charlotte harris

So I got my bonus today.  I looked up my paystub online this morning and was like “wha’ happen?!”
 
Several of my coworkers all had the same idea at the same time too.  IM’s started flying.  “Uncle Sam Sucks!”  “Where’s the other half of my bonus?!”  “I feel like I’ve been robbed!”

Mine was taxed at exactly 40%… I promptly transferred the remaining 60% into an account where it can at least earn some interest.  Interest on which I’ll be taxed again, of course, when I file next year.

And then I remembered that today is Leap Day.  I feel like maybe I am not even supposed to be working.  Did anyone else realize that they snuck in an extra work day?!  Because we have to catch up with the damn sun, they (whoever “they” are) had to make my work year a whole day longer, and I am not even getting paid extra for it.

I think maybe I’ll just put in about 60% effort today, whatcha think?  Withold the other 40%? 

I realized I feared for my eyes back in 1983 when MTV regularly aired the Michael Jackson Thriller video, along with a the-making-of-Thriller type documentary.  They showed Michael putting in those creepy yellow contact lenses, and my eyes would water every time I watched it. 

A Clockwork Orange, friends with contact lenses, lasik surgery… all these things make me nauseated just to think about.

I’m the opthamologist’s worst nightmare.  When he utters the words “glaucoma test,” my eyes start to blink uncontrollably.  As I try to put my eye sockets up to the testing equipment, I start to spasm, and tears stream from my eyes.  Doctors have gone so far as to put the numbing drops in my eyes to try and keep me from spazzing out.  I usually walk out of there with streaks of mascara down my face.  In fact, I haven’t been back in years because I am just that terrified of the glaucoma test.

So lately I’ve been getting these weird little white spots in the upper rims of my eyes.  I did a google image search for styes and chalazions and I can’t seem to find anything that looks like what I’ve got.  The first two spots went away on their own, but I have two in my left eye right now that have been there for more than a day.  They’re so small… they look like the tiniest little whiteheads (nobody else would be able to even see them unless they got like 5 inches from my face) and they’re completely on the inner rim of my upper lid.  Not touching the lashes, not touching the eyeball.  When I pull my eyelid up and try to scratch it away with my fingernail (I know, I can’t believe I did it either but I thought at first it was a blob of makeup or something!), it doesn’t burst open or anything.

I figure these two will go away too, but I am keeping an eye on them.  No pun intended. 

In the meantime I thought to myself, hey maybe you should give your swim goggles a good dunk in the pool before putting them on today.  In case I do have some sort of eye infection, I don’t wanna keep reinfecting myself every time I swim!  So this morning, as always, I pulled the goggles from their plastic case in the bottom of my swim bag and got ready to swirl ‘em around in the pool.  Except today I actually looked at my goggles.

OMG - gross!  There’s all sorts of mildewy, moldy, and I-am-sure-bacteria-y blackish brownish green stuff all inside the edges of the lenses and around the rims.  I never looked before.  There is some creepy gunk growing in my swim goggles and of course I am so paranoid I think it’s moved to my eyes.  I was already in the pool today, so I swam once more with those (yes, I really did!) but you betcha I am gonna go buy some new Vanquishers this weekend.

People, what is in my eye!?!?

It’s funny, but you do not walk into a specialty running store and stare at the wall of shoes and say, “those are cute, can I try them in a 9?” 

In the days when I was just a little girl practicing roundoffs and double-dutch, all I knew was that my legs hurt on the days I wore my Keds during recess.  When I was a teenager my Chucks did me the same way.  Years later I’d come to understand that I’d been getting shinsplints from running around the schoolyard in low-tech shoes. 

No, when you’re a grownup with aches and pains in funny places like your hips and ankles, you walk into the shop and just hope that the one, single pair that fits, supports, and flexes just right… isn’t the ugliest or most expensive pair of kicks in the store.

You try on no fewer than six different pairs, run on the treadmill, hope the camera pointed at your heels doesn’t add five pounds to your ankles, and say important things like “I know, I’m a pronator,” or use highly technical phrasing like “this pair makes me feel like I have wood planks strapped to my soles.”

So today, as I’ve done three times in the past two years, I spent a hundred dollars on the puffiest, extra-room-in-the-toe-iest (or as my Mom would say “I thought those were a man’s sneakers”), pastel-colored, safety reflective and unhip-looking New Balance.   They were the second-ugliest pair on the wall, in fact.  But whatever, I feel like I am prancing around on two pillows. 

And after I bound across the finish line at the Cherry Blossom 10 miler in six weeks, perhaps I will reward myself with a funky new pair of Chucks.   Just for show, of course.

The first time we ordered in from Golden China, we both had vivid nightmares when we slept that night.  I woke up and told crazy stories from my subconscious.  Since then, we’ve referred to the restaurant simply as Nightmare Chinese.  Who cares about some twisted dreams when it tastes so good going down?!

We’ve eaten there a couple times since, and then one recent Sunday night we ordered in again.  Too cold to venture out ourselves, we summoned the Nightmare Chinese delivery man.  The meal was tasty and the dreams later that night were lucid… but it was our fortune cookies that truly made the meal memorable.

I cracked mine open and thought, wow this is probably the best fortune I have ever received.  I read it aloud, “You will succeed in everything.“

“What’s yours,” I gestured to MF. 

He cracked his open and laughed, “wow, this is really weird.”

“Lemme guess, you will succeed in everything too,” I half-joked.

“Yes.  You will succeed in everything.“

We got the same exact fortune, an auspicious one to boot.   Perhaps it means absolutely nothing, but it makes me smile bigger to think that it does.  Ever since, I’ve teased him that we have nothing to worry about because we “will succeed in everything.” 

That benchpress goal of his?  My umpteenth stratcomm exam of the quarter?  The 10 mile race we have coming up?  No worries.  We will succeed in everything, and the fortunes remain taped to his fridge as a reminder.

Goodbye Doritos, a Haiku

salty orange crunch
foiled and deceived by trans fats
I must quit you now

Finding myself unusually hungry at 2:30 today and without my usual stash of almonds and dried berries, I trudged down to the vending machine with a crisp dollar.  I was blinded by orange.  I pressed the A4 button without browsing the rack any further.  Doritos. 

Back at my desk and mindlessly crunching away, I glanced at the label.  “Partially hydrogenated soybean and cottonseed oil,” it read.  I quit that poison cold turkey 4 1/2 years ago, even before I quit smoking.  It’s been 5 years since I bought Girl Scout cookies, and I am reminded of that fact every year around this time.

I know what I must do, and that is to say “Goodbye Doritos” with the same sadness as when I said goodbye to Samoas.  May we cross paths again someday, in a brighter future where junk food is less junk and more food, and preferably at a WaWa.

Your orange-fingered friend,
Charlotte

I made only two rules Saturday night.  Don’t put the Mister Potato Head pieces in your mouth.  “I’m just pretending to eat it.  See?”  And let’s only play with the bouncy ball in the room with the carpet.  “Because in there I could fall down so hard?!” 

We had an insanely good time.  Insane, I say, because we really were laughing and squealing like a couple of crazies.  “I love playing with Charlotte,” she announced, and I thought I might burst. 

At bedtime, she was very aware that Mommy wasn’t home so she needed a little TLC.  I picked her up and she wrapped her little leggies around me and buried her head in my right shoulder.  In the dark, we sat in her glider with her Cubby and her Snoff and rocked gently.  She breathed her sleepy warm milk breath on my cheek and smacked her lips and snored like a little baby bear, and finally the tangled mess of us were both snoozin’. 

I woke up thinking I should put her in her bed, but nah, let’s just rock a little while longer.  Those moments are a rare treat for me, plus I have the luxury of taking a nap the next day.  Spending time with my niece was the highlight of my weekend.

Speaking of the weekend, my blogiversary came and went and I didn’t even notice because I was buried in chapters 1 and 2 of my thesis.  Talk about STRESS.  I spent two full days working on it, but I did take a couple breaks, one play with my niece and another to play with MF - we saw Jumper and ate burgers at Sweetwater and I couldn’t have picked a better way to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon. 

The only way in which the following short story resembles real life is that my “Explosive Gas” detector did alarm last night and would not turn off when I repeatedly hit the reset button, the loud piercing, shreiking, ear-splitting, make-me-wanna-commit-hairy-cairy sounds caused me to scream “SHUT THE F*CK UP!” at the top of my lungs a couple times.  Even though MF was totally levelheaded about the whole thing, I realize that screaming at a piece of plastic until my throat is sore makes me look like a crazy nut, so I wrote the following little ditty for MF to show him how much worse I could have behaved!  Names have been changed to protect… well… to protect me from looking like a crazy person!

The Sad Story of Caroline and Nathaniel and the Valentines Day that Broke Her Smoke alarm and Broke Her Heart

It was Valentines Day 2008.  Candles burned a low dim light and a half-empty bottle of red and two glasses sat abandoned in the dining room.  Drizzles of hardened chocolate fondue dotted the table where, earlier, two lovers had playfully fed one another bittersweet coated fruits and cakes. 

Muffled behind bedroom doors, the sexy sounds of a lovers’ romp were abruptly overcome by a shrill, ear-splitting siren.  The noise was simply too much for Caroline to ignore.  She betrayed Nathaniel’s safe embrace and his calm pleas, “don’t go,” and leapt from the bed.

Caroline lunged for the wall, yanking the alarm from it’s socket, but the piercing sound persisted.  She bashed the alarm on the floor, smashing it into useless broken parts, yet the sound did not quiet.  Caroline, rapidly losing all sense of rationality, became convinced that the alarm was somehow possessed, the shreiking sounds threatening her sanity.  “This beast must die!!!” she shouted wildly, her voice and her facial expressions almost unrecognizable to Nathaniel, who was by then attempting to remove the broken pieces of the alarm from her fierce grasp.

But Caroline could not be calmed, not even by her sweet and gentle Nathaniel.  Grabbing her pickaxe from its hiding spot beneath her pillow, she swung wildly at the device.  Shattered into a dozen more pieces, the shriek amazingly continued to emanate.  Caroline scooped up the plastic fragments and made a run for the front door.  Unclothed but crazy and unaware, she ran barefoot through the hallways and out into the icy winter night.  “I’ll destroy you if it’s the last thing I do,” she screamed, as she wound her right arm and threw the pieces out onto the pavement. 

She jumped into her Jeep and started the ignition.  Alice in Chains blared from the speakers at the high volume at which she’d left the stereo when she’d parked the car earlier that day.  Caroline backed from her spot without looking and rolled her tires over the remnants of the alarm.  Back and forth and back and forth, she alternated between forward and reverse until the piercing noise finally stopped.  Caroline, exhausted, dropped her forehead down to the steering wheel and began to cry.

Several minutes later, out of the corner of her eye, Caroline noticed several of her neighbors standing outside her building, staring in disbelief.  Standing among them was Nathaniel, fully clothed and carrying all of his possessions.  Caroline was startled out of her temporary insanity.  She saw the look of disappointment on Nathaniel’s face and knew at that moment that he was leaving and never coming back.

In honor of Valentines Day, a total girly fluff post on some of my favorite things!

My new practice suit from Splish:

Sexy red pumps:

My Kenny Goodman Heart pendant and the Clinique Strawberry Fudge eyeshadow duo:

Rodin:

I blurted it out during a game of Hoopla, several glasses of red wine in my system.  I meant to say Snow White.  Cousin Hil added the bit about the seven grains.  Grampa and Jess and my Mom kept the zingers coming.  That was Thanksgiving.  Good times.

On Saturday a bunch of us got together again, this time to shower cousin Jess with bottles and diapers and onesies and bibs.  Several weeks to go until her baby is due and she is glowing.   What a nice afternoon. 

As always, we shared some laughs and Sis and I collaborated to win a word scramble party game.  I would never have guessed that yettale = layette.  WTH is a layette? 

Anyway, so as there was no alcohol involved, it was not me who had the most memorable quote of the day.  When someone asked “what’s a Diaper Genie?” thank goodness I kept my mouth shut and let someone else explain:  “you put your dirty diapers in, and it makes sort of a sausage of poop.”

“Your uterus is tilted.” 

I know she was just stating the facts.  She could have been telling me that my skin is fair or that I have long arms.  Totally normal… just a little bit different.

Still I couldn’t help but feel a little bit like she’d just pointed out that my smile is crooked or that the middle digit on my right hand looks like an elephant finger.  I don’t know why my uterus is tilted or what that will ever mean, if anything. 

But I got over it fast.  Because that’s not why I was lying back on the exam table with gel all over my belly this morning.  I don’t care if my uterus is tilted or backwards or inside-out or whatever, just as long as she calls me to tell me that the big black blob of an ovary we saw on the ultrasound today is something we can fix.