I am tired of a few things right about now:

• unemployment
• being worried about my cat being sick
• my cat actually being sick
• my wireless router constantly flaking on me
• falling back into my natural sleep pattern of 2am-9am
• having to adjust to my new orthotics
• having to get out of the pool while I still have a ton of energy because there’s a line
• being so stressed I still have a ton of energy after swimming 2.5km
• not having a job
• the fact that I’m grinding my teeth when I’m awake now
• my unemployment check being late
• the entire female reproductive process and all the joy it entails
• the four walls of my apartment
• little earthquakes causing petrifying fear of bigger ones
• having to constantly rejigger the numbers of when, exactly, I’m going to go broke
• the continuing need for physical therapy exercises on my bad foot.
• needing a goddamn job.

Some of these won’t be changing any time soon, but the current combination is quickly turning me into a complete fucking crazy person.

I really need to remember when I’m not working that I need to adjust my caffeine orders on the rare occasion when I go to Starbucks.

I was tired and going to a movie that I defintiely needed to stay awake through, so I stopped by Starbucks and ordered my standard drink: A triple grande skim mocha.

The problem is, usually when I’m tired enough to break down and buy Starbucks, it’s the Friday of a 70 hour week with no end in sight, I’ve been chugging minimum 3 diet cokes a day, and I’m just desperately trying to stay awake.

This time, I hadn’t had anything caffienated in days, so to hit my body with that much caffeine after having none was probably an unwise choice. I’ve been feeling weird and fucked up since I got out of the movie.

I’ll be lucky if I can get to sleep before 3am.

Very, very little is happening in my world right now, and there are two things to blame for this. One is a usual suspect: Unemployment.

The more unusual suspect is my car. My car has been a rock. Ten years old, eight of them under my care. Other than routine maintenance and a couple cosmetic scrapes, it’s been quite solid.

Now, however, it’s starting to get old and cranky. It all started when my regular mechanic pointed out that the A/C and alternator belts were really worn out, and that I probably needed to get my timing belt changed.

It’s recommended at either 90 or 105,000 miles, and neither he nor I could find any record it had ever been changed. My car is currently at around 134,000 miles, and if the timing belt breaks it pretty much takes out half the engine, so it’s definitely a bit of maintenance I wanted to get taken care of ASAP once I realized it needed to be done.

My regular guy couldn’t do it because you basically have to take apart half the engine to change it. After getting an obscene quote from a dealer, I was referred by Nate to someone his friends had used, who quoted me a third of what the dealer wanted (and less than half of what my regular mechanic had guesstimated).

So I took the car in on Wednesday, and they shaped up the timing, alternator, and AC belts for exactly what they quoted me, to the penny. Great news, right? Except for one tiny detail.

There’s a thing that goes around the axle, inside the wheel (what it’s called is written on the quote they gave me, but I’m currently too hot and lazy to get up and look for it), and it has a bunch of axle grease in it to keep the axle running smoothly.

So the guy opened the hood, took out what’s basically a flashlight on a long snaky pole, pointed out this item, showed me the decent sized crack in it, and showed me the large amount of axle grease it had kicked out.

It was one of those, “I don’t know what the hell that is or what it does, but I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to look like that” moments. Obviously, it needs to be replaced before the axle gets fucked up, since I do know that if the axle gets fucked up, that’s INCREDIBLY expensive to fix.

And of course, since it involves the wheels, if you change one side, you have to change the other so it doesn’t get thrown out of whack. The quote to get it completely fixed brought the total I’m going to wind up sinking into keeping the car running to just over $1000.

Normally, that would be bad, but it wouldn’t be terrible. But since I have no current income beyond the unemployment checks Unkle Ahnuld’s been sending me, it basically means I am a LOT broker than I already was.

Where I previously thought going out once a week for a night with my friends for $25-40 was a splurge, at this point I’m finding that going once a week to In-N-Out burger ($6.10 for a double-double, fries and a soda) is a splurge.

Hopefully something will come through soon and I’ll be able to start living like a normal-ish human again. Or I’ll finally snap and convince myself that living with a roommate wouldn’t be that horrifying. We shall see.

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.

When one of the actors starring in your currently airing series has a new job before you do.

It takes a lot to make me stop watching a show. Evidence: I have watched every single episode of ER since its premiere. IN FUCKING 1994.

But I’m with Alan Sepinwall on this one: Heroes has lost me for good, and not because of anything in particular, but because of the sum total of its stupidity.

I was trying to explain why I still like Lost but am deleting my Heroes season pass to a friend, since both shows are often horrifically confusing and unnecessarily convoluted. It comes down to this: Motivation.

Characters on Lost have either had slowly evolving motivations or still are motivated by many of the same things that they were at the outset of the show. Most of the characters on Heroes seem to be motivated by whatever fits the plot that “chapter”, or even that week.

It becomes impossible to care who’s doing what or why when a character’s motivation can change so frequently and so capriciously, and you find yourself wondering why the hell you’re still watching this show in the first place.

It says a lot about how wrong you’ve gone when an unemployed person with nothing but time to kill decides that watching your show is not worth her time.

Credit to Sars of Tomato Nation for coining the phrase “DVR Break-Up“. Brilliant in its simplification of the process of deleting all recorded episodes of a show, then torpedoing the season pass. Amusing that she inaugurated it with Heroes six months ago, because she does not posess the patience (read: stupidity) that I do.

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.

Tuesday was my last day. With me fighting off the lingering last bits of a nasty chest cold and Chaplin putting another spin of not-funny on the Six Million Dollar Cat joke with a UTI, maybe this isn’t the worst time for me to be unemployed.

I will say though, the fact that this chesty, coughing nastiness is keeping me out of the gym is not helping. I’m certainly catching up on TiVo faster than I thought I would, but I need to be working out and taking advantage of the fact that there is no crafty truck to gorge myself on.

Resumes are out, calls have been made, and more calls will be made next week when I have updated information. Until then, me and TiVo and Chaplin are just going to hang.

I got a job! I start Monday morning, and since the show has a 13 episode order, I’ll be employed for at least a few months this time. I cannot even begin to describe my relief and excitement.

Especially because I will FINALLY have enough hours to qualify for Union insurance and be able to stop coughing up huge chunks of cash for health insurance as of the end of the year.

Ah, the small joys of adulthood.

Some days I feel like the guy in this Onion Radio News bit (Achtung: loud, autoplaying audio).

Gee, it would be nice to be employed.