Wake up groggy and cranky, having overslept after taking diphenhydramine at midnight to combat poor breathing. Probably brought on by too much dust inhaled during a day of cleaning to eradicate the dust that can cause my poor breathing. Make note to read “Catch-22″ again. Finally fell asleep at 1am and was only awakened by stepdaughter returning from friend’s house, dishwasher on time delay, street cleaning truck and barking dog between 1am and dawn. Wake up wondering if my typical Sunday of cleaning, cooking, laundry, shopping and bill-paying for 10 or so hours is the best way to get ready for the work week.

Go to my standing Monday 9am appointment for allergy shots that I get to combat poor breathing. Am told that I don’t have an  appointment. Apparently my standing appointment fell down. Re-make standing Monday appointment, which will be on Wednesdays for the holidays. Wait around to get my shots; am finally on the way to work at 10:30am.

From work, call Alltel to find out why I am being charged a $200 early termination fee when I was told by their employee in their store that I was on a month-to-month contract now. Apparently employee had only checked one phone on my account, but I have two, and what he told me is only valid for one phone. So I owe them $200 because I believed what their employee told me when he checked my Alltel account on an Alltel computer in the Alltel store. Make mental note that next time a company employee gives me information on my account, I should go to the attic and pull out two-year-old records to verify. There is no manager to speak to at customer service. I have to call the local store where the employee works.

Call local store. There is nobody available to take my call, but they will automatically transfer me to the people who just told me to call the local store. Repeat 3 times. Make mental note to re-read Catch-22.

To distract myself from annoyance at Alltel, go to Social Security website to get information on how to get a card with my married name. Print out form and fill it out; find number of local office on website and call for appointment. On-hold message says that if I don’t want to wait, I can go to their website for information, where I can be told to call and make an appointment. Repeat on-hold message three times before giving up and putting sticky note on my monitor to remind me to go to library and check out Joseph Heller’s first novel.

Decide that day so far is too annoying for me to concentrate on work,  so I brace myself for the trip to Alltel. Am told the same thing, only more nicely, and get to speak to a manager who says that I knew there was a charge for early termination, therefore I have to pay it, despite the fact that her employee told me that I wasn’t terminating early. She takes my contact information. Stay tuned.

Forego the temptation to walk across the parking lot to the clearance sale at the video store. Go to bank to deposit checks. Am endorsing a check when the car at the ATM pulls out. Put down checkbook and car behind me cuts in front. I honk and shout a thank you for cutting me off. Am at the ATM myself when I hear a honk. The woman who cut me off is now blocking someone from getting out of the bank parking lot. She turns. Thirty seconds later I hear another honk. She’s now blocking someone trying to get out of the shopping center parking lot. Feel for the first time today like there is hope and fairness in the world after all.  Decide that an attitude adjustment is in order. Focus on the beautiful, unseasonably warm weather without the side worries of 52 days of water left in the reservoirs and the threat of the annihilation of civilization as we know it due to global warming. Decide to just enjoy the fact that it is in the high 70s in December and I had the good sense not to wear a turtleneck today. Call the freelance designer working in my studio with me and ask if she can think of a good reason why we should not be outdoors enjoying a beer. She can’t think of one. A pleasant interlude occurs.

Decide that since work day is already pretty well shot to hell, I may as well leave early and get a long-overdue haircut. My smart, short cut has passed the Ringo Starr stage and is moving perilously close to David Cassidy. Go to see my stylist, who starts work at 4pm on Mondays, one of the precious few days of the week that she works. She’s not there. The other stylists assure me she called and is on her way. I don’t want to sit and read about hair, a subject about which I have no interest, so I pick up Spin magazine and read about the 30th anniversary of punk, a subject about which I have very little interest. The timeline of punk history is printed in reverse type, and most of the band names are just blank spaces. Is omitting key data in an information stream part of the punk sensibility? The journalist disses how Stevie Nicks drank chardonnay on stage in 1977, and how punk was a reaction to such yuppie excesses. Later in the issue is a picture of Johnny Rotten and his wife drinking wine. Let’s just hope it wasn’t chardonnay.

Give up on stylist ever arriving. Go home with mop intact and not much more knowledge of the history of punk than I started with.

I wonder what Johnny Rotten would do if he got an unfair termination fee on his cell phone bill.