03.04.04 - 5:09 p.m.

If frangible was an i-mood choice, I would have changed my idiotic little mood indicator to frangible rather than feverish. The dictionary offers "fragile" as a synonym, but I find that word too glassy-girlish to be an accurate inflection of my mood. Inflection? Yes: inflection. I'm taking the grammatical meaning and the word and using it to represent "[t]he variation or change which [moods] undergo to [be] mark[ed by words], "not [t]he variation or change which words undergo to mark case, gender, number, comparison, tense, person, mood, voice, etc."

It makes sense, doesn't it? We inflect nouns or verbs grammatically to reflect gradations of meaning, etc. Don't the words themselves inflect our moods, when we finally settle on one or two as definition for whatever it is we're feeling? Oh, language sucks and restricts and opens up meaning, and there are so many ways to allude to how we feel, to establish mood and sense and background and feeling, to color and watercolor our lives, but there aren't that many fucking ways to say the big things: I'm angry. I'm sad. I'm mad. I'm hurt. The truths are so much bigger than their signifiers, their placemarkers, and somehow it hurts to stuff them into containers, like Cinderella's step-sisters trying to stuff their ginormous feet into her itsy-bitsy glass slipper.

I'm not a glass slipper girl.

But I am angry, both vaguely and particularly. I suppose the word "anger" is sufficient to express my feelings regarding the specific circumstances: for example, my computer at work doesn't work, and regularly crashes, and I was supposed to get a new computer, oh, seven months ago, and we're still waiting for something, and despite the slow accretion of daily disasters to the point that - now - my computer crashes in the middle of composition of a major document two or three times a day necessitating heroic measures on my part to recover the lost information. I suspect that if one were to add up the billable hours I've lost to computer malfunction over the past seven months, it would more than pay for a new computer. I really, really do not understand what the problem is here.

So. And. That's the most-recent-very-specific problem (and the monster to which I've lost several diary entries over the past who-knows-how-fucking-long and the reason I am now writing in my diary rather than engaging my work more positively. The computer crashed again and I'm tired of it and I'm not doing any more work today, at all. I'm not doing any more work today because today was one of those days, one of those awful days when everything is just wrong and everyone is just on edge and the overhead lights are too clinical and bright and the sky just sits and the ground just sits and the traffic just sits and the season just sits somewhere between winter and spring.

Joan Didion described the crazy pall that settles over L.A. just before the Santa Ana winds start up, and went on to discuss the legends devil winds from all over the world in one of her L.A. short stories. Today feels like the day before a devil wind, stuck somewhere in the middle here and there, between-times, stretched and waiting for resolution. I can't claim spring fever, because it's not even really spring yet, just some run-up to spring, some bleak, ugly winter's day that somehow got the cue-cards wrong.

Get this: it's gray and wet, but not raining. It's warm, but ugly and brown outside. I haven't seen the sun in days, and the temperature is going to sink back into the 30s tonight. What am I supposed to do with this?

Oh, I could do something with this if everything else weren't in a holding pattern, too. I'm starting to feel used (now the box is in place, but the electric company has to come and re-connect the line. And....) with the whole house thing: I'm stuck: the offer is there and - having waited this long and having made the seller fix things - I feel like I have some obligation to wait a bit longer, until I can have the inspection and whatever - but I also, goddamnit, I want to move already. I thought February, then I thought March. Now... what? So there's the waiting game, and the waiting game on top of everything else, all the emotional twists of my mother's illness and chemotherapy and everything else. The muscles in my upper back and shoulders are more knotted than macrame.

I'm just so tired.