Quickly, Before I Pass Out

I am dead tired and I want to go to bed in seventeen minutes. Because if I go to bed in seventeen minutes, I can sleep for longer than three and a half hours. Like, eight hours.

So, this post will not be artful. What I've done since Friday is work. What I've thought about since Friday is work. What I've talked about, laughed about, and sighed about since Friday is work. This is not a work blog - and I don't disclose details about my job because I wish to keep it - but you need to know this: what I do brings me into contact with people from all over the world, many of whom have genius-level IQs and all of the accompanying personal qualities.

Now, I've always fit in with nerds. They tend to like me a lot. I'm right up their competitive, socially limited alley - smart but not smarter, cooler but not cool. Then I found myself in a large room with thousands of them, responsible in part for making them do things that they are apparently not wired to do, like fill out forms, read simple directions, and walk in a straight line towards a destination. Holy whack, nerds need help with everything. I'm an extremely nervous person, but they make me look like one of those guys who goes around wearing sandals and using the phrase "no worries".

So, after each long (long, long) day of all that, my coworkers and I needed a drink. We needed between three and seven drinks, usually, which of course made the following day even longer. This is unlike my typical weeknight behavior, which, as I've said, is some variation of sit-read-stare-write. I enjoyed it, unexpectedly. But I still wished fervently for it to end - even as I sat swirling my red wine, smiling, watching Taiwanese scientists get down on the dance floor, blurring the line between nerdy and cool. I guess what this makes me is old.