Today has been a roller coaster and I am honestly so stressed out right now that I don’t know whether to scream bloody murder into the cold unfeeling night or to break down crying and not stop till I am all cried out and there’s nothing left of me.

The following is a rough chronology of my day :

7:30 am : I wake up to pee, see the time, decide not to go back to bed because I would be getting up in an hour anyway. I had to be at school early today so I could meet with my prof about what my final project for History of Popular Music will be. I will be doing the history of electronic music, from the earliest analog electric organs through Moog and Kraftwerk and Vangelis into the synth pop of the 80’s all the way into modern times where those old synthesizer sounds are very popular in the music of the day.

Oh, and somewhere in there will be video game music.

9:20 am : I arrive at school twenty minutes early. No prob. I go to the classroom, sit down, play my game (Crashlands!), and wait my turn. It took some willpower not to insert myself into the conversations the prof was having with the other students. I sit right in the front, right by the prof’s desk, and they are talking about music, and I am kinda super cool with the prof because we’re around the same age, and so the urge to add myself to the conversation was strong.

But that would have been quite rude and inappropriate. Nobody likes people who do that, including me. So I restrained my over-eager geekitude and was a good boy.

The few times I slipped and reacted a little to what was being said, I felt bad about it, and told myself that as far as my role was concerned, I wasn’t there, I was a painting on the wall, I had no opinions and I should be ignoring the whole thing.

But I can’t ignore words, even when I should. So the best I could do was stay out of it.

10 am : Class starts, and at first we’re talking about psychedelia and the Doors and Haight Ashbury and that kind of thing, and I am like, cool, interesting times, interesting stuff.

But then we got into the 1970’s, aka the first decade with ME in it, and my kind of music, and my usual level of excitement in the class about all the cool music gets spiked into the stratosphere because we are talking about Alice Cooper, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Genesis, Pink Floyd, KISS…. by the time class ends, I have gotten excited so many times that it has actually left me kinda lightheaded.

1 pm : Class is over and I go sit and use my tablet to check my email. YESSS! My new PC is finally in! I call Joe and arrange to meet him at NCIX, then head next door to the NCIX in Lansdowne Centre to pick up my BRAND NEW COMPUTER!

1:20ish : I pick up my new PC without problems. There was one tense moment when the clerk presented me with two big boxes, and said “Now this box is the PC and this box has the boxes for all the parts… ” and I said “I thought it was assembled already! Isn’t what what I am paying you guys for?” and he said “No no…. it’s already assembled and it’s in the other box… ” because, of course, he was trying to tell me that the other box contained ONLY the boxes for the parts that were already installed in the PC in the other box.

D’oh! There I go, leaping to conclusions again. Sometimes my mind is too fast for my own good. It makes a huge leap, I go off half-cocked, and end up looking like a fool.

Oh well. You know what they say….. half a cock is better than none.

2 pm : Joe shows up to pick me up and help me get the computer home. There was a minor mixup over where I was in the mall. For future note, you can always trust my directions because I am person with a winning combination of mad verbal/logic skills and a tendency to get lost/confused when given directions. So my directions are always super precise, unambiguous, and logically simple.

Ask me for landmarks near me instead, and apparently I get confused.

2:30ish : I am home. I tear into the box with my PC in it like a kid on Xmas , set it next to my current computer, plug it in, and…. nothing. No juice. I enlist the help of my online friends, which is easy because more than half of them are male tech geeks who love to use their expertise.

But to no avail. Then, at some point, The Magic Happens ™, and the damned thing starts working.

3:30ish : I, with help, figure out that I don’t have the right kind of video cable to hook my new PC into my monitor. So it’s kind of a paperweight until I get one. Eventually, I pull myself together, take a bus to the mall, go back to NCIX, buy the cable, and take a cab home.

4:15ish : I am home. Finally, I will be able to use my new PC! I open my kitbag and…. nothing. The cable isn’t there. I must have lost it somewhere along the way. ARGH. So very much ARGH. All the fucking ARGH.

So that’s been my rocky roller coaster of a day. Right now, all I want to do is curl up with my tablet, play my game (Crashlands!), and forget everything for a while.

Tomorrow, I will ask Joe to take me to the mall so I can buy ANOTHER of the same damn DVI to HDMI video cable, and guard that thing with my fucking life.

Hopefully, by tomorrow, all this will be an unhappy memory, and I will be happily playing with my new computer and making new memories.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.