If there's one thing I'll retain from my days as an acting major, it's a little piece of advice that my acting professor gave the class (in between tormenting us like a sadistic army drill instructor, and relating tales of the time he made a bong out of a motorcycle helmet). Essentially, he said:

When you fuck up, it's a profound waste of energy to spend any time lamenting the fact that you fucked up. It doesn't do any good, in any way, to beat yourself up because of it. All you can do is move on, learn from the fact that you made a mistake, and promise yourself that you will make a serious effort to not make a mistake like that again. It's all you can do, because the alternative doesn't make any sense.

When I wrote that crybaby essay a few entries back, I had forgotten all about that nugget o' wisdom. Instead, I wallowed in my self pity. Ugly. I know better.

This whole week has been one that I wish I could live over. From the general stress of not being able to find steady employment, to feeling like an asshole, to not being able to put pen to paper on any of the outside projects I'm pretending to work on, I have not been a shining paragon of human behavior.

Before this gets any worse, let's just say that I'm going to utilize that powerful wisdom and do better. I've got to hold myself up to a more stringet standard of behavior. If I keep this shit up, the guy who runs the angst diaryring is gonna be begging me to join. And he can go to hell.

If I ever state that I'm gonna join some shoegazing band with a bunch of other whiny twentysomethings, everyone who reads this has permission to come and brutally kill me.

As Montgomery Burns once said: "Push out the jive...bring in the love."

Oh, here's something that's somewhat amusing, and, seeing as how this entry desperately needs to swing in that direction, here we go: I got another temp gig for Monday and Tuesday. It's not nearly as sweet a deal as the one I had this week, generally because it entails me doing actual work in between checking my email and answering phones. The cool part is, it's in the building in which Sally works, which means that we get to go down there together, have lunch together, and come home on the train together. It's oh so very cute.

Anyway, they wanted me to come down and 'train' on the phones for an hour and a half yesterday, so I came down around 3:30 so I could take the El home with my girl. 3:30 in the afternoon is, as some of you may know, that time of day when every 9 to 5er's energy is at a lull, and, having had been up since 6am myself, I was feeling that lull as well.

I got down there a bit early, and I decided to solve this conundrum with a popular beverage called Red Bull. I'd never had one before, so, risk-taking chap that I am, I forked over two bucks, and went outside to quaff the liquid.

My verdict: Modern science could not produce a drink that tastes more like carbonated urine if it tried.

I'm sure the people at Mountain Dew and Mello Yello are jealous.

"Revitalizes the body and mind"? I don't know what Red Bull does for other people, but whatever 'energy enhancers' the shit is fortified with made me stumble through the corridors of the building like a caffeinated drunk. I don't think I regained full control of my body until hours later, when I discovered that I had several bad prison tattoos and had joined the Navy.

It was an otherwise typical Friday.