Luckily, Creepy Art Cheers Me Up

Three things I hate today:

1. Overly helpful people. I don't need you to give me a dissertation on the procedure I'm about to do--I just need to know where a reagent is. I don't need you to clean up and organize my stuff--that just makes me unable to find anything. I know that you're eager to be helpful, but when you do more than I ask you for, you are not being double-plus helpful, you are being patronizing and counter-productive. Please dial it back.

2. Being behind on sleep. I keep doing this thing where I start doing something for school early in the week, say Sunday or Monday night, and end up staying up until like 4:30am because I don't notice the time when I'm actually working on something. Well, then I have to turn around and get up at 8:00am (I know, ungodly early, right?), and I swear I'll go to bed early the next night, but then I have to prep for class or I get all alert at like 11:00pm, and then by Wednesday and Thursday I don't get anything done because I'm exhausted. My dad suggests I set an alarm for bedtime, which I actually might do.

3. Stamp machines. I don't even want to talk about it.

Two things I love today:

1. My new creepy painting that was free. As I biked out of my alleyway/parking lot yesterday morning, there was this awesome painting just hanging out, propped up at the end of the parking spaces, facing the street. When I came home again, it had blown over and been driven over a couple of times (overlapping tire tracks, don't you know), so I propped it up again, but now so it was less visible from the street, to buy some more time to figure out what was going on with it. This began Possibly Free Painting-Watch 2006, when I checked on it like six times while I was talking with my friends on the phone. It hadn't moved or anything by 1:00am, so with their advice, I finally decided to take it (protective custody so it wouldn't get trashed, if nothing else), but keep an eye out for lost-and-found notices for it. So if you are in Tempe and are minus one painting that is somewhat reminscent of the work of Jhonen Vasquez, please let me know at mercurial_girl@bust.com.

2. Teddy Thompson's Separate Ways. I'm obsessed with the title song. Too bad my connection is dial-up (What? It's free!) and I don't have like an hour to upload it for you. Buy the album, you cheap bastards.