No knees is good knees

This morning a man in a white van slowed down on the railway bridge to shout something at me as I cycled past in the other direction. I thought I caught the word "knees", but apart from that it was all lost in the noise of the wind and the traffic and my breathing. Normally when people shout out of cars it's to tell me I'm fat or ugly, but are my knees really that bad? No, don't answer, I'm not fishing for crazy internet knee-worship. Really, really. I suppose I was showing them off more than usual, mind, freezing in a skirt and tights as thin as the sunlight. There seems to be some kind of subconscious idea in my head that if the sun sees underdressed women every time it comes out, it'll come out more often; but it's clearly not going to work if they've got ugly knees, is it?

Shall I at least set my desk in order?

There's so little to do at work at the moment, so little actual work that isn't just makework, just desk-tidying. I mean, in a sense my whole job is just desk-tidying; but usually it's more like helping to tidy other people's desks, or designing desks that are easier to keep tidy, or giving people shinier in-trays.

( desk-tidying )

It's all just so much nonsense. I'd be better off tidying the house, or baking a cake. I could go home and make flapjacks, and bring them into work tomorrow, and it'd be a more productive use of the time. I mean, honestly.

Feeling low as the ground

So scratchy today, rough at the edges, full of half-formed ideas and frustration. Everything feels stagnant in here; the air smells of stale coffee and cheap biscuits, and the sky outside looks sullen and flat. It's not warm enough, not cold enough, not bright enough, not dark enough, and I want more than anything to be somewhere else. There's a syrupy-thick slow tidal swell of apathy and stupidity, tired old phrases trotted out over and over again by brittle-faced people with hair like dead leaves. I've made about fifty cups of coffee, and thrown at least a third of half of them away, and if it takes a man and a half a day and a half to do this, why does it only take me ten minutes and leave me with hours of dead time? I feel like I'm always at the front of the exam room asking for more paper, not because I'm cleverer or have more ideas but because I hate wasting time. And it is wasted; it's not constructive idleness, it's not mindful meditative spaces, it's just hours of picking and shuffling and pushing food around a plate; it's gritty, grainy seconds piling up like the residue of rice and flour and dusty lentils at the back of the cupboard where all those sealed packets have leaked out just a little.

At lunchtime I walked around the building, just to stop myself going crazy. A couple of minutes' walk takes you from identikit office buildings to woodlands and fields, bluebells and celandines, trees full of sun and shadow. In a lunch-hour you can almost get out of sight of the bars of the cage. It started to rain just as I started walking, and for a moment I was going to go back inside, and then my feet carried on walking and the rain stopped. Everything felt low-ceilinged, though, even outside, even the point where suddenly there was a view across a field where all the daffodils in the world were growing, and at the other side of the field was some kind of incredible space-age building. I felt like I'd pushed through the fence somewhere and was watching something I shouldn't be watching; something from a film, something wide-angled. I took photos, not to record anything for posterity (You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report) but just to make sure I didn't walk by without seeing anything. I took stupid photos with no focus, close-ups of nothing, wide views of everything.

Everything I see is either too big to comprehend or too small to make a difference. I'm suffering from a chronic error of scale, a lack of perspective that bends the edges of the room so that nothing's the same size. I don't fit through the doors that I have the keys for, and I don't have the keys for the doors at my level; and now I'm late again, late for everything and nothing.

I'm so tired.