Friar-Tucking around

This post is on posture and it won’t be amazing or uplifting because posture, like all other things, is shitty. That’s my POV today and I won’t take any flak for it, or for my use of obnoxious abbreviations to communicate “point of view.”

You may notice that I frequently describe my actions here as “hunching around.” That is because I have terrible, slouching posture and I tend to hunch over with the least provocation – tiny keyboard, little hatchback, boring book with small print or a candy bar dropped below my desk. Hunching is bad for you, in that it doesn’t shape your spine in the way your spine wants to be shaped, but it is also natural. I don’t see well, so I naturally bend at my mid-spine too scope out the interesting developments on my computer screen.

So I’ve been thinking about trying to improve my posture, first because it would make me seem a little less like Friar Tuck, but also because good posture makes people want to give you jobs. Posture makes people trust you more quickly than having a Golden Retriever.

But I feel that there is an alternate stigma against having good posture, as though good posture is indicative of being a real WASP-y son-of-a-bitch. I was reading a story by Dorothy Parker last night and the frigid woman in it lives in envy of her richer friend and has cocktails with her to flatter her into giving gifts. Anyway, this frigid, poor lady with the bad clothes and the pug-face had good posture and sat without her back touching the chair.

Well, with one slur against Golden Retrievers, another against WASPs and a final blow against the pug-faced populace, I consider my work here done. Oh, Thursday.

scantron sanity and misplaced quasi-political rants

I dreamed last night, or rather this morning sometime between 4:15 this morning when I woke up to use the bathroom and 6:35 when alarms started going off, that I was late to class. And this isn’t the first time that I’ve had this dream in the almost 2 years since I graduated from college. Oh, no. I have this dream a lot. And I think it’s pretty weird.

Well, I don’t think that it is ‘weird’ as in unusual, because I know plenty of ex-classmates who also experience this dream on a regular basis. I think that our brains were simply wired for so long to anticipate class-related stresses that when we don’t get that stimulus in the form of a sassy blue-and-white scantron form our brains get a little wonky. But when it comes to my specific dream, I tend to think that it’s a little weird.

First, I don’t like to think of myself as someone whose life stopped when I stopped being able to ride the campus buses for free. In fact, I’m starting to think that people put altogether too much emphasis on college, as both a requirement for future successes and as a transcendental epoch of total personal awesomeness. Obviously I think that going to college is a worthwhile educational experience and a must-have if you love school for the very schoolness of it, like I do. And a degree is, undoubtedly, something that you have for life. But it also sets you up for unrealistic expectations ($$$) and completely fails to set you up (in the liberal arts, particularly) for the harsh unfriendliness of a market flooded with young folks who can do a close-reading of Chaucer but are best suited for answering telephones and making schnazzy spreadsheets.

Don’t get me wrong. College = good. I might even go back to school. But especially with the fee increases (32% this year at my old stomping grounds) I think that it is becoming a very hard thing to justify without insuring a 32% increase in class availability, relevance, and (let’s face it) making it about 32% more challenging to get a B.A.. If it was me, I would want my money’s worth and in the case of college that means 32% more knowledge and 32% less sleep during finals. Somehow, especially in the candy-coated UC system, I don’t see that happening.

It may sound a little materialistic (yipes!) to note, but as the only member of my family with a B.A. I make far-and-away the least amount of money. And I don’t mean since I quit my corporate job; they made more than me when I was pushing paper all about.

Money isn’t the only measure of worth and it sure isn’t the best one, but I think that the UC system would do well to shift a little of the focus away from soul-bending experiences and educational enlightenment via sun-dappled Frisbee games and towards the real financial situation. For one thing, they are inflating the students’ ideas of how quickly they can pay off their loans and credit cards as easily as they are inflating the fees.

So, enough ranting brought on by watching footage of the student protests here in sunny California. My dream went like this: I was late for a class where I had to turn in a paper and my bike had two flat tires. While I was trying to borrow someone’s bike I realized that I hadn’t attended this class once all quarter (this is a common theme in these dreams) and I began to berate myself for my negligence. I finally took off running toward the building where I somehow knew that the class would be meeting, leaving my bike hidden behind a tree. Before I got there, I woke up in a mild panic.

I know that I could push it here, make some reference to dreams of the literal sense and the quickly evaporating possibility of the lower-middle class to achieve collegiate dreams, but I won’t. That would be way too liberal arts-ish.

The delayed "hella" is totally a better adjective

I don’t want to come out and say that I believe in omens, because most of the time I lump them in the crap pile with fate, destiny, karma and all of that other Buddhism-ala-It’s a Wonderful Life mumbo jumbo that assures nice people that being nice is the best way to be. But I’m only a weakly human and I was raised in a very superstitious family, so yesterday when I heard Billy Joel on the radio on my hurried drive to work (lost track of time, garage door opener wouldn’t work, daily caffeine had not been consumed) I suspected that it might be a good omen. Turns out that it wasn’t and I came home to some unpleasant news in my inbox, but it’s not a complete loss – Billy is good driving jams.

Since I have been trying to do this writing thing more earnestly, I think that I have started to get used to the rejection. It’s all part of the process and I realize that, just like I realize that having a super awkward day job is also part of the process. But if you take into the account the fact that a year ago I didn’t let anyone look at my work, perhaps you can understand the discomfort of waiting for acceptance/rejection for me. Pretty much I’m like a girl at the prom that has to wear headgear all the time and came with her best gal-pal as a date.

The whole thing is very ridiculous and to prove that I’m not taking myself and my sorrows too seriously I’ll tell you exactly why. I am by nature and by incredibly bad habit a compulsive email checker. Checking my email is the first thing I do when I get up in the morning (after deodorant, another compulsive habit) and the last thing I do before I go to bed. I am dependent on it as a source of communication and every empty inbox is a stark personal insult. Shouldn’t someone that I didn’t like in high school be FB-friending me right now?

The weird thing about making email submissions is that it completely shuts down this process. It’s not that I am dreading rejection, exactly; it is more that I have lost the aching curiosity to know what someone else might be telling me. It is very entertaining for my main squeeze, who is used to me leaning over mid-movie to minimize the window, click my gmail icon and hit “enter” twice in the manner of impatient people with saved passwords.

Last night when I got home we were sitting in the kitchen talking over the events our day (me: mean old chick that called me “young lady”; him: new John Muir obsession) and he asked me if I wanted to go and check my email. I declined; he inquired and I relented out of embarrassment. As I mentioned earlier the results of that swift double “enter” were unsavory, but my email reluctance was banished immediately.

Turns out that Billy Joel wasn’t an omen of creative triumph; he was an omen of triumphant bad habits. Today I’m going to be checking my email, hella.

A whole pie and a pink lemonade

Have you ever left a restaurant during that tiny period of time after you’ve ordered your drinks but before the waitress has brought them? I have, plenty of times. I call it the soda-break-break and I actually feel pretty bad about it.

I remind myself frequently that it is not a case of the fabled “dining and dashing,” but instead a last minute choice to eat elsewhere. And I earnestly regret that the restaurant is out a few sodas (I won’t go into my theory about how soda is the best and cheapest liquid in the world here, because that won’t win my any sympathy points). But my real guilt comes from imagining the confusion of the waitress when she (yes, she, I’m being sexist today) returns. I also feel very sneaky rushing away from the table with my head down, shoulders slumped, giving a furtive “thanks” to the hostess, even though I am fairly certain that this practice is not illegal just in bad taste.

You might ask why I am doing this so frequently if I am aware that it is in bad taste. (On a side note, is eating out in bad taste these days? With all of those calorie lists on tables I’m not certain.) Last minute regret-driven decisions are just one of the many fantastic bad habits inherent in being indecisive.

Indecisive behavior is particularly cumbersome when dealing with restaurants and eating because it can be so easily shielded by a pretend politeness. No one wants to venture a food type and when the issue is decided, everyone wants to drive there. I am personally a master of the “I don’t care. What do you feel like eating?” line even when my soul earns for a burrito.

I suspect that you are thinking that while this is all well and good, repressing one’s desire for a burrito is not a crime equal to the soda-break-break. And I agree, the two are not equal. But the soda-break-break is an escalated version of the indecisive choosing conversation.

The break generally occurs on occasions when you have been seated and you know the moment that you sit down that you made the wrong choice. Anything could bring about this realization but my queries have revealed expensive food, loud kids, and a bitchy hostess with gauged ears as the main contenders.

For example, my personal-person and I were seated once in a Marie Calendar’s in some shopping mall somewhere. The moment that our asses hit the cold plastic booth it was as though a switch had been thrown. We suddenly saw the restaurant as it really was: cold, depressing, and filled with church-goers wanting the breakfast buffet at 2:20 in the afternoon. I stared in horror at an old man sitting alone a few booths away eating a whole pie and drinking pink lemonade. Not even cornbread could persuade me to stay.

We asked for two cokes, and when the waitress wasn’t looking, we made a soda-break-break.

The font looks weird to me...

While driving home yesterday I invented a new micro-paranoia for myself: crashing my car because of temporary sneeze-related eye closure. Strange, but probably not unheard of. If I felt like validating my claims I might just look up a statistic about it, but as usual I would much rather just make irrational and unfounded statements.

This thought was brought about by two developments related to moving, the first being a new, more congested commute, and the second being a weird influx of allergies. I have had someone suggest to me recently that the allergies in this region are a form of chemical warfare perpetrated by the snooty stay-at-home yoga moms in an effort to keep anyone who doesn't have a shnaz SUV with a built in humidifier the heck out of their glistening Nugget Markets, but I must say this seems slightly far fetched.

So yesterday I was driving with my usual caution (three car lengths away from my kindred dirty cars, four car lengths away from aggressively clean cars) and I must have sneezed about 82 times. Each occurrence found me with hands locked at 10 and 2, wriggling my nose and straining to keep my eyes open.

As creepy guys on car insurance commercials are consistently telling me, it only takes one sneeze-sized second to total a person's beloved hatchback.

Freddy P. is always captain of something

For someone who loves chatting, I’ve been having my fair share of telephone issues lately. And not even the sort of phone issues that I am accustomed to having because I am at heart a spazzy and destructive person who decimates cell-phone civilizations with a single searing glance (read: I often drop my phone out of two story windows, or into toilets) but a more emotional variety of phone distress.

In my new place of living we’ve actually got a telephone hooked up to the landline and I am consistently being startled and mildly creeped out by its ring. To be clear, I haven’t lived with a phone that didn’t ring to the tune of the Ghostbuster’s theme and sport a camera feature for a number of years and so my confusion is to some extent only natural. However I did have a phone (a phone heavily abused by a chatty family) for my whole upbringing, and for this reason I can explain away the startling feeling but not the vaguely spooky feeling of sitting still and listening to it ring its way loudly through the whole cycle in the spare room.

In my defense, we haven’t given our phone number to anyone, so in some ways its creepy because it’s definitely a complete stranger ringing up. In my further defense , I’m a pansy and I like to live my life this way, so I won’t hear anything about the supposedly redeeming rewards of being brave.

To my way of thinking (which I wouldn’t dare press on anyone else, but I’m just yakking here), I’ve been so long away from the landline telephone as a social tool that it has been reduced in my mind to its strictly commercial-media representation.

As I’m a no longer a spring chicken, I’ll refrain from detailing my age exactly, but I’ll tell you that I when I was coming of age in the nineties, and in the nineties telephones in the movies meant only one thing: horror flicks.

I know what you are thinking, “This chick has finally come off of the rocker that she was so precariously perched upon.” But stay with me, I’m mildly getting to a point.

See, in the horror movies of my teenage years (I don’t watch them anymore, being altogether too squeamish and freed from that teenage desire to prove otherwise) there was always some young babe who was for whatever reason being pursued by the evil fellow in the mask/rain-coat/demonic permanent facial scarring. In these movies there would inevitable be a scene in which the girl has fled her attacker, and feels that she is secure in the home of a friend, usually some Freddy Prince Jr. who is laughing off her fears.

She pleads with him “Please Freddy P., that evil guy will kill us both for reasons not yet clear.” And he will laugh, secure in his position as captain of the varsity something.

SUDDENLY THE PHONE RINGS. But Freddy is not expecting any calls.

And we all know that it is definitely the freako with the knife. The hot babe and Freddy P. look up, the camera focuses on the phone and because of the generally bad dialog of these movies, the director decides that it will be much scarier to just focus on the steadily ringing phone for a good five minutes.

And that scene, when you know that Freddy's dreamboat face is going to get slashed with a pig slaughtering knife, epitomizes why I get the wiggins every time my unlisted telephone rings. It also epitomizes the reason that I compulsively lock my car doors when passing surly men in raincoats.

This space pod seats four.

I’m going to preface this entry by warning you (yes, you, oh boundless internet) that it might seem at first like I’m going somewhere meaningful and sentimental with all of this nonsense. I assure you, without the smallest shadow of a doubt, that I am not.

Somewhat deep people are always jawing on trying to define all manner of loaded, biblical-type words. Specifically I’m thinking of such arbitrary concepts as “right” and “wrong” or (to their friends) “good” or “evil.”

Lately I have been assaulted repeatedly with these terms over the pressing issue of wedding-reception-invitee-etiquette. [I feel by just typing that phrase my blog is going to get twice the hits. Internet fiends watching bootlegged anime are nothing compared to the sheer googling prowess of the prospective bridal class.]

Certain members of my family, being left nameless out of gaping obviousness, seem to feel that the rules of wedding attendance are so fundamental that they are completely warranted in using the cliché (and yet, so effective) guilting phrase: “Do the right thing.”

And to this I apply a basic theorem. There is nothing so serious in the implications of inviting to people to eat cake on your dime to provoke such severe language. I’m not perfecting the guest-list for the last space pod leaving earth as a fiery-hot comet draws increasingly near.

In my perception there are good things in the world (the BBC television series All Creatures Great and Small being available to stream online) and also bad (attentive salespeople).

So unless it’s about the crack-fiends at the mall, the BBC or the aforementioned space pod, I don’t want particularly wish to be saddled with the fate of personal morality.

I don't taunt insects.

When I was a teenager I suffered a spider bite perilously near to my eye (at least in my own narrow and admittedly melodramatic opinion). The only thing really funny about this story, beyond the obvious slapstick resulting from arranging your bangs to cover your eyes, was my mother’s reaction to my plight. And even that is not particularly funny.

When I interrupted my mother’s phone conversation with my panicked and slightly exaggerated assertions that a spider had bitten my eye (“ My eye, Mother, my god-forsaken eye!”) she responded with typical motherly indifference. A few days later, when she noticed my impressive shiner and inquired, she claimed that she’d thought I was joking about the spider because I apparently said weird things like that “all the time.”

Though insulted, I could not deny it: proclaiming my personal atrocities was/is a large put of my (substantial) daily conversational quota.

I was reminded of this humiliating escapade this morning. My mother was emailing me (as is her persistent habit) loads of pictures from the family Thanksgiving festivities. She included among the other unflattering gems a subsection very appropriately entitled “close-ups.”

I have tried to reason with my mother on this account many times. I’ve assured her that no one likes close-up pictures of themselves bopping from PC to PC on the family mailing list. People especially do not appreciate this when the pictures are unflattering or make them look like a goober or feature them wearing earplugs and eating huge pieces of pie. In short, people do not appreciate the Internet publicity if they are me.

After I shuddered my way through the photo selections this morning, I began yet another cap-locked email to my mother expressing my distaste of close-ups. The familiarity of the situation started me thinking about how I have most of my conversations with my mother in metaphorical cap-locks, not because I’m angry but because of my semi-constant state of overreaction.

It would appear that I am the kid who is always yelling “spider bite.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Counting minutes; Counting pointlessly

Bad audio things come in pairs.

Today I heard:

1) Two people independently describe the rock-path at my workplace as “the yellow brick road” of Dorothy fame.

2) Two Alanis Morissette songs during one 30 minute drive.

Something afoot in the Great Clips.

This morning I got the best Great Clips hair cut of my life. Well, the cut itself isn't that great, sort of a botched job of taking two inches off all the way around [Is there ever a time when you feel more ignorant about the metric system than when getting a haircut? Is an inch one hundred centimeters or ten?]. Really, I rarely bother to brush my hair, and I'm not too picky about symmetry and weird things like body, when considered in hair seems like a contradiction in terms. I have been rocking the same middle-part hairstyle in a variation of lengths for the past, let's say, 7 years and I'm widely immune to the screw ups of hair cutteries that start with Great or Super. But this morning was entirely different.

I entered the Great Clips with mixed emotions. On one hand I was feeling gleeful and self congratulatory, since I had managed while biking through the shopping center to get close enough to the Office Max to cause all 4 of their automatic doors to open as I cruised past. On the other hand (the hand that isn't so easily swayed by the good omens reliant on biking prowess and the fact that no one patronizes Office Max) my last trip to Great Clips yielded a particularly awkward experience.

During my last haircut, I was asked by my very chatty and petite [read: midget-y] hairstylist to stand up for the majority of my haircut, so that she could get an even cut. Though I was inclined to point out that my slouching posture was hardly more conducive to cutting majesty than the chair, which I was mildly certain had been designed for the cutting of hair, I tend to be very shy with protests [read: a sucker]. So I stood, and tried not to feel like Zordon from the Power Rangers movie after he gets attacked and it is revealed that when Zordon is not encased within his grandiose smoking pillar he looks like an old man with a wrinkly garbage bag on.

Alas, it gets weirder. After a few moments of tip-toeing and chit chatting around, the stylist then requested that I remove my lumpy sweater, to prevent its scruffy and uneven exterior from interfering with the precision of the cut. Again I should have protested, explaining that since I am likely to be always somewhat disheveled, that it would behoove her to just cut my hair in its normal habitat. But, because I am an utter pansy, I soon found myself feeling like quite the woman of scandal, as I presume that only a woman of scandal would choose to take her haircut standing up wearing an undershirt and a very uncomfortable expression. Hence my overall reluctance.

Today however, my hairstylist was marvelously indifferent to me. She yanked the comb through my hair without the slightest remorse and without asking whether it hurt. Instead of reminding me several times to "keep your head down, please," she simply nudged my head back into place whenever I got twitchy. And, best of all, she never asked me my major.

This is the sort of customer service that I desire. A vast, unfeeling indifference that expedites the process by removing the presumption that I want to leave feel like I've left behind both hair off my head and some emotional weight off of my shoulders. Having lived in a very small town, I always endured the chatting of haircut-ladies about my sisters and community sports and grades with a bleary eyed (I never get to wear my glasses during a haircut) good humor because I thought that chatting during a haircut was a mandatory event, like tipping or the no-charge-blow-drying that you have to brush down once you get in the car.

But today I was quite liberated from my provincial notions by stylist at station number 3, who never bothered to pretend that she cared about me, my finals, my ambiguous future, my political agenda or the shitty windy weather, in the least. And since I didn't care too much about my haircut, we got along marvelously.

[See how non-nostalgic and irrelevant I'm being? I've heard that I'm getting out of control with the weeping over old term papers and wearing my old dormitory T-shirt underneath all of my clothes. I didn't even mention that I'm getting this haircut because I fear people will try and take my picture at graduation].

You can't trust people in Hawaiian shirts.

Excuse me if I seem a little too provincial, but it occurs to me that there are few things as marvelous as a well-proportioned peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I just had one such jellied marvel, sitting in my car on my lunch break and reading from the very thrifty book of Willa Cather stories purchased for me by my quite obliging boy friend.

I am not usually quite that anti-social in my lunching habits [a combination of chattiness and a fear of the weird spider webs that always develop inside my slick ride] but I had just emerged from a morning of finding misplaced files and was feeling mildly distrustful toward my fellow-clerking-man. It’s not that I’m an automaton of productivity and phone-voice pleasantries. No, I’m surly as hell, and I spend just as much time gossiping with my co-workers about how weird those spam messages in Chinese characters are as anyone.

However, lately at work I have been assigned to a very unfortunate task that involves moving many cheerfully colored folders and files into the dark bowels of the building. Trapped in this chamber of exposed wiring, the only company I have is the mistakes of my co-workers, a pink boom box and a piece of hulking machinery that I will refer to as a furnace, as I do all electronics bigger than a microwave and uglier than a Gameboy.

On further consideration, it might actually be a furnace. All I know is that it is hot as the dickens down there and even my heartiest green Dual-Tip HI-LITER dries up in about 3.5 seconds. But I digress.

So after a morning of cardboard cuts and the numbing knowledge that there are people in the world who will use a Post-it will a happy face on it to mark their filing turf, I retreated to my grubby drivers seat with my grub. Shortly afterwards I retreated further still to the passenger seat, because it was less sunny than the drivers side.

A short pause and I will get back to peanut butter and jelly. I just realized (while considering whether or not it was appropriate to amend the word “note” to the end of “Post-it”) that I have mentioned the commercially volatile names of the Hi-liter and Post-it in this post already. Soon I will be whoring myself out to Staples and receiving my blood money in color cartridge refills.

As might not surprise you, given the violently one tracky way my brain has been working as of late, while relishing my peanut butter and jelly the evil specter of graduation-and-related-concepts reared its hideous head. It’s not entirely my fault; it’s only that I was planning on returning to my computer and ordering my cap and gown, while simultaneously thinking about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich that I was likely to have for dinner.

Suddenly it occurred to me that the cutely dingy habits of a college student (disdaining bleach, stealing napkins from Chipotle and printer paper from work, eating only carbs, getting back-pack shaped sweat markings while biking) will slowly regenerate into just dingy habits. Without the redeeming aura of half-baked education, it seems that college students are just plain uncivilized.

As a good friend of mine shouted into the phone on Monday, “When we graduate, we will stop being poor college students, we are becoming the regular poor!”

The thought was almost enough to disturb my utopian lunching experience. Thankfully I was reading nice story where the model small town people were predominantly near-sighted and sought to torment the wild-eyed romantic boy. Thus my joy of easily grasped symbolism overcame my fear of PB/J based poverty and the consequences of actually buying tissue, and my panic subsided to await another meal.

Free Stuff...Fair.

I know that it's almost summer, but I feel that this level of sunny, muggy tomfoolery is utterly uncalled for. I am determined to respond to the next person who tells me about the perfect weather of California by pulling out a metal seatbelt clasp (prepared by constant sunning and polishing) and give them a good scalding.

Also, today I was sitting behind this guy in my sociology class and his shirt said "A Global Revolution, ddr_freak.com" and I was entirely contented despite the glaring sun.

I have to dash off very shortly to this exposition of local businesses where my job-people have a booth that I must justly man. I suspect to spend the majority of my time passing out free Blow-Pops with little "Get an X Ray" ribbons tied around the stem...that is when I am not whining about the heat. However, I wanted to note a small thought that I was having today, as I ran out the door with slight deodorant markings on my shirt (more heat = more deodorant, and I'm serious about my deodorant).

Presumably when I graduate from college next month, I will be freed from the oppressive clasp of homework and lowered into the yawning jaws of full-time gainful employment, which I feel yields a good deal more leisure time. This begs the question: what will I be doing with myself when I'm not always cursing at my ugly footnotes and rushing through The Beggar's Opera? I may seem well rounded, but my only hobby is sticking my tongues out at children in the supermarket in hopes that their parents will whack them for being rowdy. I'm not overly motivated, so I'm probably not going to start my own business (learn paper mache, make tons of Sponge Bob pinatas and sell them out of my car?) or go to the gym (my school as a gym megaplex, I have never been inside except for the time I went in to watch a drunken dodge ball game).

Other things that you might suspect that I would want to do as a young professional type, but would be horribly wrong in doing so:
-caring about politics, discussing it at length
-directing middle school musicals in my hometown
-learning to drink wine, discussing it at length, making art with corks
-getting one of those hard-to-maintain haircuts where your side-bangs just barely skirt your glasses
-washing out my nalgene more than once a month

El Fin

I could make a pun about "Value" Meals right now

It is sometimes very troubling to me that all people seem to be quite crummy. [I will pause here for a few important notes: a) Obviously there are a few notable exceptions to the previous dramatic generalization b) Don't brackets look bitchin' with Courier? I can't match my clothes too well, but at least my favorite punctuation matches my favorite font] To resume...

People are oftentimes damn disappointing specimens of humanity. Now, I'm not just saying that because I read Catcher in the Rye yesterday and I'm feeling rebellious, or because I couldn't find anywhere to park this afternoon because there were too many cheerful families toting their cheerful veggies home from the Farmer's Market. Furthermore, I give you my solemnest swear that I'm not about to go off on some rant riddled with bolded words and these suckers -->!!!!! about how consumerism and superficiality is ruining Western Civilization. I certainly drink name brand soda (the elusive Ruby Red Squirt) from the cups I bought from Target too often to engage in that type of banter. After all, it's not society that makes me want to hide in my room with a stack of 19th century novels featuring heroines that overcome their social position as governesses to marry their mysterious employers...oh no, it's the people all around.

And I don't want to hear anything about (from you, stupid 2nd person anon. internet) how you can't consider people outside the context of society, because I am determined to stick to my rash statement. All I know is that I love tacky manifestations of culture in abstraction ( Rock of Love; energy drink slushies now available at 7-11; grown women dressing up in Harry Potter costume contests) while people make me want to stab myself in the face. Jesus-in-a-juicebox, I've gotten all emo, and that wasn't at all my point.

Self mutitalating digressions aside, my intent in writing this was not to catalog all of the enormous jerkwads that I encounter daily. Nay, I wanted to discuss a startling generous act visited upon me by my sister today.

I don't mean to be ungenerous myself by saying "startling;" it's just that my sister has the sort of survivalist instincts that would have scared the piss out of Darwin and all of his little finches. So imagine my surprise when she burst upon me this afternoon (finding me full of snot and secretarial rage) and presented me with lunch and a box of cold meds. I was frankly flabbergasted. Not only had she braved the awkwardness of ordering the unlisted 2-Cheeseburger Meal, but she had sprung for both the day-time and night-time pills.

There is nothing like an unexpected Value Meal to restore one's goodwill toward humanity. [Restorative powers of corny novels omitted for thematic reasons].