Thinking frugally

It seems that I will soon be making a large and car-shaped purchase. As a result of this I have renewed my interest in being a paranoid and frugal penny-pinching-type shopper.

Currently I'm asking myself: Are alternatively shaped pastas the critical missing link in my food budget?

Car stoppin' and name droppin'

Today my car abandoned me in the parking lot of a Borders Books. It was around 10 am and because my car is a particular breed of malicious, it often alerts the thwarted driver to its internal distresses by self-activating the blaring alarm. This alarm can only be de-activated by re-connecting the battery twice and playing “You are My Sunshine” on the horn (or by some shit equally cryptic) that I can never successfully perform.

As the moms-in-crocs shot me dirty looks I wondered why my car has a problem with my dress shoes. The recent streak of rebelliousness seems to correspond eerily well with any occasion that I don my shiny black “wouldn’t you love to employ a doofus like me?” shoes. This morning I was spiffed up for a career fair. Recently my car has stranded me following a job interview.

Maybe it just knows that as soon as I procure something vaguely resembling a legitimate employment I will trade it in for something in a more soothing color and petroleum bracket.

So I have been reading the latest book of mini-essays by a certain popular American author that I would feel a little too cliché namedropping. He mentions frequently that he “doesn’t drive” and relies on friends, public transit, walking and the occasionally chartered car for transport.

What a wise fellow.

Something icky for your Tuesday.

I am annoyed with my lunchmeat for not pretending to be a more wholesome staple.

Sandwiches being a very important part of my theory on eating, I usually spend some small part of the day selecting the choicest ham in the Tupperware for my lunch. This morning I was trying to get a few slices for my sandwich and was very frustrated with the way that it was all squashed together and crumbly, like one big handful of puesdo-meat.

This imagery pretty much grossed me out and put a swine-shaped damper on my appetite. Should I be eating something that doesn’t have enough nutritional integrity to hold its shape? Quickly paranoia set in. What about my mayonnaise, when did it expire? *

So here’s my plea to you, makers and packagers of cheap meat: try a little harder to conceal the gunky, miscellaneous pig-part origins of your product, because you are disturbing my feeding patterns.

*My mayonnaise expires in April 2009. Furthermore, I suspect that this might be the first time in my life that I have typed the word mayonnaise.

I'm easily tricked before noon.

In the early morning I was tricked into getting excited by a false railroading tramp. In my defense, I am never entirely at my best in the mornings, mostly because I never allow enough time to properly wake myself up before I shuffle out of the house. Being anti-breakfast, I used to allow only 15 minutes from my bed to the drivers seat of my damned and unreliable vehicle.

I shudder to acknowledge that my efficiency has decreased chronologically until I now need 30 whole minutes. However, since my beautification routine has gone unaltered I’m pretty sure that I spend that extra 15 minutes either pressing snooze or making sandwiches. My old roommates used to remark that I had a certain “sleep face” for the first hour following getting out of bed that involved swollen eyes and an expression of general distaste. In hindsight, this may have just been a nice way of saying that my head looks weird before I put my glasses on, but I'm digressing.

So anyway, this morning I was sitting at a stoplight on my way to work when a young fellow dashed between the gleaming white mass of my car and the truck in front of me, making his way into the train-yard on the right side of the street. I observed his departing form against the backdrop of the boxcars: flannel shirt, knapsack, and dirty sneaks.

Now I’ll admit that I’m predisposed to thinking about hitching rides in boxcars. Not for myself, obviously, since I’m not into being rattled about and smokin’ tabaccy. But I did recently venture with my quite obliging boyfriend to Jack London’s cabin, and I read The Road (his tract on all things hobo-ing and devious) in preparation.

So I’m watching this kid walk off and I’m thinking to myself, “This guy is certainly about to hop on the underside of this train and see America in some fit of anti-capitalist idealism, getting jailed for vagrancy and joining populist armies all Jack-London-style.”

When I passed him it turned out that he was carrying a gourmet iced coffee beverage with a mighty dollop of whip cream, so I might determined that I was probably mistaken. I’m always disappointed when a possible tramp turns out to be a pointedly disheveled youth.

In other news, today I made a massive commitment to my traitorous car and bought one of those little tape-player-converter things. I know, I know, I’m about 10 years late in electronic trends. But until recently I abstained almost entirely from driving, so I was never particularly concerned with entertaining myself in route. But now I can play my little not-Ipod MP3 thinger to my hearts content.

ALSO. I’m reading Sarah Vowell’s newest book, and I am ashamed to say while it’s good, it’s not nearly sappy enough. I was utterly entranced by her complete obsession with Lincoln in Assassination Vacation, as showcased in her lengthy speculations about how it would feel to cradle the weight of holding Lincoln’s bleeding head as he died.

This newest one is mainly facts with a generous sprinkling of very good zingers. Explanations blaming the uninteresting puritans as the crippling factor in this comparision will be firmly ignored.

Are oversized blazers okay again? And other questions.

I was wondering if perhaps it wasn’t a little too Seinfeld to blog about my trip to the dentist. But a little soul searching assured me that Seinfeld is now too removed from the gooey-grey membrane of social consciousness to do me any harm at all. After all, that Seinfeld chick got herself a new show and no longer does that big-in-front hair thing or those over sized blazers (both of which I found mysterious and intriguing). Furthermore, it’s either discussing the dentist or self-analyzing why I totally choked during the interview I had today, mainly as a result of its location in some big art-y loft with splatter paint and a mandatory legion of artsy folks loitering beautifully around.

So, I went to the dentist yesterday about a toothache. Previously I had never had anything resembling a toothache, and mostly associated the term with people crying and tying strips of cotton nonsensically around their heads. But apparently it’s just pain located in the tooth/gum region. After spending some time in the waiting room (no clocks in there, just plenty of comfy canvas chairs) I was escorted into an examination room.

Shortly my doctor/dentist/fellow bustled in and after lowering his substantial mass onto a stool briskly informed me that he was quite sorry, but I would have to postpone my deployment to the Middle East to allow time for a root-canal.

Endeavoring to be debonair I mumbling “Excuse me?” and waited while he leveled a patronizing look in my direction.

“There is no way around it, I’ve just been looking at your X-Rays,” he informed me, having apparently mistaken my awkward confusion for anger. Oh yeah. No dentist, you will not keep me out of the blistering heat and warfare.

At this point I was flabbergasted. Please excuse me while I air some very trite military stereotypes, but I was amazing that he had mistaken me for an enlisted lady. I was sitting cross-legged on the examination chair, in all of my sloppy glory (the dental assistant had advised me to take out my “hair clippies” for the X-Ray) reading a magazine article on internet dating after forty (“A match made in cyber heaven?”).

Eventually I managed to convince the doctor that I had no military affiliation (“So your husband is being shipped out?”) and that I was not 27 or named Sarah. Thus mollified, he wandered off in search of her, and I was to my own devices for another hour.

Continuing on this theme, I had some comments to make about wisdom teeth. I want to talk about them because a set of impacted wisdom teeth is the source of my discomfort, and because I was lectured on all manner of wisdom tooth protocol by my dental assistant in the waning hours of my visit. She told me that most people have them out around 16 (a time when I was of course busy mystifying the local orthodontist with my chronic bad choice of bracket colors) and that I should have had them out long ago.

This is probably true, but the thing that I took some issue with was the association of anything with the word wisdom in it with a 16 year old. I know that I was certainly not wise at 16 and that there didn’t seem to be anyone particularly sage amongst my peers. I would summarize my mentality as a 16 year old by mentioning that I owned a hat with a propeller on top of it and suspected that the cruise control on my blazer was a “booster.”

For that matter, I can’t profess much wisdom now that they’ve decided to make a surprise appearance and I’m quite aged beyond the average.

Final comment on wisdom teeth: one of the few facts that I retained from a disastrous Human Evolution Biology class that I took is that the occurrence of wisdom teeth is slowly evolving out of humans now that we have more subdued eating habits. Consequently, as time passes fewer and fewer people will probably have them.

In conclusion: I take my wisdom teeth as a personal Neanderthal insult to my intelligence and I will treat them as such, by taking the antibiotics prescribed to me to stop their kooky inflammatory fun.

Friday is chip day.

On Monday I was all set to write a blog about some silly lady-oriented thing when I was interrupted by a most distracting statement spoken by a co-worker.

Then on Wednesday I plotted to write out the story of the distracting statement, and came up with a much better opening line than the above one, but I got too busy with work to finish it. And because I am a bashful and paranoid person, I deleted it without saving it, and so that really killer opening line is completely lost to posterity.

Yesterday I was too busy googling various combinations of the words “money” “chevy?” “check engine light” and “whirling noise” to be bothered with wasting keystrokes on a blog entry.

So today is Friday, and it is overcast. And since the pretentious builders of my current work station decided that overblown windows are more earthy and art-y than glaring artificial lighting (however will I photosynthesize?) it’s pretty dark and dreary in here. As a result I am yearning madly for either a nap or a soda. (Inconsequently I am forbidden from having either at my desk, but one is more harshly policed than the other, so I suspect that the afternoon will pass with me pounding my keyboard with the dread sugar fingers.)

Speaking of things both dread and dreary, I got a job rejection e-mail this very day and since I find that I can be excessively chatty when both chipper and enraged but am quite tight-lipped when glum, I will settle with giving the cliffnotes (does anyone remember when people were using that website called Pink Monkey to cheat at school) of the aforementioned events.

“I have some pictures of fairies that I’d like to show you.”

That was the alarming statement made to me by a co-worker on Monday afternoon. To my discredit, my first reaction was neither wariness nor disbelief but instead a distracted, knowing nod. Only last week this same co-worker seized my hand and while I squirmed nervously (sugar fingers, remember?) informed me that I had a shoddy life line and that my “money line” was all scrambled (like I needed telling).

You see, people are always picking me out as an interested listener to their sci-fi uber dork tales. [GIANT, GLEAMING NOTE: I love uber dorks and their tales.] I’m not at all an unwilling listener. It’s just disconcerting to me that people always know that they can relate their stories about fan-fic editing and learning to speak elvish.

How can they tell? I don’t wear my Sailor Jupiter t-shirt in public and I sold all of those Buffy novels on E-bay years ago. Maybe it’s a glandular thing.

I just discovered that the highly commercialized short story anthology that I’m reading has a story by Arthur Miller, so I’m going to go attend to that.