I started work on Monday at eight thirty in the morning. It's now 1am on Tuesday and I've just arrived home. I didn't have a lunch break really, and I won't be paid for most of it. The working conditions are shockingly bad, but thankfully my relationship with myself is not such that I'm subject to the new IR laws, so I'm only fooling myself. Being your own boss can be confusing.
So I was thinking, in the car on the way home, that my bed was like the ribbon at the end of a marathon that has NINE WORLD OF SPORTS written across it. The finish line, I suppose that's called. Anyway, so I'm stumbling towards the finish line and my hair smells of ciggies and I've seen a billion comedians in a week and my eyelids are drooping and I really need someone to stand by the side of the road with a water bottle that I can grab on my way past and hurl all over myself in exhausted relief... but I get nothing. And then when I get home, there's an obstacle course at the end of the marathon because I haven't cleaned my room in years because everyone knows you can't work from half eight in the morning until one the next day and have a clean room unless you work as a cleaner, and so finally I get to the finish line and collapse, like a real marathon runner except without the over-excited family and friends screeching hysterically and draping me in a flag. (Mum and Dad were busy).
So, as if to further highlight my metaphorical struggle, the thought came to me all of a sudden that Melanie Howlett, Standing There Captain of Industry, is actually running a marathon. A real marathon. An actual one. With her legs. And I guess her lungs. And the rest of her body anyway shut up the point is she's running a race that STARTS AT SEVEN IN THE MORNING ON A SUNDAY (9 April for those counting) and it goes for 42.295 kms.
Although she has told me that if she "feels liks it", she's allowed to just keep running until she's run fifty ks and she'll be able to tell her friends she ran an "ultra marathon" as opposed to a shitty old normal 42 km marathon at seven in the morning on a Sunday. In Canberra.
Anyway, so now my metaphorical marathon of a day seems somewhat less energetic. Mine was probably more of a "long distance walk". No lifting your feet completely off the ground or you'll get disqualified by a little guy in a suit.
I dunno. Shut up. It's half past one in the morning. Leave me alone.