In the middle of last week, Doolies and I finally made our way to Loews—the home improvement store not the movie theater—to purchase supplies for a number of home-improvement projects we’ve been talking about. The plastic bag full of goodies sat on top of the dryer all week. It wasn’t until early this morning that I finally opened the bag to start in on my first project.

Our downstairs toilet has been acting up, so much so that I had to turn off the water. The toilet has sat (mostly) unused for the past few weeks. It was running and when I wiggled the thingamajob like I usually do to fix it, the running continued. I tried to tighten all the screws, and then loosened the screws, then changed the angle and direction of the ball thingy, and I eventually came to the conclusion that the tall thingy that the ball and lever work off of and that connects to the water under the toilet was in need of replacing. As you can tell by my technical descriptions, I’m an expert when it comes to plumbing and other home improvement projects. I bought a replacement tall thingy at Loews as part of our project planning.

I spent twenty minutes attempting to take off the old plastic tall thingy and failed when I realized I didn’t have a large enough wrench to loosen the plastic nut under the toilet. That’s how those home-improvement stores always get you: they know no matter how detailed your list of supplies is, you’ll always have to come back for more junk to get your job done. I think they could make a fortune if they provided home delivery. I would have home delivered that wrench to continue failing in my project. I didn’t make it back to Loews, however. After I confronted the unconfrontable plastic nut, I threw my tools down and escaped to the world of computers, a world that is just as frustrating, but doesn’t involve automobiles when I need to fix something.

I can’t go on with this diary entry. I thought I could. I thought I would finish it like every other day where my head is pounding away and even the brightness of the screen makes my eyes water. I thought lots of things but I can’t wrap my brain around these words. I tried not to make it another day like this. I want to write, I really do. But I find myself not having the energy or effort or whatever it is in my brain that allows me to focus and concentrate and pat words into large absorbent balls, which I can roll down the hall and post on my seemingly self-torturous website. Whatever it is is now gone.

I spent most of the morning, after failing at the toilet, working on our wedding website. Doolies and I finally hammered out the design and I’m working on the beast. It won’t be the quickest or the lowest bandwidth site, but it will be pretty. Why torture myself with a day of fancy photos if I don’t intend to use them? That was rhetorical, of course we intend to use them. And by them, I mean the wedding photos we took in Taiwan, of course. I’d link to it but that would involve additional work, of which it is next to impossible at this moment.

This is much easier when I don’t have to think about what I’m going to write. Of course this is useless, but what else is new? It’s art, my art, and fuck if I care if it becomes anything. It won’t. But so what? I’m putting words down and this is what I told myself I would do. These are words for me not for you, as I’ve said plenty of times before.

What happened to my spreadsheet? In my pain I forgot about recording the beginning time or my feelings (1s across the board). Another in a long line of failures.

Doolies is sitting at her computer working away. We ate a throw everything in the kitchen into a pan and call it dinner dinner. It turned out better than I thought. We even cooked the frozen kosher shrimps I bought a few weeks ago. (Shrimp, like all shell fish, is not kosher. This was faux shrimp.) After defrosting them in water, they looked like real shrimps, minus the vein and the shells and tail. They pan fried nicely with scallions and a bit of oil. As we cut into the first shrimp we realized that it looked much more like shrimp than it tasted. It tasted like fish balls, which was probably because that is what it was: white fish squished together into shrimp shapes, with some sort of orange food coloring along its edges.

My head is threatening to remove itself from my neck. The pain is not improving, and the one Advil I managed to swallow earlier hasn’t helped much. I think it’s a sleep problem today. I went to sleep late last night and woke up in the middle of the morning. I can’t do the math now because my head won’t let me, but I think I slept either too little or too much, and, whichever one it was, I slept outside my schedule. As part of my anti-headache regime, I try to keep my sleep patterns as constant as possible. I failed last night. I woke up this morning with a slight headache, which staying on the computer working on the website most of the morning, and not eating until noon, certainly didn’t help. Life is about sacrifices I guess. I’m on my way to finishing my sacrifice for tonight. I need sleep and I need sleep badly. It’s one of those pathologically yawning headaches that I know will go away with a good night’s sleep. Or at least I hope it will. I’ll wear my sick sweatshirt to bed just in case. That always fights away the bad bugs that run around my body on these weakened nights.