So… MF was going to be debriefed at work today, as his contract is coming to an end. So I shot him a quick email this morning to say “hold on to your underwear!” Take a moment to slap your knee.
OK, so anyway, Gmail must have scanned my message, honed in on the word “underwear” and customized all the ads in my sidebar. At the top of the list of sponsored links was a simple ad:
WTF is Mormon Underwear? I did not even click on the link to find out. I’d rather let my imagination do the work.
Perhaps Mormon Underwear have extra cushioning down there for the young men who ride their bikes around the neighborhood to wear under their white shirts and black pants. Maybe Mormon Underwear is more like a chastity belt of sorts to help young (heterosexual, of course) lovebirds save themselves for legal marriage.
Naw, I don’t actually wanna poke any mean fun at anybody’s religion… but seriously… why the need for special skivvies?!
There’s a girl in my Strat Comm class who eats just like a 12 year old boy left alone at the vending machine with a roll of quarters.
I took notes in the margin of my notebook last night. (Next to where I was doodling little hearts and flowers and writing my name with my boyfriend’s.) I wrote down everything she ate as she picked snacks from her oversized tote bag and grazed throughout the 3 1/2 hours.
o a six-count package of sandwich crackers (couldn’t tell if they were filled with peanut butter or imitation cheese)
o an individually wrapped Rice Krispie treat
o a grab bag of plain Utz potato chips
o a small bag of Cheese Nips
o a 12 ounce can of Coke (not diet)
o a 16 ounce bottled water
I fell asleep in the back of the class around 8:45 so I am not sure what other trans-fat-laden goodies I missed during the later stages of her snack-a-thon.
She’s like a size zero and I guess in her early-to-mid twenties. But her face looks like she’s used up and worn out. And I bet it’s ’cause she hasn’t ingested a single nutrient since her mama stopped packing her lunch back in 1998. Anyway, she always wears fabulous shoes. (I felt like I had to say something nice!)
I’ve always thought they were just for show. Something the idiot kids rivet onto the back of their souped-up Neons and about as “necessary” as the coffee-can-tailpipes and extra dark window tint.
I wondered aloud when we were driving around town one day, “Seriously, why does anyone other than a racecar driver really need a spoiler?” I suppose I forgot that I was hanging out with a pilot’s kid.
Because instead of a smartass answer, I got schooled in aerodynamics. Foils. Air flow. Lift disrupts the vehicle’s handling. Spoilers spoil the lift. It was his grade school science project.
I listened, interested, but then filed it away in the useless trivia corner of my mind. Might come in handy one day as a crossword puzzle clue.
But then some warm winds blew in overnight. Melted the snow in my parking spot and rattled through the walls of my building so that the hallways sounded much like a Nascar track. I hit the road this morning and that same wind lifted up under my Jeep and moved me from one side of the road to the other and back. And back and forth and back and forth like that all the way to work.
This happens every time I exceed 30 MPH on a windy day. But this time, thanks to my lesson in air movement, I could finally understand what was happening to my vehicle. And I wondered to myself…
How can I put a spoiler on this Wrangler? Yeah, mental picture not so great.
“This is Figaro.” We were sitting in Starbucks, a quickie date in the hour and a half between work and school… because we just can’t want to wait ’til the weekend to see each other. I must have stared at him quizically because, once again, he looked up and gestured at the speaker and said “this music… this is Figaro.”
I was sorta stunned. He’s no doubt a smart and open-minded fella but I wouldn’t have pegged him for an Opera aficionado. “How do you know this?”
“Haven’t you ever seen Bugs Bunny? All the music in that cartoon is Opera.” He went on to describe the episode in which Bugs disguises himself as a conductor in the Opera and the scene in which he keeps his hand up a *little bit* too long. A gesture to the singer to hold the note… until he’s about to burst. The comic relief at that moment makes it a little less about the opera and a little more cartoon.
I laughed, “I guess cartoons are more cultured than I thought.”
This is a transcript of an actual phone conversation I had today. But imagine you’re my coworkers (every last one of them is male)… and you can only overhear MY side of the conversation…
*ring ring ring*
Me: Happy Birthday!
C: I love you!
Me: Aww, I love you too!
C: I am so glad you’re my friend!
Me: Oooh, I am so glad we’re friends too!
C: I got your card and I started thinking, and I told my husband that I just know that you will be my friend forever. Others may evolve into acquaintances, but I know for sure you’ll always be one of my best friends.
Me: Awww, I am sure of it too! I am so glad we’re friends!
C: Thank you for remembering my birthday.
Me: You are such a sweet friend, you totally deserve to have your birthday remembered!
Seriously, every sentence in our conversation ended in an exclamation point and was spoken loudly in birthday-cake-sweet tone of voice. With candles lit on top! And her name written in curly script!
I don’t think the guys are too sure how to handle the only female in an office full of men, so I won’t catch any crap for having said all of that out loud today. Either way, I am so happy that C is my friend and that I have the chance to tell her.
She’s moving to Florida in a few months but I keep hoping she’ll call and tell me that they’re not gonna go after all. We meet for breakfast and I play with her daughter. I pass along good books to her and she gives me naughty novels to read. She tells me all the icky stuff about pregnancy and motherhood that few others will say out loud. She’s the only person who can forward me silly emails about cute puppies and babies dressed as pumpkins and how my friendship is like a flower, and it doesn’t bug the shit out of me. Her husband even likes me. I even like her dog.
She crochets blankets for homeless and elderly people, she runs errands for the young mother downstairs whose husband left her when the baby was born, she dogsits for the neighbors. She basically takes care of everybody else, her family, her friends, and even complete strangers, and then sometimes she just runs out of time to take care of herself. So my wish for C is that everyone else do something for her this birthday.
It was the most recent in a long string of new-home-related calamities.
A little background: First the painters clogged my toilet. Then the wrong couch got delivered. The washer and dryer and dishwasher all went on the fritz in the same week. My home warranty company refused to repair said washer and dryer. The carbon monoxide detector alarmed. My dresser was irreparably damaged during shipment. The furniture store forgot to order my rain-checked entertainment center until it was discontinued.
I still have no couch. The bedframe is still in its box because I’m half expecting to open it and, given my track record, find it broken in some way. The new washer rocks itself right out of the laundry room during the spin cycle and the guys are coming back to fix it on a night I’d rather be out on a date with my man. And all the deliveries have left scuff marks on my recently painted walls.
I’ve been needing someone to be pissed at.
So now, finally on one of the coldest winter days we’ve had, my heat stopped working. I think it had been out since Sunday. I slept Monday night in extra layers and called a repairman this morning.
He tested and zapped and beeped and measured. Switched and unswitched and tapped and gauged. “Ma’am, may I show you something,” he beckoned from the foyer. I found him standing there with his finger on a switch. A power switch that looks like all the others. I’d never known what it controlled, so I’d always left it alone. Hadn’t tried flipping it since maybe that first day I lived there. I’d just always left it “on.”
“Ma’am, this is the power switch for the entire unit. I found it in the off position.”
Of course I had to disagree with him, the expert. “I haven’t touched that switch since the day I moved in, so that CAN’T be it. I live here alone and I know I didn’t touch it, and it couldn’t have turned itself off.”
So he actually took out something that looks like a Geiger Counter but with wires and clips. (Ummm… how do I know ‘Geiger Counter’ but not know the name of his electrician’s tool? I don’t know.) Anyway, he used his tool to prove to me that there was no charge when the switch was off, and full “120″ charge when the switch was on.
The heat was never broken. Rather, my power switch was off. I am serious when I say I never touched it. But I had delivery men in there on Sunday, and it’s possible one of them hit it. I said I needed someone to be pissed at. I could be pissed at those deliverymen. But I think instead I will just…
…laugh at myself. For calling the repairman and paying him $55 to tell me to “always ensure power switch is in ‘on’ position.” Duh.
I’d arrive at the office some mornings to find little trinkets on my desk. During those two weeks, he’d get to work before I did and leave me little gifts. Baseball cards. A coffee mug and a lanyard. One day even a cookbook. I’d only met him once when one day he walked over to introduce himself.
“Hi, I’m J. I sit down the hall. I’ve been seeing you around and I can just tell by the way you talk to people that you are a nice person. I gave my two weeks notice today and I didn’t want to leave without trying to meet you.”
He was very shy and mentioned my smile… he had clearly premeditated that encounter. For the next two weeks, I’d IM every morning to thank him for the goodies. We typed and chatted and he told me all about his childhood in California, his years in the military, his friends at Walter Reed, his passion for baseball and his cultural roots.
He flirted and was thoughtful and sweet, but I wondered why he put so much effort into getting to know me yet never asked me out. He avoided the question, so I cautiously waited for the other shoe to drop.
And then one day he told me about his wife and two young boys. They were separated and living on different floors of the same house. Counseling had already failed, but one child with special needs prevented him from leaving. So, he said, he slept on a mattress in the basement and coexisted politely with his spouse.
After a little bit of thought and after confiding in a few friends, I stopped responding to his IM’s and returning his emails. I declined invitations to meet for lunch, and I tossed those old baseball cards somewhere I wouldn’t think about them.
To this day, several years later, he is the first person to remember my birthday every year. With the change of every season and on the eve of every holiday, he writes to wish me well. He writes a sentence or two about what is making him happy at the time, but I still will not reciprocate. He wrote again this morning, and as usual I deleted the email. I’ve decided that he is not a bad man. But he was certainly once a confused and lonely man. I don’t even know, maybe he still is.
While I understood his priority to be there and care for his children foremost, I felt sorry that he wasn’t also able to be his happiest in other ways. I wonder if his kids, if they ever understood, would have appreciated their dad staying trapped in a bad marriage for the sake of the children, or would they have preferred to see him find love and happiness? Would finding said potential happiness have made him an even better father? Was it worth it to live sadly in the basement yet be there for bathtime every night versus living one town over and seeing his boys on weekends but maybe rebuilding his self esteem in the meantime? I have no idea what the right anwser is, but I hope he figured it out.
As long as I’ve known her, she’s been an able-bodied woman abusing a handicap parking permit. We figure the permit is for her dependent elderly mother. It’s certainly not for herself. She skis and hikes on the weekends but then pulls into the handicap spot at work on weekday mornings.
She’s a miserable human in many other regards, but the only true offense we can accuse her of is parking in the handicap spot, so we whisper about it every time we cross her path.
And now the past couple weeks I’ve been seeing her around the building… walking very slowly… with a cane. I hope one morning she pulls into work to find all the handicap spots are full.
Karma came around and bit her in the ass, didn’t it.
“I have a bag of goodies from Mom… can you meet me at 11?”
Goodies!!!! I envisioned a bag full of chocolate. Or some cookies. Or something cute. My Mom knows how to do “goodies!” So I set a reminder on my laptop, and at 10 minutes to 11, I started to walk over to meet Sis.
Sis handed me a bag of… mostly magazines. No chocolate. No cookies. Good magazines, yes. But no ”goodies.” So of course now the only thing I can think of is getting my hands on some chocolate.
So… thanks, Mom for the reading material! I’ll buy my own sweets to snack on while I flip pages! Maybe Sis and I shouldn’t have made the handoff justt before lunch.
P.S. Speaking of goodies.. I made a batch of oatmeal chocolate chip scones yesterday. Adapted this recipe I found on epicurious. Substituted 1 cup of semi-sweet chocolate morsels for the 1/2 cup of dates. I had to give some away so I wouldn’t eat them all.
I was lying awake, trying to convince myself to either get out of bed and fuel up for a run, or feign a tummyache and tuck further under the covers.
It had been only eight hours prior that, at 12:02, I sleepily moved from the couch to the bedroom where I finally looked at the clock. Oh no!! I skipped back into the living room and informed MF that “we missed New Year’s!!” We kissed anyway, hoping that the clock was 2 minutes fast or that maybe it’s “the thought that counts” and not the actual time of the kiss which determines our luck for the next year.
So cozy under the covers that next morning, but having already tempted bad luck by missing the kiss by two minutes, I suddenly felt like I had to do something to compensate. To let my man go on without me and run alone for our first joint goal of 2008 would be a poor metaphor for continuing our relationship into the new year. Plus, if I’m a quitter on New Years Day, then I’m setting myself up to be a quitter all year, right? Ditching the race would be a bad omen for my relationship and fitness goals and my attitude in general, but gearing up and trying my best would certainly bring good luck. I wanted to start the new year off with the best of intentions, even if my body was operating short a couple ounces of water and a few winks.
I wasn’t exactly tired, sick, or hungover from New years Eve. I had fallen asleep before midnight after a special four course dinner, a few glasses of wine, half of the Bourne Ultimatum, and plenty of water. Nonetheless, I was not in peak condition to head out for a 10K run. I secretly wanted to move to the couch and veg out instead.
So MF brewed the coffee and poured the bran flakes. We laced up our sneaks and drove over to the park to sign ourselves up. 485 other folks did the same thing that morning, and we all mingled in the rec center gym where a hippie played guitar and sang, and MF told me stories of the past two years he ran this same race. In 2006, one turnaround was unmanned, and most racers ended up running an extra two miles that day. My sensitive belly turned at the thought of running two extra miles after having drank two extra glasses of wine the night before.
But down at the start line, bombarded by the cheers of the spectators and the frenzied beeping of the timing mat, I got totally caught up in the energy of the race and forgot all the silly little reasons why I’d wanted to stay home. THIS was the only right way to start the new year. A few hundred yards down the field, MF wished me a ”Happy New Year Babe” and we were off!
An hour later, when the finish line was in sight, we high fived each other and chatted our way to the end about how we definitely beat our last 10K time and how we’re so proud of ourselves and ready to ramp it up for the next race. We traded resolutions over breakfast burritos that day, but I already knew 2008 was off to a good start.
