Even though I had a massage on Saturday, my neck is still wrenched from working so long on Friday. It drove me crazy today! When it's like this, the muscles around my neck tighten and choke. My jaw and teeth hurt. And the slope of my shoulder aches. I catch myself fidgeting and reaching to massage the sore spots, for all the colleagues to see. It's only Wednesday, the next massage is Saturday. Two more days.

It has become fashionable among the greek-row alumni at work to walk around holding their laptops by a single corner, open at a 90-degree angle and held carelessly to the side with one hand. One guy has been doing it for a while. I don't know where he picked it up, but now at least four other dudes hold theirs the same way. I'm amazed and disturbed by the trend, that one man does it and others like the way it looks, want to look like that, and so start doing it too. The other day, my boss saw one of them doing it and lit into him: "Stop holding your computer like that!" She pays for the damn things, after all. Two thousand bucks a pop. I've thought about explaining the reason why it's dumb to hold your computer like that, how the stress forces internal pieces to touch that aren't supposed to touch. But I know that the machismo they're attracted to is the appearance of being flippant toward a delicate object. Saying something won't accomplish anything. Whatever. Not my problem.

While I'm on the subject of the office, here's yet another indicator that the still-fresh date on this industry has passed: I've noticed that I can tell the kind of writing someone is doing by the cadence of their keys on the keyboard. Can you? I've never heard anyone mention this, but I can't be alone in having certain Pavlovian reactions to these patterns. For example, someone chatting on IM types in rapid-fire, light on the keys. Someone writing a pissed-off e-mail or who is generally feeling self-righteous pounds on the keys. A fucking carpetbomb of keystrokes. You can hear them across the room. Someone thinking through a composition types in spits, backspaces, and pauses. I only ever really notice the first two activities because of their intensity and duration. Because our office has no walls, no barriers of any kind between people, I can easily verify what someone is doing when they are typing by turning around and looking at their monitor or by waiting for the pause and seeing the IM appear on my screen. Just a strange artifact of working in an open office, with no sound abatement of any kind. I'm pretty sure I don't want to know this.