today, i have plans to do the following: on my lunch break, purchase the new dave eggers book. it got four stars in some publication, however, it may have been the pittsburgh tribune-review, so i suppose i have to take that with a grain of salt. also, tonight i will be stuffing my middle ear with hydrogen peroxide-soaked cotton balls. after some mysterious event on sunday, i can barely hear anything. the world sounds as if i am underwater. its one of those ailments that isn't any kind of emergency, but is just excruciatingly annoying. all day i am missing conversations, accidently ignoring people, and tonight i will not be able to sing karaoke b/c i am having a hard time hearing myself talk. other people are annoyed by hearing me respond "what?" 750 times a day.

yesterday, i got to leave work early to drive one of our attorneys up to montefiore hospital. at first i didn't want to do this, because the lady is the most untalkative person ever. i've worked here two months. she just learned my name yesterday. with this hearing affliction, the last thing i wanted to do was make awkward conversation with someone i just met. however, leaving work at three with the only responsibilty of babysitting someone's car while reading chuck klosterman and avoiding a busride home is worth the sacrifice. ironically, she is also the most softspoken person in this firm. of all the things she said, i maybe caught one or two sentences. (also, i hope thats real irony, not alanis-morrisette irony, because if it isn't i don't think i know what the definition of irony is.)

sitting in the car, i realized two things. if someone says what they are doing WON'T take an hour, it almost always takes that much time or longer. if they say it will take an hour, it will take five minutes. also, if you stay with the car, you can park wherever the hell you want. my sole purpose for accompanying this lawyer was to park her car and then return it to her after her meeting, so she could avoid paying for parking/the hassle of parking an oakland sidestreet. fine. after i dropped her off, i noticed several cars parked alongside the driveway curb. i pulled up behind one of them, planning to stay until i looked to suspicious. no one bothered me. no one within a hundred yard radius even resembled a parking official. i was sitting five feet from one of those no parking signs. however, if i had left, i almost certainly would have been ticketed/towed within ten minutes. somehow, the driver's presence in the car makes it entirely acceptable to park that car illegaly. had i left this car at a parking meter outside eat n park with fifteen-minutes too few, i would have immediately got a ticket. somehow, i can park MORE illegally and as long as i hang out, i'm cool. it boggles my mind.