The long, dark tea time of the soul

Some people turn to drugs, others turn to sex or alcohol.

I turn to Spider Solitaire.

I'm in one of my 'blah' moods and can't seem to bring myself to do my laundry or finish off my undergrad paper tonight. Both are lurking at me from across my room like little demons made entirely of guilt. It's like Douglas Adams's "The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul" where the protagonist simply refuses to clean out his fridge. It was some sort of ongoing war he had with his cleaning lady, only I don't have a cleaning lady and instead of a fridge, it's my laundry and paper. Who knows? I could be breeding my own modern day Norse god of guilt. I keep telling myself that the only reason I haven't done my laundry yet is that I harbor the faint hope that it will simply sprout legs of its own and march down the four flights of stairs to the laundry room and do itself for me. So far, it's just sprouted arms and started talking to me, but no sign of legs yet. A girl can dream.

Ngoc Anh's blog about the quarterlife crisis (I believe that's what it was called) was very intriguing and definitely something I could relate to. One would think that being in a professional program and working on a second degree, I'd have some clue about where I'm going to end up in the next 5 years. *gives maniacal bitter laugh* yeah right.

So it's times like these that I sit here, playing spider solitaire and pondering about life, the universe and everything (yet another Douglas Adams reference).

In times like these, I also turn to Ranger and ask him to make sense of my life for me. He's mostly the strong silent type, but when he does say stuff, it's gold. I asked him what his philosophy on life was and he sat there nibbling for a bit and then he gave me a very interesting answer.
"Babe," he said, "you know that bunnies eat their poop at night, right?"
I nodded and he continued on,
"Well, I may not be able to decide what you feed me, but I can choose what I want to absorb."
He paused for emphasis. "You remember in your anatomy class that you learned that bunnies eat hay and that they quickly poop out all the rough stuff that has little nutritional value? And you remember how the stuff that does have nutritional value, we store in our appendix so we can absorb more of it and then at night, we poop that stuff out with a bunch of nutritional mucous and eat it another time just to make sure we get as much out of it as we can?"
I nodded again, an epiphany slowly dawning on me. Ranger spoke on.
"Well, life is like that too. You might not be able to control what comes at you, but you can sure as heck decide what you want to do with it. You feed me generic bunny food and cheap ass no-name hay, but I make the most out of it by covering it with mucous, pooping it out and eating it again, thus changing it into something wholesome and digestable." He stopped and stared directly at me. "At the end of the day, it's all about what you do with it."

He slowly took up a piece of hay, nibbled a bit more and looked up at me again. He winked.

"But you gotta remember babe, in the end . . . it's all a load of crap."

With that, he turned around in his cage and snuggled into his litter box for a nap.