Damn.
If you're in a meeting and you decide to launch into what you think is a pretty hilarious—if somewhat vicious—description of an ex-coworker, the worst possible response from any member of the group is… "That's my mom".
And may I say that while "commit to your story" may be a sometimes effective (not to mention ballsy) strategy when caught red-handed perpetrating a crime, you will not successfully extract yourself from the above situation by squaring your shoulders, looking the offspring dead in the eye and countering with, "Well, she's still a lazy bitch."
I completely forgot that I had the "ABOUT" link over there on the right, and having just clicked on it and read all one hundred fabulously boring, bullshit, falsely humble, closet self-aggrandizing tidbits about myself that I somehow-- mysteriously and frankly disappointingly-- found pertinent to ANYTHING three years ago, I made an executive decision (because I am The Chiefest Chief Head Executive of this stupid website) to FUCKING
DELETE IT.
I'm not sure what I'm going to put there, but I'm pretty fucking sure that I won't mention the idiot pets I had in elementary school or what
foods I don't like.
I mean, come ON.
I'm open to suggestions. If there's something that you'd like to see on the ABOUT page, let the Chiefest Chief know. The Chiefest Chief is generous and benevolent and philanthropic and giving and generous. And benevolent. And according to the ABOUT page, doesn't much like corn but loves her brother and notebooks.
What an asshole.
Next Thanksgiving the plan is to wake up, immediately slam down a fifth of grain alcohol, and go back to bed. My liver would THANK ME. I understand that I would have to decant my
own grain fifths, that Arizona Beverage doesn't bottle those, and for good reason (see:
lethal convenience pgs. 12, 342-347), but I'm willing to invest whatever it takes to BREAK THE
CURRENT ROUTINE. I won't even go into detail. Poor
Caitlin took the brunt of the horror, and I don't remember a lot of this... but apparently after I downed four bottles of wine I could still operate a cell phone and somehow a pack of Parliaments had materialized. With the "Hangover of the Year: Wow, You Really Should Lay Down and Here, Use My Chapstick Immediately" award still hanging over my desk from
last year's post-Thanksgiving workday, I felt compelled to fake it today. Poorly, no doubt, but I never once-- never
ONCE-- curled up into anything. And you can't take that away from me.
Everything was moving along just swimmingly this morning until I realized that I have a weird red rash on the tops of my hands and on my arms. Due to my inherent nature, it goes without saying that now my eyes itch uncontrollably and I'm having trouble breathing. I immediately called my mom to see if she can drive me to the E.R. in the event that I start convulsing any second now.
ME: "I don't know, maybe anaphylactic shock?"
MOM: "Remember when you were seven and you cried about how much your stomach hurt? And you could hardly get out of bed or in and out of the car and your dad and I thought for sure you had stomach cancer? But then you started bragging that you'd won the sit up contest in P.E. the day before?"
ME: "Or toxic shock? One of the shocks? What other shocks are there?"
MOM: "Or when you were eleven? And there was something so horribly wrong with your bowels that the specialists-- the specialist
s, plural-- made me go down to the school every day and get stool samples from you at lunch? I'd have to pull you out of the cafeteria so you could crap onto a piece of aluminum foil, remember that? And I'd cry the whole time you were in there because I just
knew that we were going to have to pull out your diseased intestines and I'd picture you dancing at your wedding with a colostomy bag and I'd cry and cry... and then we figured out that you'd been eating the blackberries that grew on the 7th hole fairway, and once you stopped eating a CARLOAD of fertilizer you were fine."
ME: "I think my throat is closing up."
I think my throat is closing up, people. Can someone come get me? I think I definitely have one of the really serious kinds of the shock.
RE: Avoidance of Broccoli Tragedy
Dear Ms. Estella,
I wanted to thank you for unwittingly performing a public service. Your link to the archives of
outofcharacter may have saved me from the agony of a scalding. Through the knowledge I gained from reading that bit of history I was inspired to be extra cautious the other night (Wednesday) when I was steaming broccoli & can confidently report that I suffered no burns whatsover. Attached is a picture of the broccoli that could have caused me discomfort, but didn't. Please keep it for your records. File under "broccoli".
Yrs in a steamed, vegetative state,
Nigel
If You Wanted It You Should Have Taken It With You.
So we're about to be knee-deep in the Holiday Party Circuit again, and I'd just like to say that
this year, instead of getting all cocky and sure of myself and over-confident in my mad social skillz, I'm going to take a minute and remember that time a few years ago when R and I went to dinner and the couple at the table next to us finished their dinner and left, leaving half a bottle of wine on their table which I snuck over and stole and then drank and then the couple came back to their table from the patio where they had been dancing.
That should do it.
Another List Of Things That Make Me Really Uncomfortable. 1) I burned my finger last night making candy apples. If you ever melt four bags of Brach's cinnamon disks and bring that lava to a molten orgasmic froth of sugar and fireants and boiling churning devil fire, don't stick your finger in it. DON'T STICK YOUR FINGER IN IT. Correct,
I have learned nothing. Perhaps
you have done better. But then again you're
here.
DON'T. STICK. YOUR. FINGER. IN. IT.
Apropos of burns, my family are a fundamentally hygienic people. I grew up in a house of unquestioned daily showers, weekly nail clippings ("outside. OUTSIDE!") and twice-sterilized needles for splinters. ("OUTFUCKING
SIDE!") So when I arrived at work today with an index finger so grotesquely and hotly blistered that it wouldn't bend (as well as a tray of the hardest, most impenetrable candy apples in the history of stained glass and titanium), all I could do to ease the blister pain was to rub it lightly on the exposed flesh of others and make a sad face. And then (after multiple rubs, multiple pitiful faces) my boss-- mother of four, not kidding around-- knocked me to the floor and stuck a thumb tack in my finger. Just pulled it out of the wall and jammed it into my blister.
No boiling water...
no matches to char the stabby end (the char means it's clean!)... just her and me and a yellow thumbtack. And some... liquid blister. Onc she picked her knee up off my chest I scampered down the hall, afraid that she might want to disinfect the surgical area with a thrice-used Lysol wipe, but it made no difference. She'd tasted blood. Every five minutes she was sneaking up behind me, brandishing a bent staple, asking if I needed a "re-stab". This was uncomfortable-- both physically and mentally-- but even more uncomfortable was the realization that, in addition to having to be tricked, bribed, or physically
trapped in the shower, I've now lost the very last "get in, and that soap better not have any
letters on it when you're through" remnants of my sterile Methodist upbringing. My boss stabbed my blister with a
thumbtack. That she ganked out of the
wall. And we were IN.SIDE. My grandmother's towel pantry full of clean washcloths finds this whole situation very, very uncomfortable.
2) It makes me uncomfortable that
Jennifer Garner has been eight and a half months pregnant for 14 months. BREAK IT OPEN, ALREADY. I don't think I can handle another US Magazine picture of her sans makeup waddling arm-in-arm with Ben Affleck with a decaf latte. And I can't stop reading US Magazine, so you need to WORK THIS OUT, BENIFFER.
3) I just found out that the guy in my office who heads up Food Safety Management is ALSO in charge of collecting specimens of all hairy, strange, enormous, foreign, quick and/or poisonous insects that pour out of any produce crates imported from fucking HOLYJESUSSOMEBODYCATCHTHATBECAREFUL. Yeah. He keeps them in his office. Once I found out, he started coming around, offering to let me watch the feedings. It's not so much the cordless phone-sized insects that he keeps in styrofoam coffee cups stacked on top of each other on the floor, but the fact that I don't know where he's getting all of these kittens is making me uncomfortable.
I missed
Stace's second call in two days. Call #1 occurred while I was sleeping. Call #2 occurred last night while I was working. I saw that she had called, but I
just had a chance to sit down and listen to her second message:
"Are you fucking sleeping
again? There's no
sleeping. Give me a call or email me. Yeah, email me. Listen to this.
[background music gets louder... background music is Kenny Loggins and Stevie Nicks singing "Whenever I Call You Friend".] You
know this is your fault." I can't stop laughing. That's totally my fault.
Despite working until almost 10:00 last night, I was determined to end my
14-year late streak and get to work on time today. Some people like to
start their self-improvement resolutions on Monday, but I like to start on
Friday so that if I'm successful I can pat myself on the back and take a
break on Monday.
Knowing that nothing short of trickery / full bladder / knives can get me
out of bed before the critical lateness stage, I set the clock last night
so that in the morning I would be fooled and think that it was later than
it was. I know you're thinking that this whole scam works better when a
person doesn't have first-hand knowledge that the time is wrong, but I'm
generally pretty stupid so I thought in my case it might work.
Unfortunately (and this is where you'll take back the "You're not stupid,"
that you muttered on the off-chance that you were defending me... to me) I
got a little woozy and light-headed when I was setting the clock (all those
buttons! BLINK. BLINK. BLINK.) and I set the time EARLIER than it actually
was. Instead of later. So while my PLAN was to wake up, rub my eyes and see
that it was "wow! 6:42, I need to get moving!", what I ACTUALLY did was
wake up, rub my eyes, and see that it was 6:07. Oh, god, PLENTY of time.
Snooze. Snooze. Snoozesnoozesnoozesnooze.
I got myself dressed and out the door in perhaps an all-time record time of
six minutes. My head itches, my eyes are sort of watery and I don't
remember exactly how I got here, but by god I was on time. I'll be damned
if I'm going to squelch on a Friday resolution... how else can I justify
bailing on Monday?
A representative for Monster.com came in today to meet with my boss(es) and explain that if we don't shell out insane amounts of money for the privilege of posting minimum wage retail positions on the web our company is going to go bankrupt faster than
Scarlett Johansson's humility. Her three-hour pitch reached an orgasmic crescendo when she locked the door behind her and quietly showed my hyena-fanged superiors how to "business logon" to the site and see who in our office has posted a resume recently.
I think it goes without saying that she got the account.
I, of course, was not privy to these closed-door shenanigans, but once the safehouse was cracked and Ms. Monster had Manolo'ed her soul-selling ass back out to her Maserati, I was upper-arm ushered into a quiet office by four sets of gripping sharp fingernails to share the potentially blackmailable glee that is "Seriously Ill Gotten Gains In The Workplace".
And like all Seriously Ill Gotten Gains, it was awesome. I mean, once I had gone through the whole, "Jesus fucking Christ, did
I post
my resume to Monster? Because I motherfucking
meant to... wait, did I? Or did I bail? Did I figure it out? Or did I give up?" gambit. Which was fun. And not at all pale and clammy.
Turns out I had
not posted my resume. Which saved me my job, I'm positive, because not
only would I have had to explain to my boss(es) why it was up there, but also why it was FULL OF LIES.
I shared this whole ecstasy-clam-relief experience with a coworker whom I rarely talk to but who shares my general "get the fuck out, abandon ship" mentality. She stopped date-stamping pointless forms and smiled knowingly.
"That's the Lord looking out for you," she said, shaking inky "11-09-05" at me.
"That's
exactly what that is!" I answered emphatically, remembering why I never talk to this woman and realizing that I had just bought myself six more months on the "Christian spam poetry prayer email" circuit, but you know what they say... you catch more flies with sacrilege and hypocrisy!
Deep down I know that it wasn't any god at all that spared me the humiliation of having to come up with like 800 bad lies at one time. It was my twin shrines to Lack of Any Kind of Follow-Through and Total Technological Incompetence.
I really need to get around to building those.
If only I knew how...
I had this dream about my boss last night... she asked me to meet someone
somewhere the next day at 9:00am, and I decided to meet him at like 11:00am
instead. In flip flops. When I finally met this person he told me that he
had just gotten off the phone with my boss, and that she was pissed. That
she had called everyone in my department in for a phone conference to
discuss the situation.
I spent the rest of this SEVEN HOUR DREAM in turmoil. When I wasn't hanging
on the poor guy's arm, begging him to tell me EXACTLY what my boss had said
("No I know, but HOW mad?") I was trying to figure a way to cheat my way
out of trouble. At one point a very nice dream-lady offered to hack into
the timeclock software, but my dream-hopes were dashed when she couldn't
fit under the dream-desk to get to the dream-server.
I hate that feeling, that "I fucked up for no reason and now I'm
legitimately up against the wall for it" feeling. It was such a relief when
I heard the alarm this morning that I slammed it off and went back to sleep
and overslept by forty minutes.
So after an entire awesome day texting
Styro, I decided that it would be criminal if I didn't get my ass to Vegas next weekend to hang out with her and her man.
A simple plan: lie to my family, drive up early Saturday, get shitfaced with
Cait and a bunch of kickass people I don't know, sleep god knows where, and drive home Sunday afternoon.
I feel like I'm 14 again.
I'm going to Mexico right now. I don't think my phone works down there, but that doesn't mean it won't be clenched in my sweaty fist the whole time.
Yesterday I upgraded my cell phone to this tiny chrome thing that does everything but print money. It keeps rolling it's little LCD eyes at me because I'm only using like 4.2% of its talent. I'm frankly starting to get a little bit of a complex because my lifestyle is conspicuously and embarrassingly "voicenotes" -free. I've been making people guess what time it is in Taipei so I can stare at the World Clock, and if anyone needs something uplinked to something else, let me know. Apparently I can take care of that for you.
I always feel a little bit like a loser when I program "Mom and Dad" into the Contacts list first thing. They've had the same number for sixteen years; the likelihood of my freaking out and being all, "OH MY GOD I WISH I COULD GET IN TOUCH WITH MY PARENTS WHO LIVE A HALF-MILE AWAY FROM ME IN THE SAME HOUSE I LIVED IN WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL" is relatively low. But I keep doing it. Mom and Dad. Meemaw and PawPaw. Aunt Mimi's pager. Uncle Freddy's office fax.
Ladies, remember when you were like seven, and you had a purse but nothing to put in it? So you'd carry around a couple of dolls, some legos, a cup, and an enormous plastic horse in pointy-legged prance pose? That's how I feel with this cell phone. Like I'm carrying around a big Prada bag full of Barbi clothes and crayons. There are six numbers programmed in it, and I'm related to four of them. I've gotten one call. From myself.
BUT. The text messaging! How did I escape THIS heroin for so long? Unfortunately (or fortunately) I only know three people whom I can text message:
1) R's daughter who, away at San Diego State, is way too cool to deal with me learning how to do this. The pity factor would be on par with watching your grandmother dance to Eminem. I'll take a text class or something first.
2) R himself, who refuses to learn how to actually SEND messages, but who will tolerate opening his phone and reading
my messages to
him. This is like writing to a stroke victim. Only with more technological disdain and general confusion. And less drool. Or more drool. Depends.
3) My boss. Which, yeah. Let's go ahead and open THAT fucking window.
So I'm left pretty much just staring at the pretty screen and taking pictures of the wall and estimating the flight time between here and Mongolia.
I think when I started this my principle point was that my number changed. So FYI.
