Have been alone in house all day because enormous snowdrifts from recent blizzard have made going out very unappealing. Plus everywhere I wanted to go is closed. It's amazing how many ways one can be unproductive. In effort to avoid my to-do list I have made and consumed endless cups of tea and stared fruitlessly into space looking for unforthcoming answers and redistributed all the clutter in my room without making any actual difference in the volume of the neverending mass of stuff that I have somehow collected over the years and which is now my responsibility.

And it is now 8:30 and I have accomplished nothing whatsoever.

Am going to have a glass of wine and look at the snow and wallow in self-loathing.

School is closed tomorrow so I have the afternoon off. Here's to greater productivity then.

The world is full of shifty-eyed, evasive, mouth breathing, annoying phone-call making, appointment-flaking, high maintenance, low tolerance, joke-not-getting, grating-voice-having cretins and apparently they all want to live in my apartment.

Maybe it's not them. Maybe it's me. Maybe I'm simply past the time of my life when it is fun - or at least not excruciatingly unfun- to share a cheap apartment with two virtual strangers.

In any case - I feel confident that when Sartre observed, "Hell is other people" he was probably trying to find someone to pay 1/3 of his rent.

Fucking Valentine's Day. Fucking invasion of Pepto-bismol pink hearts and stupid cherubs exposing themselves and moronic love poetry everywhere.

Every idiot who goes about babbling about Happy Valentine's Day should be choked on his own Whitman's chocolate and buried with a long-stemmed rose through his heart.

Bah humbug.