JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

You ever have those days when everything’s fine or better than usual, and you’re not rushing anywhere, and you can do pretty much as you like, and then you realize that what you really want is to smash people’s heads in? It’s a pleasant day so you go to the mall and dine in the restaurant where you’re a regular and you always leave a good tip even with the 10% service charge and the 12% VAT. You have your lunch, then you signal for the bill, and you wait and wait and no one brings it to you. So you signal again, and the waiter nods and the manager nods, and still nothing happens so you go to the counter to pay up when you could’ve just walked out, and the restaurant isn’t half-full but everyone acts like they’re too busy to even take your money.

You take a deep breath, it’s not a big deal, you’re having a nice day, and you walk to your friend’s building to drop off a book. It’s 1pm and the sun’s blazing so you ask the guard in the back of the building if you can leave the book at his station for your friend to pick up, and he says no, you have to take it out front to the reception desk. So you ask if you can just pop in and leave it at reception because it’s too hot to go round to the front, and he says no, it’s not allowed, and you want to be polite and egalitarian, but no one is cooperating so you end up addressing the guard as if he were your serf, in rapid English, and that’s the only time he springs into action and buzzes your friend’s apartment to tell him there’s a book for him. You didn’t want to do it but goddammit they asked for it, it’s like they want to be oppressed.

Then you head on to your appointment with a European journalist who knows someone who knows a friend of yours and wants some information for his article, and he’s alright he’s not the problem but right there you realize that you’ve had it with foreign journalists picking your brain and waiting for you to hand over the story, and you want to say, “Call your editors, tell them to hire me to write the story, I can do it in my sleep, and they can pay me what they pay you which is at least twenty times what local writers get,” but you’re too polite so you decide you will only answer questions that are asked of you and volunteer nothing that resembles an original thought. By which time you hate everyone—the ugly yuppies braying their stupid stories at the next table and the troglodyte in the short-sleeved barong tooling down the street not stopping for pedestrians as if he owned the shiny BMW he was driving and by the way why are snazzy cars always driven by trolls I guess they need them more, and I’ve forgotten what the point of all this is but I’m glad I blog it’s faster than therapy.