Friday, November 21, 2008

Fistful of advil in my bubble space

I think that it’s about time to change my image to something more intimidating and awe inspiring. [The last time that I considered changing my image it was because I wanted to be more mysterious. To be clear, my idea of mysterious is to grow my hair out long and wear it in a single braid down my back, but enough about that.] My motivation is this: my spinelessness has become so apparent that even oral surgeons (the yellow-bellied gum-cutters of the surgical set) feel comfortable patronizing me.

Today I went to visit my oral surgeon because a whopping 3.5 weeks later, my gaping wisdom teeth wounds were still throbbing like nobody’s business. Three previous visits had resulted in smiles from dental assistant and plenty of nasty tasting cotton swabs, but no actual relief. I had received several lectures on not taking any crap this time, so I tried to look at stern as it is possible for one to look while wearing a paper bib.

The oral surgeon seemed unperturbed by my glare. In fact, I think he was too busy shouting “You again!” and acting surprised to see me to notice my face…or the mouth bleeding evoked by the prodding assistant with her thin metal stick.

He gazed at me in a kindly manner and asked if I was feeling any better.

“Last night I took a fistful of Advil,” I responded. He didn’t seem impressed. I guess a guy with gobs of Novocain looks down his nose at giant bottles of Safeway Select Advil. He looked inside my mouth. He flushed around with water. He sat back, looking startled.

“You’re wearing Sarah Palin glasses!” he exclaimed joyously. By the time I summoned up enough spit to protest, he was stuffing my mouth with “special” gauze and telling me to come back next week.

Being intimidating would have plenty of fringe benefits that have nothing to do with oral surgery. Maybe I would have fewer people wandering around the side of my desk at work to see what I’m typing while I’m helping them. I know that they probably just want to make sure that I’m spelling their name correctly, but I find this very disconcerting. And not just because I usually have Twitter up. Oftentimes these people have pockets full of tissues and bodies full of excitable germs.

Would it be too nineties of me to say that I want to intimidate sickly customers out of my “bubble space”? Yes, I think so.




Thursday, November 20, 2008

This is not a vomit story

I think that it is real pleasant when people call television shows “programs.” This is an excellent tactic for worming your way into my affections during casual conversation.

Also, I am prematurely and rapturously excited about Thanksgiving. I was raised to be very gluttonous around the holidays and Thanksgiving is prime pie chow-time. I spend most of the day stuffing my face with deviled eggs and avoiding awkward conversations that start with “How’s school going?” I guess now that I’m graduated, they will all be “Have a job yet?” questions. I will mumble about bad economic conditions and repel questioners with my paprika breath.

Last Thanksgiving I had the mad stomach flu. I never really get stomach-type illness, but this was wretched. I couldn’t eat more than one mouthful of mashed potatoes and was sick for the next three days. At the time I was house-sitting for a good pal of mine (HI TORI!) and it was only her charming cable television that saved me. That and the plain oatmeal and telephone sympathy (during gross vomit-description conversations) furnished by my main fellow.

I wish I had thought at the time to call the junk I was TIVO-ing “programs.” I would have been consoled.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Spoons for special occasions

A really marvelous thing just happened to me.

I was sitting at my desk a few moments ago when a very elegant lady approached me with a plastic bag. I was instantly impressed with her hat, which was a little black number with some mesh extending from the front to cover her face. Intrigued, I glanced around my mega-double computer screen. She wore a back skirt-suit and glasses on a beaded chain around her neck.

“This,” I thought to myself, “Is a woman with driving gloves and more than one set of spoons.” I asked her what I could help her with in an extra polite way. I imagined that this lady was a widow with a tragic past, so I didn’t mind coddling her.

Here’s the real kicker: it turns out that the plastic bag was full of slightly-used Time magazines that this charming lady wanted to leave in our waiting room. For months I have been reading the same Country Home catalog, so I was drooling over the opportunity to pretend that I didn’t know how the presidential election was going to turn out.

Also my pal brought me a delicious tea from a certain soul-less commercial coffee house that I dare not frequent myself for loss of street cred.

Sometimes people are awesome.

Monday, November 17, 2008

I make no secret of being a pansy

I just finished reading “White Noise” by DeLillo and although I feel sort of barbaric typing it out, I wish someone would have actually died. It’s not that I’m bloodthirsty. Quite the opposite actually. Usually I am squeamish as hell. I can often be found quailing.

Speaking of this (and I’ll return to my clumsy attack on someone else’s art in just a moment) I have been thinking lately of scenes in movies in which someone gets their head bludgeoned and spattered.

You know the sort I’m talking about. It starts with a fight or tense discussion. They grapple, the bludgeoner grasps for something heavy, we get a shot of the soon-to-be-bludgeonee on the floor (eye’s all squinty and hands held up in defense), followed by a shot of the bludgeoner lifting the blunt object over their head, moving into a quick down-swing. And then, you hear a wet crunching noise and you know some bloke just got bludgeoned. Probably there will be some blood on the walls or face of the violent-freako with the blunt object. Call me lily-livered, but I hate this sort of thing.


I invariably close my eyes for this sort of scene. And I suspect that if I were ever to be in a ballistic manifestation of my general grouchiness, I would refrain from punching someone in the face out of an abject fear that it would elicit this exact crunching noise.

But back to “White Noise.” The main fellow in this book (as well as many other characters) was obsessed with the idea of his own death. And although it seems more optimistic to think that we should all privately grapple with the idea of death and learn to deal with it, I rather wanted him to die. He just seemed so tormented that I thought it might be more pleasant for him to be freed from the anticipation.

I’m not trying to be morbid or particularly sadistic. I liked the guy; he wore black plastic glasses and so do I.

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Are there really 18 wheels under there?


If I were particularly lonely I would call up one of those "How am I Driving?" 800 numbers and describe in detail why a particular trucker's performance and road etiquette was offensive to me.

I wonder how these conversations go.

Yes, I'm still here. Illegal lane violations up the whazoo. No, I can't see the license plate. Yes, a big truck, a gray one. Going left on the freeway. Tasmanian devil mudflaps and a surly expression.

Loud engine. Like, rudely loud.

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

This blog is free, so it probably has anthrax

As I skipped every instrumental track on the CD playing in my car this morning, I decided that I am into very obvious aesthetics. I like songs with words, paintings with glaringly apparent subjects and I feel just dreadful about certain modernist novels. Not all modernist novels, obviously, but the particularly sassy Irish ones.

I may be dense (and I just ate three buckets full of hummus for lunch, so I probably am) but I like to believe that it’s a matter of taste. I can’t be blamed if I buy into the pleasant simplicity of the narrative arch.

And speaking of narrative arches [standard seamless segue to follow]. Last night I was reading this article in the free Sacramento Bee my non-fiancĂ© and I scored (it was just sitting on top of the newspaper box, asking to be taken or poisoned with anthrax) last Sunday. It was a regular column, a dual opinion thing written by a father and son, addressing some previous column in which they argued over whether the father should pay for the son’s gas. Apparently there had been a reader uproar over this, and the familial duo was rebutting accusations that the son was spoiled.

I could not resist rolling my eyes as I read the son’s defense. Yes, he knew that he had “entitlement issues” like all teens, but he solemnly believed that this didn’t show an improper upbringing. On the contrary, he believed that he would grow up to be an upstanding citizen and good provider for a future family. In his opinion, he was an okay guy.

“Stupid teenagers,” I thought. “I don’t care how many houses you built on a summer abroad program in Guam. I bet your father wrote this in an effort to pad your college application packet, so that you can get into a flashy university and in four years become a sloppy semi-employed person like me.”

And that’s when I realized. I’m a jerk. What’s more, I’m a jerk with possible entitlement issues and a free Sac Bee in her bathroom.

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

I went as a pseudo-intellectual for Halloween

Today I had the top of a muffin for breakfast and I must admit that it was very tasty. It reminded me very much of the time of my life when everyone I knew was a barista and I ate millions of muffin-tops off day-old pastries. Blueberry muffins with the crumbly junk on top were always my favorite.

The second reason that I found the muffin very satisfying is that it came from a bakery and I have very ambitious feelings about bakeries. To be clear, it’s not that I like coffee shops overmuch. Nope, I’ve never been one to patronize coffee shops, even though I love to loiter with what I might call a delightful decaf-coffee-bev. Probably I’m just afraid that someone will call me a pseudo-intellectual when I hang out in coffee shops looking pensive, and since I am a pseudo-intellectual I don’t want anyone to blow my cover.

Anyway, I like bakeries because when I imagine myself I like to think that I am the sort of person who frequents bakeries. I try to believe that this is just because I am naturally nostalgic and I like small business and quaint things and I definitely love bread. But it’s possible that I’m just lying to myself.

Maybe this is a product of Hollywood. Imagine for me (look how bossy I am, regardless of national holidays like Veteran’s Day) the beginning of some unlikely love story movie.

The likeable and endearingly loopy character surely stops at a bakery during the opening sequence and the bakeristas will know his or her (her or John Cussack) by name. Peppy music will fade, he/she will jovially get the “regular” donut and coffee bev combo and pleasantries will be exchanged.

Now, you might think that this is used to create juxtaposition with the other, more uptight character (who will probably be trash-talking a cabby while drinking a raw egg for breakfast) so that we know exactly how unlikely the love affair will be.

Really, though, I think Hollywood is trying to tell us that people who go to bakeries are plenty more charming than people who drink raw egg protein drinks while looking at their Rolex. And I’ve never known them to lie before.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Botony Monotony

Having been admonished, I suppose I should update. As you can see, I’m awfully good at following directions, and that especially pertains to direction in cap-locks.

At my work-place today they served free BBQ sandwiches, and since I love things covered in sauce (BBQ sauce, free sauce) I stuffed my face, commenting between bites how entirely strange it is to serve BBQ in the workplace. We are often being reminded to present a clean and somewhat approachable face to the public and to this end BBQ grub seemed entirely illogical. But I wouldn’t look a gift-BBQ sandwich in the mouth. [I didn’t even bother to find out what kind of meat it was, so I wouldn’t know what sort of animal to find this proverbial mouth on, anyway.]

Fittingly, this tremendous meal backfired overwhelmingly, because I’ve catapulted downward into a post-lunch slump. I feel ever so much like a nap and I’ve adopted a distinct desk-slouch. I’m highlighting so slowly that the freaky and prolonged highlighter squeak is really maddening.

Such is my dreary fate on a Friday afternoon. But there is an exciting anecdote to follow.

A certain manager in my workplace gave us reception types some fake flowers in a silly vase for our desk. Now, these flowers were a really outrageous color and showed up somewhat dramatically against the boring flagstone decor of my desk. With eerie regularity, patients have taken to approaching the desk, often even stopping cold in the hallway to stare beforehand, and fingering these fake flowers. Really, there were several gawkers everyday. After a few moments they would invariably comment on the color and ask if they were real.

I’ll admit it; at first I didn’t know if they were fake or real (I, after all, had not spent the last few moments petting them) and I would express this as politely as possible. But over a few months their unwavering brightness assured me of their immortality and I grew annoyed with the interruptions.

For the last few weeks I have struggled against a desire to ignore people asking about the plant. I wanted very much to instruct the curious parties to poke their fingers into the soil and feel the lifeless Styrofoam heart of the plant and to see for themselves that it was no agricultural marvel. Nothing more remarkable than a little corporate schmoozing.

But I’m too much of a pansy for such direct confrontation, so I took the flowers and disposed of them. It was very satisfying. And this blog is hopefully sufficiently satisfying to requesters.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

I'm pro procrastination

I thought of a really great idea for my return to the blog arena last night when I was falling asleep. I quite clearly recall reminding myself to remember the idea, and repeating it to myself to be sure. Quite obviously, since I am biding my time here typing away, I definitely forgot about it.

Shamefully, I didn’t forget about my blog. I wish that I could say that I had forgotten about it and had since been happily cured of my internet amnesia, but really I’ve just been madly avoiding writing. I’ve considered it many times. I have been reminded oh-so-gently by my admiral boy-companion. There have been many days that I’ve been at work, staring in wonder at the automatic spring-operated Post-it dispenser and considering bloggish thoughts.

But instead of laboriously opening up a Word document, I have elected to do a mess of other things. Like getting my wisdom teeth removed and surrendering my face to the dread swell disease for a week. Or failing at job interviews and sobbing into my pleated skirt. Also procuring matrimonial engagements.

I would consider going on here, and whining about the obnoxious sweats-wearing cell-phone obsessed families in the waiting room (why is this a common theme in all waiting rooms?) or about how I want to read some fluffy news stories that aren’t at all about Obama, but I just can’t find any, but I think I’m going to stop here.

I would very much rather read this Fitzgerald story I am in the middle of, and continue my homage to the alter of procrastination.