Panoply of Dysphony

In which our Hero sits astride a didactic polemic and galumphs his way to oligarchy. And no, that doesn’t mean anything (that I know of), just sounds interesting when you string the words together.

By request, things that have sucked this summer:

• News of two loved ones with serious cancer issues. The latest update came this morning, my uncle’s experimental treatment has been a bust, the tumour is twice as large.
• There’s been a very quiet and slow brewing plan for the last two years to throw a do for my parents upcoming wedding anniversary. Said health issues make said throwing politically unsound, which makes me sad.
• My accountant, who I have gotten sufficiently pissed at to want to replace him with…
• My doesn’t-seem-to-want-to-be new accountant, who is part of a large network of accountants providing services specifically to individuals like me and I have been a customer in the distant past but who can’t seem to get their shit together enough to return my calls who only just FINALLY figured out how to return my phone calls, the reassuring little shits.
• The ever-circus of my current job situation has made this “The summer of holding the bag” because everybody is on vacation and what’s left has so little collective clue that the problems all come right back to me.
• In the center ring of the ever-circus, we still have the ongoing question of their attempt to convert me to a full-time employee. My employment status has effectively been in question since June as they work through the process of trying to make an offer to cut costs. The highly-qualified rumours are that a couple of peons were made offers that they tried to counter and were told, “No, this is all we’re prepared to offer” And they took it. But the top-dog in the stack was also made an offer, says rumour, and he laughed and handed it back to them. I don’t think they can make me an offer that makes sense to accept.
• But we have the other side circus ring, which is that the last project with it’s highly theatric panic-attack of a launch has resulted in a thank-you “event,” one of those tacky, underfunded gestures where we get to go to lunch with people we’re sick of working with and have little remaining respect for, at one of the crappy run down holes-in-the-wall where we shelter in our pre-existing cliques and pray for the shit food so that annoying guy will just stop talking. Except that somehow, this event is at a corporate box at a hockey game, and with executive bigwiggy people invited to join and likely to show given the fancy pantsy treat. Which whereupon I’m now completely lost in my usual policy of carefully and scientifically avoiding these events on the grounds that my work was already paid for and the teambuilding event is not going to make me feel differently contemptful of the contemptinated vermin, because now I may have some obligation to show the flag in front of the management except that between now and then I’m very possibly about to take what they think is a highly-paid and very proudly presented job offer and tell them that it’s not good enough for little old me, and then it may not be as fun to have the direct attention of the high-and-mighty poobahs who have deigned to share with me their underwhelming grace. Oh, and also I’d love to go to the hockey game. Dammit. (That might have just been an entry. Retroactive BWE, this paragraph, k?)
• And capping the kicks in the manatees is the sudden collapse of the plan for me to get to spend a little downtime in the charming company of my lady Nocturne. I was heartbroken when circumstances made the whole thing impossible, and the emotion got in the way of sanity because I was the one saying it was too much to attempt, and I don’t know how I got so attached to improbable possibility (except that it would have gotten me and her time together). To answer the specific question, we’re fine. I’m madly in love and trying to not annoy her with my teenaged-girl-scaled goopery. I just really really really was hoping, and there’s some residual whining to get out of my system.
• In the same collapsing causal wavefront, a parallel grief, the fact that another attempted vacation was gone, and I need the down time, it’s been nearly two years and I need… something. A time to catch my breath, maybe.

Anyway, I highly recommend the symbolic shave. The stubble fell with the weight of a beardy world that had been stuck to my chin. (I’m tired, it’s good enough)

Though that might also just have been because I got a little more soap on the brush and had my face lathered like it was covered in aloed whipped cream.

(Which is not a delusion to indulge in, to my soapy-flavoured regret)