Ack. Some days, I wish I had.

I suppose it all started on Thursday, when my alarm clock went off at 6:15, and the first thought I had was: "If this house is burning down around me, I still couldn't get out of this bed." So I turned off the alarm, and went back to sleep until 10:45.

Effectively missing all three classes I have on Thursday mornings.

But I get up, shower, and go to work from 12-2, during which I run into two out of the three professors whose classes I missed.

Whatever. Jan stops by and asks if I can take her to get her car at the mechanic's after I'm done working. I have class at 3, but I figure we can get there and back in time. (Her mechanic is a little ways outside town.)

We depart, but I have to stop and get gas first. Now, one of the many things that is wrong with my car at the moment is that the spring which is supposed to pop open the cover to the gas tank doesn't work, so I have to hold the latch down (located next to my seat) while reaching over with some object or another (in the past this has been the Club and a shoe, but today it's a water bottle) and hitting the cover on the side with the hinge so it will pop open. Not being a contortionist, it's a little bit difficult, and while I was doing this, I felt the familiar dreadful twinge in my lower back. (For those of you who weren't reading Gracefully back in January, I had some kind of back spasm that kept me literally on the floor for nearly two days.) But I stood up and started pumping gas, just breathing and telling myself that as long as I could stay standing up long enough to fill the tank, I'd be okay. (When it happened in January, I had to lie down about 15 seconds after the spasm.)

So I finished pumping the gas, got back in the car, drove Jan to the mechanic's, got back home, took a muscle relaxant and three Aleve, and went to class.

It hurt like hell, and I had to walk really slow, but I could tell it wasn't going to be as bad as January. After class, though, I came home and went to bed, and stayed there until Friday morning.

Still couldn't go to class on Friday, though. When this thing happens, I can stand and I can lie down, but sitting for any length of time is nearly impossible. So I stayed home and worked on the trial I have on Monday night.

The only good thing about it is that it got me out of going with Mark and Katherine on Saturday morning. John Travolta is shooting a movie nearby, and they were having a casting call for extras. They were pretty excited about it and asked me to go with them, and I didn't really want to rain on their parade, so I agreed to go. I didn't want to sound like a snob, because I do understand how that can be exciting, but after you've lived in Los Angeles for a while and especially when you've worked in the industry, it's not such a big deal anymore.

So I laid around yesterday too. I would have gone online and caught up with everybody, but they were replacing another electrical grid at school, so our server was down. I watched "A Time to Kill" (my own copy, not having any idea that it was going to be on ABC that night) and a "Where are they now?" thing on VH1 for the people in "Rocky Horror," followed by a Pop-Up Video for the songs in it. (Interesting things I learned: the guys who played Rocky and the Narrator/Professor refuse to discuss their Rocky Horror experience, which means that they must have turned into really bitter people, and in the opening song, the lips are Magenta's but the voice is Riff-Raff's.)

I'm watching the movie now, and I'm realizing that it sort of loses its appeal without the people talking back to the screen.

That's kind of it. I have enormous amounts of work to do, so I must away. Besides the trial tomorrow, I have a really ugly Advocacy assignment due Tuesday morning, so between the two, my time is not my own. After Tuesday, however, I should get back to my regularly scheduled updating.