Why do you work so hard.

There is no doubt in my mind that I should be sleeping right now.

Some days are just filled with a combination of bizarre humanity though, and you can't shut the light out even if the switch was flipped. I can't hit the pillow until I have exorcized every last shred of demon, and sometimes there are no demons keeping me awake- but because I have been blessed with Sleep Paralysis, I fight hitting the pillow because of the demons who await me there.

I worked a pastry shift tonight.

After baking, prepping and making:

pear and huckleberry crisps
cheese and chive biscuits
buttermilk breakfast biscuits
individual cheesecakes
cinnamon ice cream
croissants
lemongrass creme brulees
passionfruit sorbet
and banana cashew muffins

I scrubbed 5 years of nicotine like stains from the ceiling.
Then I used a wire brush to scrub the grout on the tile floor. I scrubbed so hard that there were sparks.
I listened to Exodus, 80's hair metal, Modeselektor, Devin Townsend, Nile and the Laughing Hyenas.

A waste case of a room service attendant asked me if I was a lesbian, asked me out after work, told me I would be a good housewife and touched my face in a kind of price for a redbull. He is from Syria. He drinks vodka. He insists he would never kill anyone while drunk driving because he is a pro, and thinks that women shouldn't really involve themselves in issues of what men find pleasurable.

Then there was the photograph that the line cook pulled out of a pastry cook book for me.

A girl in her 20's, standing, wrists secured by hanging leather cuffs, naked, with a circle of clothespins encompassing her nipples, stomach and labia. A sous chef and the pastry chef had apparently enjoyed her together. She used to work there. These two men flirt with me out of boredom everyday, and while each one of them would argue that I am nothing like that girl-if I were to bring up the photo at all... That's not the fucking point.

I was looking forward to coming home and spending some love time with my man, only to discover that my younger brother was visiting.

He thought Kate Winslet looked at him and spoke to him during the Oscars. Literally. I drove him home. Even though I scheduled a day off from work to take him to the Mental Health intake facility to get him on meds for his schizophrenia, now he does not want to go... because he is paranoid.. and you have no idea what that means for a person who is living the nightmare he lives. He is tortured by his own mind and will never have peace. I could tell him that I would do anything for him, and what he hears is that I have arranged for several men from secret agencies to record his every thought and kill his family if he so much as mentions a single one of his thoughts. He's a brilliant boy, suffering in a war that only men have been capable of depicting in art. Fiction is his terror and he cannot process reality.

I know what work holds tomorrow, and I don't have the patience for the immaturity. I hit a wall tonight while busting my ass amidst a motley crew of people who see tomorrow as another chance to get off.. and I have fucking had it with man.