a bad day in more ways than one

I got up early this morning and didn't feel at all like doing the stairs. My heart was murmuring and beating irrhythmically, and my motivation had bottomed out. No idea why that's the case, and no idea why my heart might be all jittery: I hadn't had any caffeine the previous day; all I'd had were "zero" drinks (0 calories, 0 grams of carbs), so what the hell was going on? This problem started yesterday for no reason I can fathom. This morning was the continuation. In fact, I'd barely slept all night, so everything felt out of whack.

As I put on my clothes in reluctant preparation for my workout, I decided to flip a coin to see whether I should do the stairs or not. Heads: exercise; tails: just crawl back into bed. Two out of three tosses. The gods spoke clearly: go do the workout (the results were heads, tails, heads). Grimacing, I headed out to the freight elevator, went down to B1, stretched my calves 30 seconds per leg (if I don't do this, I cramp up), took two deep breaths, and started up. I had barely gotten through the four flights from B1 to 1 before I was out of breath, and by the time I had gotten to the third floor, I was utterly winded, as if I hadn't been doing the stairs almost daily for the past two months. It was weird and embarrassing, even with no one around to see my failure. But despite my bruised ego, I swallowed my pride and decided it would be better just to stop there and then. So, having done only three floors' worth of stairs, I summoned the elevator and went back up to 14. And that was the first reason for my bad day.

The American cheese I had ordered via Coupang had supposedly arrived yesterday. Coupang deliveries, per my instructions, are normally supposed to be dropped off right at my door, but... nothin'. I wrote Coupang a memo; the reply that came back was utterly detached from reality: it said that they were having trouble reaching me by phone, and that all I needed to do was put out my Coke Zero by the door. I emailed back that the problem wasn't Coke Zero—it was the American cheese I had ordered, and there was no need for a driver to pick anything up: I wanted my product delivered. I never heard back from Coupang after that, but on an intuition, I went down to my building's lobby and asked the guard whether a package had come for me. It had. I took the box to my office, and voilà: it was the missing cheese. The delivery driver had ignored the instructions to deliver to my door and had instead lazily dropped the package off at the lobby's concierge desk. I contacted Coupang to say that all was well, and please don't send a driver for any reason.

My third problem wasn't really a problem, per se, just a weird drop in site-visit stats after a glorious month of thousands-per-day visits. This past week, my blog's daily unique-visits counts were: 10878, 11186, 10648, 12152, 14632, 12110... and today, so far, I have only 193 visits.* My total for February reminds me of December: this month, I'm over 146,000 visits, which may be a new record. (January, you'll recall, was rather anemic, and in December, I had 121,900 visits, which was a record at the time.)

So those were my three big problems for the day. Happily, tomorrow is March 1, a national holiday, so I have a three-day weekend. My boss has been gone all week to Jeju on a rare vacation, kickin' it with his family. He called me at the office yesterday, though, sounding stressed out despite the "fun" activities he'd lined up for his fraternal-twin sons, which included go carts, laser tag, and, I think, shooting at a gun range. I could tell he wanted to be back at the office and away from the noise and chaos of a wife and two tween boys.

So despite the suck-ass day, I'm not feeling too horrible. The long walk I failed to do this morning will be done tonight, then tomorrow, I'll do a full set up the staircase (1.25 staircases). This morning was supposed to be only half a staircase (up to 14), and I couldn't even make that. But maybe, if I get to sleep early enough tonight and avoid stressors like watching people argue politics on YouTube, I might wake up feeling more balanced and ready for staircase work. I really do need to work on my sleep schedule.

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*The sudden disappearance, today, of that many visitors feels like swarming behavior, so this could be the coordinated action of bots, in which case the number of bots visiting my blog must be way, way more than 50% of my site traffic. Maybe I've been stuck at 600-ish unique visits per day this entire time.