Today was fairly quiet at work. The biggest emergency of the day was talking my boss into doing platinum rush for yesterday's drama client. I guess the key argument was finding out that his form had been sitting around in the giant email box for three weeks before we found it, but she caved, thank goodness. Other than that, I have my Quarterly Huge Project starting up tomorrow, and today is usually people sending me panicky emails right before the deadline, but that wasn't too bad. Which is to say by 3ish today I was pretty much out of things to do (shocking) and it was two hours of killing time. Which is a lot easier to do while working at home alone, I gotta say. Less pressure to Look Busy when dear lord, I was on the dregs o' shit.

I have actually gone outside on break the last two days. Nobody's outside, so that's great.

In addition to the shitstorm/shitshow emojis I learned about last week, another work friend from that other office introduced me to the doom flame barrel emoji. They are not happy in that office, lemme tell ya.... "We have so little joy in our world. All we have are fun emojis " He's a sweetie. This is my coworker Christine's husband and he invited me to the house...y'know, in the future. I said I'd love to go again and not have to ding dong ditch again.

After work, I had signed up for what sounded like some kind of online murder mystery, and then they were all "Log in with the spreadsheet!" which I could not get into, and when I said that, they said "You have to log in with your (school, not my school) email." In that case, never mind, logging out! I apologize for not realizing it was somehow Your School Only when I found it on a theater website. Oh well, I was starting to feel a little dubious about the activity anyway. I wasn't feeling all that group chatty and I kinda got a bit weirded out when I got a message asking if the host could unmute me whenever she wanted. (But I guess being able to say no is better than being forced upon me....) But I would have signed up for Story Studio tonight had I not signed up for this thing at the same time, so too late now. Grr, argh. Oh well, they do more of them.

On the other hand, Kelly found me a YouTube of Dear Evan Hansen, and I was officially bored enough to watch it (I will say it's a musical where the plot has always sounded...not great.... to me), so what the hell.

Dear lord, Evan has run-on mouth. Like a lot of that. What was all of that?

Anyway: the plot of this is that Evan (a loser/nerd type) is getting bullied by Connor, who gives me early Logan Echolls/Veronica Mars vibe (the resident psychopath). Connor signs Evan's cast and catches Evan with a letter that he had to write to himself for therapy reasons and takes it away, in a rage because I guess Evan wrote about his crush on Connor's sister Zoe. Three days later, Connor's killed himself, his parents somehow think Connor and Evan were secret besties after finding that letter, and Evan feels pressured to pretend they had a friendship when his parents are all "THIS IS ALL WE HAVE LEFT!!!!" about it. Meanwhile, Zoe is all "Connor was a terrible person" and his mother's all "He had good sides!"

Evan's one "family friend" thinks this all sounds like they were secret gay lovers. He still agrees to fake a secret email account between Connor and Evan for his parents. Evan/his friend writes very cheerful BS. I'm a little weirded out at the cranky emo dead guy doing a cheerful mini-group dance number, gotta say. "It doesn't sound like Connor," indeed, lady. He wasn't a laugher.

Zoe points out that Connor used to scream at her that he was going to murder her while punching through her door "for no reason."

Connor's idea of a joke: renaming "Huck Finn" to something you can't repeat in front of his mother.

Kelly is watching it at the same time. She just wrote that she thinks she has to write a musical now. To which I was all YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS.

So Evan founds "The Connor Project" and has his speech at the memorial go viral. Hoooo boy. I do think the songs in this one are very heartfelt, esp. "You Will Be Found." Oh my, Zoe just kissed Evan for "giving me my brother back."

Anyway, Evan becomes more popular/happy/adopted by the Murphys/etc. for all this stuff, except Alana's smelling a rat on all those emails, and he makes the dumb mistake of giving her the original letter that started it all, which she posts online. Shitstorms ensue. "They're going to arrest the Internet?" sums up a lot of things. Evan finally outs himself as being a lying liar who lies. A year later, Evan and Zoe more or less make up, albeit not romantically. He's working at Pottery Barn now.

What do I think? It's a very angsty musical. Very pretty music, well written emotions, well done. It's just not very...fun, but it's not supposed to be, either.

In other news, Mom called tonight and said she called Meg today to ask how I was doing (I'm fine with this). The conversation went very well and she was very reassured. Also, Roger has a vaccination appointment in San Jose on the 18th. I hope they have vaccine by the time he gets there.

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