After being ready to drown myself in the afternoon I have to report progress on my paper. I just couldn't hear my incessant whining anymore myself. (Putz!) Not very significant progress, but still progress. Now my eyes hurt because my monitor is in its "turquoise" phase and apparently has decided red is evil. Occasionally it will waver and the original colours will return, but only to taunt me with their brightness for a New York second and then disappearing into the ether again. If you have a monitor around somewhere and it needs to die, bring it over to my place. Meanwhile, I have three monitors sitting on my desk. One's completely wrecked, one flickers and dies all the time, and now the turquoise thing. Maybe I do need to invest money I don't have into a new monitor.

This reminds me of the tax thing that's still floating around. My cats have removed even the possibility of doing it myself by dumping red wine over my forms GRMPF and FCKU. And unfortunately I need lots of working up before contacting people I don't know i.e. a tax consultant.

It's worst on the telephone - I really suck at phonecalls. Personally, I surmise that's because I don't hear very well. I tend not to understand what people say and then usually am to embarassed to ask a fourth time and just hang up with issues not being resolved. I hate it so much, I will only do phone calls on the hour or on the half hour. If you receive a phone call at odd times that means you're a REALLY GOOD friend.

I have the same resistance about e-mails, too, though. It takes ages for me to compose a mail - I'll read it, reread it, delete stuff, add stuff, copy & paste, add some more stuff, re-type deleted stuff, delete the whole thing and start over again. I don't know why. Maybe it's perfectionism. I don't want anyone to read one of my mails and think "Oh my god, what an idiot." Or some such. It also goes for e-mails to friends, though. Ages, I tell ya. Ages.

Now imagine how long it takes to compose one to a tax consultant. Exactly. One week and counting at the moment.