I only had two simple tasks to complete today: complete my MacBook/iPod Touch/Apple Care rebate, and complete my Palm Centro/AT&T wireless rebate. Somehow it happens to be 11:10 p.m. and neither have been done.

Talk about pissing the entire day away.

The lack of absolute deadlines is seriously making me go bonkers. I’m not sure what’s going on here. My brain feels like it’s been anesthetized, and the rest of my body wants to go berserk. As the night wears on into early morning, I’m starting to feel like I want to jump out of a window.

From time to time, I get glimpses of enlightenment. I have to learn how to relax. Rome wasn’t built in a day. Whatever needs to happen will happen eventually. And if it’s never gonna happen, it’s just never gonna happen.

The “never gonna happen” part is what is perhaps wearing on me, but I’ve been down this road so many times, I don’t understand why it’s getting to me this bad this time. Maybe it’s just the nature of the beast. Each time is guaranteed to be worse than the last. Wonderful.

But today’s sequence of events will give you some insight into the perversity of my nature. So I start working on the rebate form for the Apple deal. It involves four parts. The first is just getting the damned rebate form to print out. Which shouldn’t be a problem at all, except that I haven’t used my printer in months. Luckily, the printer driver happens to be still sitting on the hard drive somewhere, and after some mucking around with the System Preference panel, I can send documents to my aging Canon i850.

Unfortunately, the ink is pretty dry, because, like I said, I haven’t used the thing in several months now. I print several copies of the form hoping that maybe the spray nozzles are just clogged, and I need to be patient. That doesn’t really work at all.

Luckily I have an unopened Canon PIXMA iP1800 sitting in my living room. The box has accumulated a nice thick layer of dust. I don’t even remember when I bought this thing. I only remember that it was cheap, and I needed a new printer because I thought that the old one was completely busted. Thankfully, it’s a literal plug-and-play operation, and Mac OS X recognizes it right away. The form prints out beautifully. Onto step two!

This involves collecting the (1) receipt, (2) MacBook UPC, and (3) iPod Touch UPC. Now, if I didn’t give a damn, I could’ve had these things ready hours ago, but, being the paranoiac that I am, I figure I ought to at least scan copies of the documents in. Oh boy.

First problem. Because of my currently tangled setup, I need an extra-long USB cable to connect my Canon LIDE 20. Unfortunately, I don’t have/I can’t find where I put an extra-long USB cable in my apartment. I improvise by grabbing an old USB hub from somewhere. Unfortunately, it’s not a powered hub, so it doesn’t work. By this time, I need to get something to eat.

Somehow I end up at Fry’s Electronics and end up buying a powered 4-port USB 2.0 hub for $20. After taking a rather convoluted route home, which involved watching the sunset, I finally make it home and try it out. I already had the TWAIN SANE Interface for Mac OS X installed, but I don’t think I ever installed the version for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. But it doesn’t work. After much gnashing of teeth, I delete the packages from my system and try installing from MacPorts. Unfortunately, they have a copy of SANE that is 2 years old, so I have to monkey around with the Portfile in order to pull down the more recent release (1.0.19). Still no dice. But I think I’m getting closer. I can feel it.

On the other hand, it is 1:40 a.m., and I’m pretty much nowhere nearer to my goals than when I started, and the apartment is a lot messier.

I know I’m not going to get an answer, but sometimes I’ve just gotta ask: What the hell is wrong with me?