love and death are always on my mind

I was in the office by 8:45 this morning, and didn't leave until 9:30. Yay. I came home and ate five tacos to make up for the fact that the only thing I ate at work was a peanut butter sandwich (and I didn't even have time to toast the bread), and by the end of dinner found myself clenching my knife in an unnecessarily-threatening manner. Thirteen hours in the office will do that to you, especially when you know that you have several more hours of work to do. I was only able to hack it for two more, though, and now it's time to throw in the proverbial towel.

I'm always disgusted by using the bathrooms in the office after the cleaning staff goes home for the day. There is a woman whose sole job is to maintain the ten or so women's stalls in the building; she is inevitably in the bathroom when I walk in, and as much as possible she flushes and cleans as soon as someone uses any toilet. It seems rather unnecessary--but I have come to realize that this has become a very necessary action solely because it is so taken for granted. Those of you who were my residents have often heard me rail against the tragedy of the commons, whereby people feel that they can ignore a problem or trash a place just because the blame cannot be assigned only to them, or because there isn't enough incentive for them to act in a community-minded manner. Walter and I experienced our own tragedy of the commons last summer, when we entered a cold war over who would be the one to break down and pick up the dead bee lying on the bathroom floor; we finally reached detente a week later and picked it up together. Anyway, the point is that now that people are used to having the bathroom cleaned as soon as they use it, they have become absolutely disgusting. People don't flush, or they urinate on the seat, and without someone there to pick up after them, most of the bathroom is rendered unusable. Ugh. Apparently the net result of having a country with a billion people is that 600,000,000 people rely on the 400,000,000 poorest people to pick up after them. Those four hundred million people also don't get anything that we take for granted, like latex gloves or disinfectant, which makes an already unpleasant job potentially dangerous as well.

VH1, though, continues to entertain; while I was working tonight, they played MC Hammer's 'U Can't Touch This' video. That reminded me of my fifth-grade science teacher, who wore purple hammer pants to school one day and was mocked relentlessly for it. Ah, fifth grade. That was when we were being bused 20 minutes north to have fifth and sixth grade in a nearly-condemned brick building with dangerous radiators and no playground. The building had a lot of history and character, much more so than the classrooms in the new addition to the high school. Of course, that character was partially defined by a grown man in hammer pants, so maybe it wasn't the kind of character that should be influencing our nation's youth.

Okay, much work awaits me, so it's time for bed!