Dear Diary:
I woke up with a fucking huge headache today like I was hit in the head with a subway train. It might have something to do with the fact that I finished a bottle of wine to myself yesterday when I started drinking with some friends at 4pm since we missed the prix fixe lunch price, we just drank our lunch instead.
The worst part about being laid off is that you can’t throw money around anymore. I actually have to look at prices of things. I bought a $3.00 papaya yesterday because I just grabbed it but didn’t look at the price. A THREE DOLLAR PAPAYA! Is there a fortune scroll in the middle of it? Who the hell sells a papaya for $3?? Who the hell buys a $3 papaya? I bought strawberries, grapes, a freaking papaya, some chicken, cheese… basically only a small hand basket full of groceries and I fucking spent $73. I almost grabbed a bottle of truffle oil but then saw that it was $40! Before I would have just said, oh what the hell, and got it anyway. Now I’m freaking out about a $3 papaya! (I would rather have drank my papaya mixed with alcohol, but such is life).
I actually have to live life, but I’ve forgotten how to do it. Billing billing online shopping because I didn’t have time to actually go shop billing billing and then complaining about billing throwing money around billing billing was what my life was for several years after law school. No more cabs, no more martinis on a Tuesday for the hell of it. On the flip side, I now actually have time to read all the books or watch all the movies I want to or go do all the touristy stuff in NYC that I never had a chance to when I moved here because I was hired to be a billing machine. But now that I have the time to live life, I realize that I don’t really remember how to do it. I sometimes still have the feeling I have something due or have to be somewhere at a certain time. I think this is a post-traumatic stress syndrome.
One bad thing about being laid off is that now I can’t use “getting slammed at work” as an excuse to turn down invitations from friends and family to do things I don’t want to do. Mom and Dad won’t appreciate “I have a fucking hangover from cheap wine” as a valid excuse.
I guess it’s time to re-enter society and I can’t be some weird anti-social lawyer with some weird tick (seriously, why are so many lawyers so fucking weird?? and socially inept?)
–In Need of a New Excuse Out of Things
* Posted April 4, 2009
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