Bitch, please

You’ll have to pardon the whining, but sometimes a guy just needs to let it all out, OK? Here, in no particular order, is a brief list of bad things that happened yesterday:

• Woke up to an email informing me that a collection agency that is annoyed about my insolvency is escalating things to the lawyer level. (Thanks, freelance clients who didn’t pay invoices for months at a time while I was looking for steady work.)
• Left my US checkbook at home so I couldn’t throw a sacrificial pittance at them to get them off my back for now.
• Did not wake up to discover that large fees for other freelance work had finally been deposited in my bank account
• The new glasses I ordered last week did not show up at the optician, like they were supposed to, so I’m still stuck wearing the old pair held together by messy gobs of Krazy Glue.
• The optometrist checking the fit of my contacts informed me I have crusty eyelashes.
• Fontlab crashed a bunch of times, but that’s a daily occurrence.
• I finally did my taxes, even though I was pretty sure I didn’t have enough money to pay them. (I don’t, because of those invoices that haven’t been paid yet.)
• But I couldn’t even finish preparing my return because TurboTax refused to let me enter credit card information that’s not tied to a US address.
• I got a photo for my emergency new passport, but it’s not the size that the US requires, so I have to run around and find another place that takes a proper set instead of using one of the stupid booths.
• I already whined about how I have to have my passport replaced, but that’s still making me mad.
• I was finally informed that the mysterious kidney problem that my doctor has been trying to identify is acute interstitial nephritis. I can’t feel anything going wrong, but apparently it can become suddenly life-threatening.
• That means I have to switch from my regular meds (which always leads to days of feeling shitty), and take a ridiculously huge stack of other ones to deal with the kidney thing and then manage all the side effects that are likely to happen.
• I will probably be suffering from severe indigestion, weight gain, and acne for the next few weeks, as if I wasn’t self-conscious enough already.
• Got stressed about today’s deadline for an ATypI proposal, an indefinite but urgent deadline for stuff I have to write about another ATypI thing, the presentation I’m giving CSM next week, a regular client’s ongoing needs which they never plan far enough in advance and hence are always rush jobs, and the massive family if Indic typefaces I’m still trying to finish for my full-time job (the success of which will determine if I get another job by the time my visa runs out).
• My Gujarati is not progressing well, and that pissed me off.
• There was probably some other shit that went wrong, too, but I can’t remember it now. It was a really bad day.

Thankfully, Ian made me a nice cuppa tea and some dinner while we had a productive, encouraging chat about upcoming projects for The Colour Grey, so really helped me relax before I came home and fell asleep. (And sleep is good because that’ss when things go away for a few hours and I like that.)