I’ve gotten into something of a winter funk. It started out with the aforementioned really awesome stomach bug that left my innards out of sorts and me curled up in pain for a week, and continued into a solid week of pouring rain in LA.

Rain in L.A. somehow seems much more depressing and draining than rain anywhere else, probably because it’s always sunny here and the change of pace is so much more severe.

So between the illness and the rain, I’ve been tempted many times these last few weeks to just curl up on my couch and sleep the day away. Some days, I manage to fight the urge and actually get up and get a load or two of laundry done.

But more often than not the last couple of weeks, Chaplin will jump up on me, and either curl up between my feet or on my chest. The power of a sleeping cat is utterly ridiculous when it comes to draining me of any ability to stay awake. He’s like a purring hot water bottle.

I can sleep 10 hours a night and if I don’t snap myself out of it, I’ll still nap another two hours with the kitty. Which is exactly what happened last night and this afternoon.

I’ve mostly only been getting out to go to the gym recently, and I think I need to make sure I keep changing things up a bit more in order to prevent myself from literally sleeping my life away.

The first thing I need to do is get back to dragging myself to the gym in the morning rather than the afternoon – I always have way more energy after the gym, and am consequently way better at fighting off cat-induced sleepiness.

I also think I need to increase the time I spend away from my apartment, even though it may increase the danger of me spending money. That’s been my primary unemployment excuse for never leaving the house: Staying in is almost always cheaper than doing anything other than bike riding outside.

I’m at the point where I’m so averse to spending money that I can’t really bring myself to go to the local coffeehouse or sandwich shop and gank their wifi just for a change of scenery, because I’ll be tempted to at least order a hideously overpriced beverage if not a sandwich that costs more than I have budgeted for my entire day’s worth of meals.

So I think it’s time for me to hit up my friendly local parks and maybe go sit and get my reading-learning done out by the ocean when it’s a smidge less windy than it has been. Maybe I’ll even break down and go to a library.

The fact that it’s supposed to pour again all day tomorrow (well, today at this point) means that at least the “go outside more” part of this plan won’t start until Wednesday, but I think putting my finger on the problem will at least help me address it.

When you’re unemployed, there is an awful, awful lot of time to kill, and you quickly become aware of what ways you best tolerate killing time without falling into a paralyzing boredom. I’ve divided my potential time killers into three categories:

I. Things I Will Do To Kill Time:

• Read entire contents of internet by 2pm daily.
• Clear off TiVo at least 2-3 episodes at a time.
• Watch entire seasons of TV shows on DVD.
• Swim at least 3km.
• Bike at least 40 miles.
• Play the guitar for a bit.

II. Things I Will Reluctantly Do To Kill Time:

• Force myself to cold-call potential employers (Note: mostly on Mondays).
• Read something printed on dead trees.
• Laundry.

III. Things I Will Not Do To Kill Time:

• Clean up this pigsty.
• File paperwork that has been piling up for about 18 months.
• Learn to cook something that does not involve disguising the fact that I can’t cook for shit with copious amounts of cheese.

It used to take me at least two weeks to start losing my mind and climbing the walls after becoming unemployed.

My last day was last Tuesday, and I’m already starting to feel like the walls are closing in on me.

I really ought to consider a career where I don’t bounce between fourteen hour days and NOTHING.

A few bits of errata, Laz style:

– Because we were on a Wednesday-Sunday shooting schedule, I had taken to calling each day “Fake ____”. Like Wednesday was Fake Monday, Thursday was Fake Tuesday, Friday was Fake Wednesday.

Today, the last day I have to deal with this shift, I found a flaw in my cunning plan: I forgot that it was Fake Wednesday, not real Wednesday, and that therefore the aqua aerobics class would be taking over the pool at 9 instead of 9:30, and got kicked out of the pool halfway through my laps.

– Are you really really bored? Try to identify the candy bar simply by looking at a cross-section. I went 14 for 20.

– I am extremely excited to see Wall-E tomorrow. Almost as excited as I am to actually have a Saturday off.

–Our entertainment this evening was chasing the mouse that lives in the kitchen all over the office. My PA was taking videos of this with his cellphone, one of which has me saying in the background, “Well, the mystery guy who lost his clothes finally called back.”

No, I will not be posting these videos.

–We finally finished shooting!

This has been a fun show, and a very good learning experience. The shifted week thing has been an absolute bear, but at least it was only for three weeks. I pulled a couple sixth-day paychecks, which is helpful in the realm of “Mama needs a new pair of everything.”

I’m back to a normal schedule for the next couple weeks (well, I’ll be in for a couple hours Sunday, but nothing like my schedule previous sundays of 5pm-5am), and then I’m scrambling for a new job. Gotta love the freelance world!

Ah, the dulcet tones of the Production Office when there’s a 10am call and a projected exceedingly late wrap – The fridge sadly cranking along, two keyboards clacking away as two sets of hands type bored IMs to friends lucky enough to not be stuck at work at almost 11pm on a Saturday night.

You’ll notice “the drone of the air conditioner” is not included on this list because…well, it’s not on. And the engineer who actually knows how to turn it on has gone home. And the windows don’t open here.

I’m getting a little sleepy. And I can’t leave until they wrap. This is going to be a looooong evening.

At least a) I have gotten every bit of work I possibly can out of the way, b) I did my PT exercises so I don’t have to when I get home, and c) I discovered that Netflix Watch Now has the Dragnet Blue Boy episode on it. This is the most gloriously paranoid half-hour of television ever.

After watching it with the poor PA who’s stuck here with me, he said, “You know, this was only fifteen years before Hill Street Blues. I can’t imagine how they came that far that quickly.” He’s damn right.

Here’s how bored I am right now: I cleaned. And not just “sprayed some Lysol over the bathroom” cleaned. Like, threw out tons of shit I don’t need anymore.

You know how, when you move, there’s always a few boxes that never actually get unpacked until you move again, and you wonder, what’s in here that is actually worth moving?

I unpacked those two boxes today. Turns out the answer was: not much.

I also went through my magazine and newspaper collection and threw out anything that wasn’t of legitimate historical value, meaning about 95% of the batch is now in the dumpster.

Let me back up for a second: I’ve had several boxes of old magazines that I kept around for years (as in, the oldest one I found was the issue of Newsweek right after the ‘95 Oklahoma City bombing).

I’ve dragged these boxes all over the country, since my mother moved out of the house I grew up in and into a much smaller condo, depriving me of much-needed storage space.

I started hanging onto this stuff after my dad showed me a newspaper he’d kept from the day Kennedy was shot, something I found really fascinating. I wanted to save similar stuff for the future.

But I went a little overboard: I saved dozens of issues of Guitar World, Rolling Stone, and other magazines that really are of no use to anyone. I saved every Oscar issue of Entertainment Weekly. I saved everything even moderately historic from Newsweek.

I’d long considered selling the collection on eBay, but when I went to look online today at what I might actually get for some of these magazines (answer: very little to nothing), I decided to just pitch them.

So I went through, saving a very few truly historical items, but otherwise pitching everything. I threw out four bankers’ boxes worth of crap.

What’s funny is that when I checked my email after doing that, there was email from my dad, who’d been looking for my Social Security card. He didn’t find it, but he did find a massive pile of other stuff, including correspondence from summer camp, report cards from elementary school, and various other pack-rat items.

At least I know where the hoarding instinct comes from.

After that, I went through the aforementioned drag-around boxes, digging up dozens of documents that needed to be shredded, and a whole lot of trash.

I wound up with so much stuff to shred that two things happened: First, my shredder overheated badly enough to be unusable for about an hour. Second, I filled a medium-sized moving box completely with the shredded remains of all that paper.

My bedroom is now almost disturbingly clean, and my cat is really, really confused, since all his hiding places are gone. I’ve kicked up enough dust to be sneezing like a madwoman, but it’s nice to feel like I’ve actually made progress on something.

Tomorrow, I’m attacking the living room. I expect to finish filling the dumpster sometime in the next couple of weeks.

Sweet God, I’m already so fucking bored.

Maybe I should consider this unemployment program in India, at least that’d be a change of pace.

Courtesy Dave Barry’s Blog.

Yesterday, I was bored.

Today, I’m restless.

Tommorrow, I think I’m going to hit full-on Marge on a plane “LetmeoutLetmeoutLetmeoutLetmeout!” mode.

This is going to be a looooong summer.