This is the second day in a row that I have woken up in a bad place. Yesterday, as I wrote about in yesterday's post, it was because of the violent way in which I was awakened. Today, it was because of the invasion of the modemsnatchers.
My mother recently decided to switch our landline over from Verizon to Time Warner. She sees this as a life-altering decision. It's about as important to me as if she replaced all of the boxes of Chex in the house with cheaper boxes of Chex. I don't eat Chex, so I don't give a shit. (This is the second blog post in a row in which I have mentioned cereal boxes and tried in some way to relate them to something. I swear, I'm not paid by General Mills or Kellogg's, although I am completely open to the idea. I'll change my whole page design to a giant cereal box and draw pictures of cereal boxes doing cancer research and donating mosquito nets to poor families in Africa if it means more money to fuel my voracious spending habits.)
However, there was a part I did give a shit about, and that was the fact that that meant big, burly men with toolkits and brightly-colored work uniforms would be stomping enthusiastically up and down the stairs of my house and yelling about "phone jacks" and "modems" while I sat trapped in my dark room, half-awake, disheveled, and wide-eyed for hours. This is not a situation I would wish upon anyone for anything longer than 15 minutes.
I am perfectly capable of moving while the workers are here. I would need to put some clothes on to avoid being offensive, but I'm pretty sure tolerating people living their everyday lives in the houses they work on is part of their job. I just don't want to. I get this tremendous anxiety any time someone is working in the house and I become afraid that I am going to get in their way somehow and accidentally knock them down the stairs and then they are going to sue me and take away my internet connection and my house and then I will die on the street, never again to watch videos of cats jumping off of tables onto carpeted floors or have late-night conversations about swear words in Farsi ever again. The idea of that is too much for me to bear, so I'd rather stay in my room with all the lights off and pretend I don't exist.
There was only one problem with staying in my room: The only thing I can do in my room that doesn't make noise is be on the internet, and when they are working on something that compromises the internet, using it becomes unreliable.
I swear, the evil corporate lobbyists would prevent it from happening with their fancy wines and endless sums of money, but the internet should be classified as a habit-forming substance. I don't necessarily need it. I don't do anything tremendously important on it. I mostly look up Wikipedia articles of obscure diseases, participate in immature group conversations chock full of lewd humor, and, as previously mentioned, watch YouTube videos of cats jumping off of tables. These are all entertaining, but I manage to pull myself away from them for long enough to sleep, eat dinner, and do most of the other things that need to get done during the day.
That doesn't change the fact that, when it's off, I usually enter some sort of fetal position (as close to fetal position as you can get in a computer chair) and begin sweating, squirming, and questioning the worth of my entire existence. I get sudden urges to look up things like "calories in a pomegranate" and "what happens when you put a Beanie Baby on top of a ceiling fan and then turn it on" and I can't because I don't have an internet connection. Then I look to my phone, naturally, which has 3G and all of that new-fangled mobile technology. When that's not working, I go through the five stages of grief, lay down, and pray that sleep will take me out of this misery. Then I end up having dreams about my friends becoming amputees and going fishing with Ellen DeGeneres in an ocean of cherry jello, in turn giving me more things to look up. When I wake up, I am usually in a panic, with my pillow thrown across the room and my mom wondering why I've been screaming "REEL IT IN!" for multiple hours while apparently asleep.
My internet is back now, of course, and I'm a little less upset, but I'm still shaken. The friend in my dream had her leg entirely cut off, and there was a giant crowd around my house because she was at my house for some reason, and she came out completely nonchalantly, got into another friend's car, and went to the mall. It's times like these when I wish dream interpretation worked, although that probably just means that I have a weird fear of getting my leg cut off and I am overdue for a mall trip. Don't even know where to start with Ellen DeGeneres and the jello, though.
