I'm tired. I've been burning the candle at both ends. And it's not a nice scented candle either. No, it's a candle of work.

Last night I stayed up to 2 am to finish an essay for someone, and two nights ago, I actually left the apartment at 2.30 am to exchange an essay for cash with a student. I woke Girlfriend as I left, and she called me, begging me to come home, worried I'd get mugged and left in a ditch.

Even though I wasn’t beaten up and/or raped, my body's showing signs of damage. My wrists are shiny and red, due to resting them on the laptop for so long. And I've been using the laptop so much that my right index finger is now twitching. It moves slightly every few seconds as if simulating a mouse click.

Putting my strange haunted finger aside, I also feel as if I don’t go out enough. After all, I work mainly from home. Take today, for example - I left home for just twenty minutes, for the exciting task of picking up a takeaway for Girlfriend.

A quote from a short story comes to my mind: "the West, where you lived half the year like a monk in a cave because of the weather”. Well, that's me, a monk in a cave. Actually, a monk in a cave with a laptop. One of my fondest recent memories was shopping for Christmas decorations with Girlfriend last Sunday - probably just because it involved being somewhere other than my apartment. I could have been doing anything - getting mugged, for instance - and it would have felt good just to be out the house.

So I've decided - for the rest of this month, I’m going to work very little. I need the time off. I feel numb, a little bit shell-shocked, from all the work.

But what to do instead? I could flick bogeys at the wall but Girlfriend will complain sooner or later. Or I could start a Nu jazz band, except I can't play any instruments. And I don’t know what Nu jazz is.

No, what I really want are some good old-fashioned video games. I haven't so much as touched a controller since I came to Canada, but thinking back, playing videos games were some of the happiest times my life. It sounds sad, but it's true. It was pretty much all I did from the ages of seven to twenty-two. I still remember my Dad encouraging me to play Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time, thrusting the controller into my undeveloped child hands. I was terrified to play because I didn’t want Sonic to die. The worst part was Sonic drowning – the urgent music getting progressively faster as Sonic begins to run out of oxygen - it was psychological torture. Yet, this didn’t stop me getting addicted.

I’m a little lonely these days, too. Girlfriend used to ward away the loneliness, but I've seen little of her recently, as we both work a lot.

Wait, I have an idea! I'll steal Girlfriend's friends. I know of one or two who aren't working and are desperate for company, even if it's just my company. By the time they figure out what a crummy person I am, I'll have already used up hours of their non-valuable time.

Life is dull. I wish I had some video games right now.