I've been meaning to take part in this Daily Grind phenomena wherein you photograph and document a typical day. I keep forgetting, however, as I am not awake until I am out of the house and with coffee in hand.

Unfortunately I can't really claim last Friday as typical, since there was a snowstorm and it was my last day of freelancing before the holidays. Everyday is an adventure when you are mostly unemployed.

And waiting for the bus. I take El Blue Line from Western to Division first, but that was before coffee and therefore before I started taking photos.

Here we are in a warehouse districty area of Chicago, walking through snow and ice to another day at the office!

Who's excited about a day of graphic designing? Why, it's me!

The robotic doorman provides me direction in life, but only after I # her.

And here is my temporary workspace of the past few weeks. Laptop on the left, which I've been using for Adobe CS3 and the older imac I've been using to work on their CS2 projects. Soon they will upgrade to CS4 leaving me in the dust. I hate you Adobe. Note my mouse with the curled, frayed retractible cord. I've been lugging that around for five years, but thankfully received a new bluetooth mouse for Christmas.

This is the offices of Thirst. Their walls are covered in the canon of graphic design history. Paul Rand's iconic “eye bee M” logo can be seen near the center of this lovely and blurry cameraphone picture.

Here is Bud, my roommate who actually works at Thirst on salary, and Ben, a former intern who was just hired on in an assistant position. They think they're so damn fancy with their jobs:

My day is mostly hours of moving around pixels on the screen. I spent Friday tracing a blueprint of a power plant at Midway Airport. Sometimes I stop to eat a sandwich. This is what my sandwich looks like when it is gone:

Here you can see me going slowly blind from eye strain:

Another late day at the office. As a freelancer, they don't make me answer the phone thank god. Unless they are all gone or busy. I hate the telephone.

After work I went to see a production of the Unconquered at the neighborhood Absurdist theatre with Cameron.

I posted about the last production I saw there, No Darkness Round My Stone, which involved graverobbers standing around in a cemetery saying “God is dead, god is dead. This is a cemetery!” This play was not so good, sadly. I also fell asleep, per reasons outlined in a previous post. The characters were a sitcom mom and dad (who looked like John Waters), an educated schoolgirl character who sat around in an inflatable tub filled with books, and “The Soldier” who did whatever weird shit necessary to move the plot. The plot mainly revolved around the five second rape of the daughter character by the Soldier in the first act. The background was of an advanced, cultured company thrown into chaos at the hands of a revolution only to turn into a fascist state. The fascist state required the father to say “I'm taking up golf” a lot. The daughter also screamed “I've been raped!” a whole lot while the mother and father bought into the elite of the new order at the hands of the soldier. The soldier became the leader of the country? Big Brother Max Headroom?

I dunno. It was okay. After that Cameron and I went to a neighborhood bar for a fish fry. On the way we came across this holiday window display:

We proceeded to get trashed after meeting up with his friend Tegan and going to a few more dives. After a night of cheap beer I decided to order gin and tonics at a dive. I don't drink gin. I stumbled home, had a loud drunken phone conversation with the boyfriend in my living room and pleaded with Matthew (MWINMB #3) to come over. He didn't. Well, not until Saturday night at least.

Kafka is on my shirt there, which makes this post Kafkaesque. No arguments.

It's been an interesting Christmas, but I'll post about that later.