Feeling Peaky

I work as a temp for a council planning department. Mostly I file, update mail, and process planning applications. At the moment I want to bury myself in finnicky tasks to make time go and money come faster. I want to get to Japan, start my new job, see my boyfriend and do exciting things instead of counting the minutes until lunchtime. Everything is filed and I stand with my forehead against the window and watch people walking nine stories below. A plane bisects the glass and sky and, for the first time since I came back from Thailand in November, I want to be on it. January blues settle like a toad below my ribs.
I sustain three irritating injuries before noon: a splinter, a bleeding gouge from a file refusing to be filed, and an interesting barcode effect in one elbow after the stack of folders I was carrying slipped and sliced me as they fell. This is the point when I decide today is January Blues Day. Pass me my harmonica.
Melancholy is like crying. It does you good to indulge now and again. I wallow in self-pity and count the awful things that stack against me. My boyfriend is in Japan, so I curse the gods for our not getting together when we were at the same university. I suspect the gods had little to do with our choices of boy/girlfriends and the lucky timing that meant we were never both single, but that would be missing the point of January Blues Day. Mostly I just miss BF and wish I could talk to him now instead of doing crappy non-work.
I have no money. I loved the holidays when I had them and would have fought scrappily with anyone who tried to take away one day of my Christmas holiday, but in the cold light of January all I can see is skinny paychecks and the staggering cost of going to Japan. Eek. And that's before we even get into the duvet-clutching nightmare of student debt that will haunt me until I am a hundred and twenty-four. It's January Blues Day, so I allow myself a long-suffering sigh. Aaaah. God, that's good.
It's nine-thirty now, January Blues Day is nearly over. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow. That's something to smile about.

Karma and Suicidal Spiders

Lisa sat down and said, "There was a letter for you on the table."
"A good letter?" I said.
"From Nova."
"Did it look good?" The interview was three weeks ago. How could it be good?
"A4," she said like this confirms everything, but I am stubborn.
"Maybe they ran out of rejection letter-sized envelopes."
"A4 and fat."
"Maybe they wrote 'fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off fuck off' over and over on ten sheets of paper to fill me with hope then crush me when I finally opened it."
"Maybe you got the job."
"It's possible."
I am wildly superstitious about interviews and pathologically afraid of them. I start being generous to beggars and avoiding cracks in pavements. I wash spiders down the drain accidentally on purpose all the time, but after interviews I hope being nice to them will swing the karmic scales in my favour. One turned up in the shower a week after the interview, and I took great care not to drown him. Unfortunately Stephano the Suicidal Spider chose to hang out by my shampoo bottle for a week before vanishing in mysterious circumstances and I feared I had failed some cosmic test, dashed away my teaching post in Japan and instead earned ten pages of fuck off.
I open the letter. "We are pleased to offer you a teaching position..."
Now I can resume my spider-drowning ways.