Month: January 2006 (Page 2 of 3)

Last night, I was talking to my boss before I left, recapping some things & talking about the lunch party I’m co-ordinating for everyone at work. It’s an “Office Space” party, we had one at my last job, and it was quite fun: watching the movie “Office Space” over lunch, and we’re providing all the movie snacks – popcorn, candy, soda. And with a movie like this one, you also have to have cake! I ordered a big cake from Costco, and it says “Happy Birthday, Milton!” in honor of crazy Milton who didn’t get a piece of cake in the movie. Mmmm, cheesecake filling & cream cheese frosting. Kill me now. We’ll also have a couple of prizes – one person will win the movie, and the MacDaddy prize is, of course, a red Swingline stapler, complete with Innitek post-it notes.

So my boss goes, “You’re becoming a regular Julie McCoy Social Director…” and I am sure it comes as no surprise to you that I have been called that before. I did point out that I’m far from being the only social director here at the agency, and I have actually shown restraint, out of deference to other people’s toes.

But the Love Boat reference reminded me of the time in my life when my liver was a magical sponge, and hangovers didn’t ruin the entire weekend. Yes, I’m talking about college, and the 3-5 years afterwards. We would play “Chug Boat”, with all sorts of drinking rules, and every episode guaranteed to escort you to “Blotto” in an hour or less. We made posters of the rules & collected money for beer. There were Group Drink rules, where everyone watching drinks, including “Captain without a hat!” “Full boat shot!” “Theme Music!” “Sexual Innuendo!” or anytime Isaac the Bartender pointed at the camera. Then, you also picked a character, and every time that person was on screen, you drank. Hardcore players would insist camera angle changes constituted a new shot, and god help you if you were playing with them. Oh, and if you picked the Captain, you had to drink TWICE if he was on-screen and not wearing his hat. I usually picked Gopher, and depending on the episode, Julie McCoy. (You might recall she had a teensy-weensy coke problem and wasn’t in all the shows…) I also remember playing to a two-hour Mother’s Day special, in which a side bet was established where the person who picked the cast member to follow also would have to do SHOTS if they ended up with the worst mother on the show. The guy whose character had Ethel Merman for his mom was the lucky devil that night….

In any event, today’s lunch party will be a little less raucous & a little more frosting-filled. I am ready for the weekend, and as much as I could, I’m not going to come in and work! Ummmmm, yeah. When I said “Saturday”, I meant “all day” on Saturday. Mmmm, yeah…….. I took the quiz, and the “angry” part made me laugh…

Samir

What Office Space character are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

TGIF, and make sure you get your TPS reports turned in!!!

Yesterday was one of those days. I play a mean-ass game of whack-a-mole, so you may rock at Dance Dance Revolution, but I can pound the hell out of vermin popping up all over the place. Unfortunately, I get so zoned in the whacking, I don’t do so well at managing, or interpersonal skills. Every fifteen minutes, I re-remembered something that HAD. To! Be done! RIGHT now! It may not have been that urgent, but when you’re whacking out the moles, everything becomes urgent.

And, if one more CBS station whines to me about not getting on this current buy, despite the fact the demo is Adults 18-24, I am going to punch them in the face. Through the phone. Oh, you’ll see it on your tv news. Probably on a different network. TONIGHT! ON FOX! Crazy woman twists time & space continuum & cold-cocks television sales rep THROUGH THE PHONE!

There’s a chapter in the yet-unwritten Big Book On Marriage (subtitled: Things Nobody Told You), titled, “In Which You Discover Ways To Bug The Living Shit Out Of Each Other And Still Stay Together.”

Fortunately, we don’t have a lot of entries in that chapter here, but I managed to stumble on one the other evening. Actually, I think it’s only the second line-item. But it’s a doozy. For whatever reason, I started speaking to JWo in a rich, rolling Irish brogue. I startled myself with how good it was, because normally all my accents tumble and crash within two minutes into something distantly Australian. (Crikey!) I simply channeled the spirit of a dead Irish priest and spoke to him gently & kindly, asking him what he thought of “24” & Jack Bauer, my child. Then I asked for some good whiskey. I felt like the next Meryl Streep.

Then, JWo started screaming, STOP IT STOP IT!

Hm! A chink in the armor! I shall stow this information away and return to it again, when it will be mooooost useful. MOOOOHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Oh, you probably were wondering what the first item on the Stop Bugging The Crap Out Of Me list was. Well, I also channel a ferocious, wily gopher. It’s quite a look for me, and I expect when I’m senile & calling myself Paddy O’ Furniture in my golden years, rambling about the Potato Famine and the rolling green hills, I’ll still utilize this face to scare the young ‘uns & get ’em off my lawn. This one REALLY scares James, and in fact, it scares Kristin, too. I don’t bring this face out for many folks, just the ones closest to me…. So consider yourself LUCKY:

When your alarm goes off, and you stretch your arm out to hit the snooze button, and instead?

You hit your husband.

Mornin’ Sweetie!

Yeah, it would be nice if I did a love-thy-brother kind of blog today, in honor of Dr. King, but instead, I have to rant about the dumbshit in the Ford F-250 who almost broadsided me on Ward Parkway this morning. I could not believe my eyes, and my little mosquito-whining horn & I were in shrill agreement as I screamed, performed evasive maneuvers & saw my entire front quarterpanel narrowly miss being rammed by his big green stupidness.

Ward Parkway is three lanes wide. I was in the middle lane (with a big black SUV on my left, so I had very little room to swerve). Mr.FuckNut 250 was at a stop sign & turned right into the left lane – but see, you can do that pull-into-traffic alongside oncoming cars if you’re a BMW Mini. A Ford Contour. Even a Passat. But when you have the length & size of a big pickup truck, you can’t make that turn without crossing another lane. Which FN250 realized, as he saw my “O” face screaming at him & heard my little horn honking, and I could see him, wildly cranking his steering wheel as hard as possible, and between both our efforts, my car did not get hit.

A near-miss for LaFonda. A near-need change of underpantaloons for me, not to mention the years off my life. One more stupid driver to put on my list.

Seriously, the difference between me & a meth addict is that my addiction is legal.

I will prove my point shortly. I got up early this morning, meeting my friend Kyra (look at her watching Cesar Milan in her finished socks!) for some coffee before we hit The Studio for their annual sale (25% off everything!) Our friend Jimmi showed up, too, and we huddled & chatted while we waited for them to open. I actually surprised myself with how little I ended up spending – a skein of Schaeffer Anne for socks, two skeins of Noro Kureyon & a co-ordinating color of Woolpak (for a second, modified Kristina) (boy, I’m link-happy today for some reason.) I also got a skein of the softest, yummiest mongolian cashmere, because Kyra was knitting a pair of socks from the same stuff & I fell completely in love with it.

SO, after that adventure, I went to Costco, did some shopping there for staples, and then did a little Thai Place takeout. There was a girl sitting at the bar, looking through the Sunday paper. She looked at me and said, “Do you go to the Thai Orchid, too?”
Uh…… I said, “Well, once in a while. I used to go a lot more often but since this opened in Westport, it’s much closer to work.”

“Well, I thought it was you. I used to waitress there. Red curry beef, right?”

I could only nod, stupefied. It’s been several years since I went there with a lot of regularity. (Of course, red curry beef? That’s what I was getting today….)

“And your friend? She always gets the Massaman Tofu.”

“Oh, yes, yes, she did.”

Hah! I’m not the only one with my addiction. Though I don’t know if she meant my friend Liz or my friend Shelley, since that’s what they both always got there, and they’re both blonde.

There’s something about staying in one place for a long time, though, that fosters being known places. Obviously, going to a restaurant 2x/week probably helps reinforce recognition. But it’s kind of strange for me, so many connections with people who know the same people, something I see particularly at work. My boss, my friends, all the people who grew up here have that intertwined connectedness even more so. All I ever wanted to do was escape everyone knowing everybody else when I was growing up – after all, in a town of 721 people, the main form of entertainment is staying current on everyone else’s business. Being the outsiders, we were like a Tom Cruise-Katie Holmes trainwreck worthy of weekly speculation and gossip. Now, I meet people who know other people I know, and it’s kind of fun. Oddly enough, it doesn’t bother me the way I thought it might. There’s a sense of community in the connections, now. It doesn’t feel invasive or oppressing. Come on, sing it with me:

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,
and they’re always glad you came.
You wanna be where you can see,
our troubles are all the same
You wanna be where everybody knows
Your name.

Yeah, I’ve become “Norm” at Thai Place & Thai House.

Tonight, I was leaving to go pick up pizza, and I spied a lady with her dog, walking up alongside the big telephone pole by the street. Her dog stopped and began dutifully sniffing, at the place we’ve dubbed “Pee Mail”, ala Survivor’s “Tree Mail” communications. That is our dogs’ favorite place to sniff in the yard, and I’m sure there are stories and visitors and all kinds of things we simply can’t detect. Thankfully. I thought it was funny & I rolled down the window to tell her that was “THE” spot in the neighborhood. So, she came over to the car, and I met her dog, Noah, who’s a bruiser of a chocolate lab, super friendly and then suddenly his owner, who I learned is from Argentina, explaining her heavy accent, is being dragged through our garden island – because a cat is running through our front yard & Noah is going to catch it! Holy crap. I put the car in park, and looked back just in time to see Noah’s owner fly face-first off the rock wall towards the pavement and drop the leash, letting Noah tear off into the dark.

Since our dogs have pulled this number numerous times, I wasn’t too worried, assuming Noah would come back shortly (as it dawned on him the cat would not be caught), and I could even hear him in the next yard, snuffling around. Noah’s owner did not feel the same way, and started wailing and shrieking, and wringing her hands. Unbeknownst to me, OUR dogs were also tuned in to all this drama from inside the house, barking & whatnot, so JWo opened the door to see what was going on and then we had BURF BURF BURF First Line Against Terror Reporting For Duty, SIR! surging around us! But I think it was good they came out because it zipped Noah right back to us, to check out “the ladies”…. he only knew them through their “correspondence”….. Then the lady from Argentina told us her employment history, her street address & a good portion of her life story, and might have given us a key to her house if I hadn’t pointed out JWo wasn’t wearing any shoes & was obviously a bit cold on the pavement….and she collected her dog & went off to finish walking him.

Yes, we have some seriously bizarre Saturday nights, even if we just stay home.

Garsh. We had lunch today at the Taj Mahal (not to be confused with the Bob Mahal, my favorite name for the new building being built just to the south of our offices), and I had not been there in a couple of years. Mostly because I had a falling-out with a friend, and in some strange unspoken agreement, I got all the Thai restaurants & she got all the Indian restaurants. I wondered (worried) just a smidge as we got there today, if I would see her, and how I’d react. Since she wasn’t there, the queasiness was replaced with voracious hunger for the Chicken Tiki Masala, as I had forgotten just how much I love that stuff. And the tamarind sauce. I want to smear it on my face.

Sigh. Yum. And now I’m in a coma.

I was never in band. The closest I ever came to playing a musical instrument includes the following items, which will slam the door shut on any supposition you might have had that I did, in fact, play in the band: Flutophone (a.k.a, the Recorder), an Autoharp (jammin!), a Harmonica, and a Fisher Price keyboard with pastel keys.

I can’t read music, except for singing, sort of. I was in chorus, and what I lack in a beautiful voice is more than compensated for with my gusto and volume. I do quite well if the tenor section needs help, I’m definitely an alto….

I do recall composing a sad, dirge-like ditty about (bad timing, but sorry, it’s true) miners on my Fisher Price keyboard, and performing this song for the entire fourth grade music class. I did not realize at the time that in performing my self-perceived talented & brilliant composure with its sad, sad, SAD words about how lonely it is in the mine, I had just exploded my final chances of EVER fitting in with my classmates. At least it wasn’t on the autoharp.

So, I really liked, nay, LOVED, the flutophone. I adored when they arrived and Flutophone Music was all we did in music class. I can still smell and taste the blue liquid all the mouthpieces floated in, and the challenge was to get a good white flutophone with red trim. The black ones were simply not as glamorous. My father, perhaps hoping he was raising the next Zamfir and her Magic Pan Flute, noticed this enthusiasm, and bought me a wooden recorder. I would practice my warbling notes in the loft of the dome home. In between BONG HITS. (OK, just kidding, but seriously, I look back on the hilarity of all this, and the fact it was the 70’s and I wore a lot of corduroy, come ON, it wasn’t just ME, man….other people loved the flutophone, too! Right?)

Then came 5th grade. And the Musical Instrument Aptitude Test. We were given all these different mouthpieces to blow on and try – not connected to the rest of the instrument, and under the supervision of the music teacher, who then wrote down on a notecard what your destiny would be. I brought my little card home from school, and my father blanched. For I was most adept on the mouthpiece of? THE TROMBONE. My father called the music teacher. Was there anything else, anything AT ALL I would do well at. The flute? No. The clarinet? No. The violin? Nobody here knows how to play that, Mister, we can’t teach it. I still can hear him saying, beseeching the teacher for a different solution: “Look. It’s not like you can really go out on the hillside and play the trombone all by yourself! Isn’t there SOMETHING else she could play?” I immediately visualized myself barefoot, in a field of clover, tooting and honking away on a giant trombone. Did you remember that I have short arms? (Not short arm syndrome, that’s different.) Clover & trombones, all in all, it was not a pretty visualization. I knew when that line was uttered, I was not going in to band.

So my musical education stayed confined to chorus, all through high school, and some of our concerts and songs are still completely ingrained in my head. The solo at the 4th of July concert that required a brassy alto, to ham it up while singing – gee, guess who was picked for that spotlight? I was a shoo-in. I have always danced along in life to a different drummer – and I guess now you know it’s a drummer who also can play a mean flutophone.

So, yesterday, at the end of the day, I brought up the fact that it would be very challenging to actually put your head in an oven. Yes, I was feeling overwhelmed at the time, but not seriously contemplating the maneuver. Kristin countered that Sylvia Plath did it, as did a character in Hedwig & The Angry Inch. I say that unless you have a stove bolted to the floor, you would tip the oven over. And the whole thing would be a very uncomfortable way to go. The low bending, the sprawling, the delicate balance of keeping the stove from crashing on your head – after all, if you wanted to exit with crashing, you’d take on the fridge, or a vending machine. I mean, even a little non-fat person would make our oven tip over, it’s simply a matter of physics, with the door acting like a lever! (Now, I better stop, because that’s as far as my smacktalk about physics can go. I can reference Archimedes, and then, like George Costanza, my hands are up in the air and I’m outta there.)

I’m just saying. It would be incredibly awkard and uncomfortable, and once you got your head in there, hell, I’d start getting all OCD about the crap on the bottom of the stove, and I certainly wouldn’t put my cheek on that, so I’d have to clean it, and then I’d be back out of the oven & living life to my fullest with my bright yellow gloves and a can of EasyOff. Hmmm. EasyOff. I wonder if that works on salespeople….. and how do I spray them through the phone….