Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature. Albert Camus

Half the world is composed of idiots, the other half of people clever enough to take indecent advantage of them.
Walter Kerr

Ms. Blog Stalker, er, excuse me, my #1 Fan, must have really, really had a slow Monday at Balderdash & Verities today. After extensive blog-a-riffic reading pleasure over the weekend, Ms. Blog Stalker (I'm sorry, but #1 Fan just doesn't fit. See the quote above! "Ah, but to which of the 2 quotes are you referring, Annie?" you might ask."There are two quotes at the top of the page," you notice, confused.) logged into "Rhythms" 3 times thus far today using the office computer. She's not spending an hour and a half on it like she used to, because as I understood it, the physicians (HER bosses) proposed (but are apparently having trouble enforcing) a rule of not surfing the internet for personal use while on company time. Evidently, she believes herself to be beyond reproach and sees herself as equal to her superiors. This fuckwit clearly thinks that the rules for the under-staff (for lack of a better term), the non-managerial personnel, are different and thus do not apply to her. I, on the other hand, attribute it to her being sneaky as she's, as I've said before, the only one with her own office and a computer no one else can see the screen of, that she can quickly click out of if anyone walks in while she's reading about me referring to her as a cretin for the 2,395th time.

Why don't you plop yourself down after work, have a glass of your homemade wine and try and deduce it all? Too lazy? Read up on Albert Camus first and then have a conversation me.)

And she always goes to the blog through Google. Wouldn't you think she'd either have bookmarked the site by now, or at least have memorized the web address? And why is it she's still misspelling my last name half the time?

Ms. Blog Stalker logged in today at:

9:51 am, when she viewed 3 blog postings.

10:59 am, when she viewed 5 blog postings.

3:08 pm, when she viewed 2 blog postings.

En mass, it equaled only roughly 15-20 minutes of time, according to my tracker, but unless she took a short lunch or break time, is not on HER time. It's on THE DOCTORS' time. Phrased more accurately, given the frantic workload *I* was used to at the office, especially on a Monday, it was a WASTE of the DOCTORS' money. She is being employed to work for the doctors, not to even remotely PEEK at my blog. If she wants to stalk me from her phone, or her other job of managing corpses (literally!), or at home, Jai Guru Dev, Hare Hare and there ain't a damn thing I can do about it. I live a public life.

One might argue, "Annie, don't YOU have anything better to do all day than to track how many times your former supervisor read your blog?" Valid question. Thus far today, I awakened at 6am, jotted down some ideas that may or may not have creative merit in the future, got my son up and ready and off to school, went to see Stosh, my doctor (who marveled at all the new metal sticking out of my head as he tried not to grab at my rings to get a gander at my inner ear), ran errands, checked out the summer school schedule for my Abnormal Psych class, went to Target to buy 25 plastic shoe box bins (for my shoe whore clusterfuck in the closet), manically organized that, found a kick-ass toy for my friend's baby's 1st birthday that'll drive her nuts but will entertain him for hours, talked to my son on the phone at his dad's, where he is refusing to eat Grandma Loony Pants' meatloaf tonight because of his (mother-induced) fear of Pink Slime, marveled at my completely re-organized office/soon-to-be bedroom, answered some emails....then sat down at the computer to check my blog stats, when I noticed that Ms. Blog Stalker had been on an awful lot today.

I couldn't help but notice that she re-read the blog "Nothing is Real. And Nothing to Get Hung About." from January 19th of this year. In the blog, she was outed for having spent a total on a particular work day of one hour and 31 minutes perusing my posts using the office computer, on company time. In other words, again, wasting the doctors' money. Sans apparent consequence, it would appear from my perspective.

That post was full of twists and turns that the average nincompoop might have trouble following. Admittedly, that particular entry, like so many others, sort of goes all over the place and isn't a cohesive "story." It was about me having pneumonia at the time, my week's agenda, my mom and I darting in and out of the Professional Building to avoid being seen by any of the staff at Balderdash & Verities (which is turning out to have been the PERFECT choice of pseudonyms), the top dawg at B&V complimenting me on being a fascinating character when he and I had a sit-down together once (the doc w/the burst appendix), me being scared of my ex-boyfriend and (gasp!) at least complimenting Chris' intelligence at how to web surf anonymously as opposed to SOME PEOPLE....geez, what else is in that blog? Oh! Right.

I propose the idea that the entire blog site, that all of Rhythms from the Offbeat Drummer, is fictitious. I didn't say it was and I didn't say it was not, but that I was merely one of the "characters" in a very vibrant biographical (or is it?) online diary and that only I and a very, very select few other readers could tell what was truth and was bullshit. If Ms. Blog Stalker is STILL confounded about that notion, I fear we're at a crossroads.

What's NOT bullshit? The statistics. And I KNOW I've mentioned it before: that I have a program that screen captures the stat results, the IP address of the medical practice, their internet carrier, their computer's operating system, what version of web browser they're using, their latitude/longitude, how they got to the blog (Google, directly to my address, through Blogger, etc), how many pages were read, how much time was spent during any given visit, and often, the entry and exit pages. That's how I know what blogs she read. I can view entry and exit pages and match them up to the time any user was on the site. It took me a while, admittedly, to figure out the screen capturing program on my computer, though my tracker still logs all of her visits from way back when. It's just now I can quickly print them all out, and I presently have 17 visits during the work day collected, all coming from the medical practice, in the last couple of weeks.

I fear I gave the numskull too MUCH credit in the blog I wrote about left brain vs. right brain thinkers. I labeled her a left brain thinker, when it's becoming more and more obvious that she either a) doesn't think logically whatsoever or b) is so hell-bent on my life being her personal, favorite reality non-tv show that she is compulsively scanning for exceedingly juicy details about my life all day long. Psychologically, she *could* be diagnosed as an actual idiot savant. Example: she can do the fucking data entry blindfolded but cannot engage in a dissection of "Finnegan's Wake."

Suffice it to say, I'm out of ideas as to how to get the muttonhead away from me, having felt compelled to blog for the umpteenth time about her snooping on me while she's supposed to be working, when I have dozens of other, more important, or at least more interesting things I could be blogging about. In the "#1 Fan" blog, I explained to her how to fucking SUBSCRIBE to the blog if she's THAT interested in me. Yet the dim bulb still logs in at work.

What irks me the most, again, as I've said before, is that we, the peons, would either get verbally reprimanded or at least looked at with disdain by our superiors if we took a 30-second mental break by breathing deeply and looking out the window, or if we chatted or giggled too much in the front office. Fuck, you go into hypoglycemic shock and you get drug tested! Yet it's permissible for the "office manager" to repeatedly poach the online happenings of someone who, by all rights, should've long been forgotten if *I* was as expendable as I was made to feel on so many occasions, not by everyone, certainly, but by most.

I'm a big believer in the law of karma. I was trying to explain it as lucidly as possible to my 12-year old the other day. See, we have these neighbors across the townhomes who foreclosed on their house, and are in the process of being evicted. Their son, who's perhaps 19 or 20 years old, is cocky and wild and thinks he can stay in the house as long as he wants to, without the sheriff ever kicking him out. He thinks, if the bank that now owns the property, changes the locks, that he can just pick the new locks and get in and continue to squat until....forever.

This young man doesn't understand the process of a sheriff's order of eviction the way I do, as Luke and I were finally evicted from Camp Swanky a year and a half after our landlord foreclosed on the building and poofed away into thin air, never to be seen again. The bank, the utility companies (the landlord owed over $1500 in unpaid Chicago water bills), the sheriffs...were all very patient with us, knowing we were alone with a young child. But eventually, we HAD to move out by a certain date, which was when we took up residence at Camp Miklasz. Not only did the bank change the locks, they padlocked the fucking place down so there was literally no way to gain entry.

Luke said once the 90 days are up for our neighbors, we should call the police if we see the young man try to gain entry to the townhome. I told Luke "No, that's bad karma." He asked me why. I told him that we were lucky nobody ever rang the police on us when WE were squatting at Swanky, and furthermore, my feeling was that when you do bad things to people, bad things are more likely to happen to you. When you do good things to people, you're rewarded with good karma. This is where Luke and I had a different philosophical perspective, since he's a straight-up Christian and Mom's, well, the Christian with the Hindu tattoo who practices a lot of Buddhist principles. Luke asked me to explain it to him from a Christian perspective, so I did. I referred him to one of my favorite, most often-utilized Bible verses, Romans 12:19, where God tells us not to take revenge on someone who's wronged us....to leave it up to God. ("Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord....")

No, I don't think Ms. Blog Stalker is planning to concatenate me in my alley with the loaded heat she packs, for I believe her to be far too mendacious for such overt efforts to silence me. I'm going to keep on writing with vigor, passionately, just as I live my life and will not allow such an illiterate imbecile decide for me whom to love, whom to hate, or upon whom to deliver indifference. Ours is more a war of sagaciousness, from which she has no hope of emerging victorious.

Ms. Blog Stalker texted me this morning to "stop it." Obviously, if she wasn't reading my blog about her dicking around, she wouldn't have sent it. And it wasn't suffixed with "...or I'll shoot you," so I've decided to ignore her. The whole conundrum is petty and juvenile, and I'm through with it. It'd be nice, though, to see some justice served, you know? I'm at least protected by the First Amendment.