way in these moments / grief is ineffable / words fail.

He was my friend, though I only saw him at work. He was a really good guy. He wasn't fifty yet.

I miss his presence in the office, but that's been true since he got his pancreatic cancer diagnosis last spring and took a week off of work before his (borderline emergency) surgery. He had a Whipple Procedure; which came up in a rerun of "Scrubs" this winter, a throw-away detail in a storyline about competitive surgeons.

I never visited his house, but he showed me pictures of his kitchen remodeling project. He finished it six months or so before he got sick.

He was an amateur photographer. He was deeply involved in his (unknown denomination) Christian church; guys from his church family visited him often during his hospital stays -- I met four of them the second-to-last time I saw him. I got that good-people vibe from them, too. They obviously cared about him deeply.

He's been gone from my daily life in the office for a bit more than a year, but now he's gone from everyone's daily life, everywhere.

It just is what it is. And it's only a little harder to put my feelings into words as it is to actually figure out what I'm feeling.