Avoidance

I've been having a bit of a hard time with work lately, so I haven't been keeping up on this as much as I should. Employment is completely overrated, except for that whole paycheck issue. I'm getting to the point where, every time the phone rings, I flinch. Because I'm afraid it is for me. And I might have screwed something up. Or missed a deadline. Or forgotten to show up for something. My stomach clenches. I can't sleep. I can't concentrate on much of anything. It all just sucks.

I haven't reached the depths of my first professional job. When I worked at my old office, I used to wonder if I managed to get into a car accident on the way to work how many days that would keep me out. I put post-its over my message light so I wouldn't have to see how many calls I'd received and wouldn't have to call them back. I'd try to figure out what kind of elective surgery I should sign up for to get out of work for two to four weeks. It hasn't gotten that bad. Yet.

I bought myself a bit of a reprieve today. Not much, but enough. Enough that I think I can sleep through tonight. Enough so I think I won't wake up at 2 a.m., unable to sleep any more, thinking of all the things that I've screwed up, things that I've forgotten, things that I've missed.

Until next week.

Grief

Last weekend, I went to the big city for a concert with some friends, two of whom are married. Once we got there, rather than driving aimlessly through town trying to find a parking lot everywhere we needed to go, we decided to use the little Epcot-like elevated people-moving train-ish contraption.

We're standing on the platform, trying to avoid the large group of teenagers (why do they always move in packs?) when the train came in. Being polite midwesterners, we allowed the people getting off the train to get off before we got on. Mistake.

The wife managed to get on the train. The doors started to close so I, being wise to the ways of Metro trains and their built-in safety features, stuck my arm in the door in order to get the doors to open again. Didn't work. The thing started beeping, I pulled my arm out and the train pulled away with the wife inside.

We turned to look at the husband.

"Dude. It'll be okay. We'll be here through all of the stages of grief for you."

"That's okay," he replied. "I've already reached acceptance. Can we go to the strip club now?"

Fake Fine Fink

My friend recently moved into a new condo. She bought it from the management company where she works. Sorta. Anyway, her boss's company manages the building. And, for a long time, her condo was the model to show prospective tenants. And it was furnished.

She ended up getting a lot of the furnishings along with the condo. Except for the stuff that the bitchy boss's wife wanted. The only piece I was worried about her grabbing? The Fink.

The Fink. It is fake fur blanket. With heavy fringe. The fake mink: fink. It is like laying under one of those lead aprons that your dentist puts on you when he's taking x-rays. I love it. I've loved it since I first laid eyes on it and christened it "the Fink." It is a fabulous piece.

I'd get one myself, but I think my cat would either turn it into a place where fake fur meets real fur and creates a new type of organism, or else she'd treat it as a vomitorium. I couldn't subject the Fink to a risk like that.

Who'd Have Thought

Five years or so ago, who would have ever thought that it would be Xtina that would still be putting out excellent records, making kick-ass videos, marrying (and staying married to) a seemingly normal guy and generally avoiding all the pitfalls in the road of pop stardom?

And who would have thought it would be Britney who had two failed marriages, two kids, a propensity for cheeto-eating and walking barefoot in public bathrooms and too many trips to rehab to count?

Not me. Xtina, I apologize. You have defied my expectations. In a good way.

Britney? Not so much.

April 12

It is snowing here today. Has been since yesterday. The roads were slick enough to cause cars to end up in the roadside ditch, with wheels spinning and headlights pointing toward the sky.

Two years ago today, or on this date at least, it was sunny. And warm. The flowers were blooming. My allergies were kicking my ass. Golf league was about to start in a few weeks. It almost felt like summer.

I don't remember actually making the phone call. I know that I called for some particular reason. But I don't know what that reason was.

I do remember knowing, at the moment that someone else's voice came on the line, that something was seriously wrong.

I remember walking through the office where I worked at the time, looking for someone. So I could let them know that I had to leave. Right now. I remember I found our paralegal in her office. She offered to drive me but I told her I was okay.

I remember my boss calling my cell while I was on the road alongside the golf course. I have no idea what he said. I remember, later, finding out that he was pissed that I had to leave because we had some big project we were working on.

I think I was wearing a beige suit.

I remember pulling into the neighborhood. There was an ambulance. There were sheriff's cars. There was a crowd of people around the mailboxes. I remember there was a stretcher. I remember not looking.

I remember a group of women standing outside of the condo, like a flock of colorful birds with bright, shiny eyes.

I remember my mother looked like hell.

I remember that they drove the ambulance back to the condo. They let us say goodbye. I remember he didn't look the same. He was wearing shorts and an ugly golf shirt. But not an ugly golf shirt that I'd bought him. A different type of ugly. Not loud-ugly, like I liked. Boring ugly.

I remember my mom kissed him on the cheek. Something I couldn't bring myself to do.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table, going through his telephone book, calling our relatives, his friends, people I'd never spoken to in my life. Now I know that when they heard my voice, they probably felt the same way I did when I called earlier in the day. You don't get those phone calls out of the blue unless something bad has happened.

I remember going home that night and thinking about my mom being all alone.

My dad died two years ago today. On a bright and sunny day unlike today. A day where he got to golf and have lunch with his wife and go out to get the mail and never come back.

I love you, Daddy. I miss you every day.

Hitler

I was talking to my friend the other day. I have no idea what we were talking about. It could have been anything from her pregnancy to Anna Nicole's babydaddy to what we'd most like to have on a hamburger. And am I the only one who is sad that Anna's little girl won't get to be a real live princess someday?

So we're talking about something and whatever we're talking about triggered a memory for me. For some reason, I started thinking about this girl I met in college who was the best friend of one of my friends that I met in the dorm. The best friend went to school in Kentucky and would come to visit a few times a year.

Our senior year, she started dating this guy. I'm reasonably certain that she brought him to visit. And I think she ended up marrying him. I also seem to remember that his last name was, of all things, Hitler.

Me: "So I'm thinking her name ended up being Chrissy Hitler."

Jocelyn: "You're shitting me."

Me: "No. I'm completely serious."

J: "Can you imagine? How awful that would be?"

Me: "He seemed like a really nice guy. But that's one cross that's a bit much to bear, I think."

J: "Wouldn't you change your name, for cryin' out loud?"

Me: "You know, you'd think so."

We sat and thought about his situation for a moment.

J: "What if he ran for class president in high school? 'Hitler for President!'"

Me: "He'd never be able to wear a brown shirt'"

J: "True."

Me: "I'd imagine he gets a lot of looks when people read his driver's license."

J: "Or when he's taking your daughter to prom. 'Hi. Very nice to meet you. I'm John Hitler. You're daughter will be perfectly safe with me.'"

Me: "Would the parents be so bold as to ask, 'So, are you related to the...other Hitler?'"

J: "The possibilities are endless."

Me: "How about when he's invited to his employee's kid's bar mitzva? 'Honey, I want you to meet my boss, Mr. Hitler.'"

J: "Yeah, that'd go over well."

A Rag-Tag Fugitive Fleet

Like all good pagans, I spent much of Sunday on my ass. Actually, I was way more productive Sunday than I was Saturday, which was spent recouperating from "The Great American Move-In" on Friday night. All the furniture of a live-in boyfriend, without the sex! Just what I've been looking for in a relationship!

Anyhoot, by Sunday afternoon, I was drinking a beer, flipping between The Masters, The Color Purple and whatever disaster movie of the week TNT chose to run. I have certain stations I frequent and I rarely venture outside my comfort zone. E! is a perennial favorite, as are the channels around there: MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, USA, F/X, etc. Anything that has anything on it that has been shown 2.1 million times previously? I'm there.

But, as it was Sunday, I thought I'd flick through some of the local channels to see if they were playing repeats of Little House or some horrible Hallmark Movie of the Week, like Love Comes Softly. Hey, it's got Izzy in it. It can't be all bad.

And what do I find, during my clicking? Hidden away on what used to be the WB? And is now...some weird family/religious/Pat Boone commercial carrying network? Battlestar Galactica.

Not the new-fangled nonsense. Oh no. Richard Hatch. Dirk Benedict. Lorne Greene!!!! And, even better! The first episode! Caprica bombed during peace negotiations. Evil Baltar conspiring with walking toasters! It doesn't get any better than Starbuck macking on the ladies in the launch tube, baby. Until Athena gets pissed and shoots him in the ass with a stream of steam.

As a child, I was obsessed with this show. Obsessed, I tell you. I watched it religiously. I made my mother buy anything that had anyone from the show on the cover. People. Us. The National Enquirer. We stopped short at Alpo. I believe I may have made audio tapes of it with my tape recorder. Had I known about fan fic, I would have written it.

And the show, while eminently cheesy, still has little glimpses of genius. The music is fabulous. The special effects compared to those now are horrid. But back then, not so bad. They made enough of an effort to show Boomer's hands on the controls when he was flying the fighters. As the only black guy they let pilot anything, other than Colonel Tigh, it would have been fairly obvious otherwise.

The...I guess you'd have to say, theology, behind the whole thing, isn't so bad, either. As far as science fiction stories go, that is. I mean, it isn't a family swept away by a river through a gorge and into a land populated by dinosaurs and Sleestaks, but, really, once you've put that story on paper, all others pale in comparison.

I still dearly love Dirk Benedict. I had a pin with him on it, back when you'd get pins with Def Leppard and Van Halen on them. He's dreamy. And I continue to hope that he aged better than Gil Gerard did. Because age did you no favors, Buck Rogers.

And I checked the tv schedule for this new, creepy, right-wing, family-friendly network. Two showings. Every Sunday. 6 and 7 p.m. Make a note of it.

No Good Deed

My friend, Laura, has a son. We'll call him Grant, for the sake of anonymity. At Christmas time, Grant was offered the opportunity to go work on a cruise ship for six months, until June of this year. He'd get to go all over the Pacific, work with his friends and have amazing adventures. We all told him he should go. Well, everyone told him to go, except his girlfriend, Spring. (Those of you who know these people are laughing up your sleeves at the fake names but I don't want anyone finding this during a random Google search and then hunting me down.)

Spring cries. Spring sobs. Spring begs him not to go. But in the end, cooler heads prevailed and Grant took the job. Spring and Grant had been living together for quite some time before this and, when he left town, he left behind most of his stuff. His fake plants. His high school yearbooks. Posters from shows he'd been in. College kid stuff.

So Grant goes on his trip. And two months in, decides he and Spring are not to be. Which is, of course, why Spring didn't want him to go on the trip. Absence doesn't always make the heart grow fonder. Sometimes it smacks sense into you. At some point, Grant tells Spring that things are over and that they aren't meant to be. When that is and how this occurred is yet to be determined. And I will outline the reason for my ignorance below.

By the time Grant and Spring hit the skids, Laura had left the country. She housesits in the winter and lives in a summer cottage during the warm months. However, she was given the opportunity to go work in the Carribbean for several months and, being no dummy, she took it. So she has a very small summer cottage filled with stuff and no actual house-house of her own. So I, somewhat stupidly, let Laura know that, should Grant need a place to stash his stuff during the months that he'll be away, I have two rooms that I never use and he's welcome to move stuff in there, if he has someone to move it. Better that than hearing from friends that your ex-girlfriend is selling all your possessions on E-Bay. Or has cut one sleeve off of every shirt that you own and thrown them onto her front yard.

I don't hear anything. And I don't hear anything. And I think, "Well, maybe he isn't going to tell her until he gets back." "Or maybe she's going to hold onto everything in order to ensure a face-to-face meeting when he gets back." "Or maybe she already got a good price for everything but his old kitchen pots."

Last Wednesday, I get an email. Grant's friend, Matthew, is wondering if he can come over that night to bring all of Grant's stuff over. Well, if there is one thing that is sacred, it is Wednesday at the bar, so I tell him Thursday or Friday will work. He picks Friday. It is a go.

Some background. I've met Grant, oh, maybe a handful of times. I'm friends with Laura. I'd seen Grant and Spring together a number of times but wouldn't count myself as a friend of either of them. However, I'd hear all about Grant and his relationship with Spring from his mother. So their relationship, to me, was kind of that of Jennifer and Brad or Brad and Angelina. I know all about it from the outside, and have discussed it at length with others, but have no actual first hand knowlege of the subject.

So I'm thinking, "Great. Matthew's going to come over here with some friends. He'll have talked to Grant about everything and I can get the scoop from him about the whole break up. The when, where and how." Turns out, not so much.

Friday afternoon, I get a call from Matthew.

"So, we're leaving Spring's place right now and should be there in about twenty minutes. And, um, well, how is it that you know Grant?" I can tell he's trying to figure out what he can tell me and what he can't, as he clearly doesn't want to offend anyone.

"I'm friends with his mom."

"Oh, right. Um. Spring's coming to, um, help."

God. I immediately get on the phone to everyone in town to see if they're available to come over and relieve the awkwardness that is about to engulf my house. But, no. They're all drinking. And laughing at me. Bastards.

They show up. Two guys and Spring. Who, for the most part of the next hour, is incredibly gracious. But what else do they have? A friggin' U-Haul. Not the little one you haul behind your car. The cube truck. And it is full.

We spend an hour unloading. Four people. An hour. Grant has a lot of shit. The aforementioned fake plants. The high school yearbooks. Notes from college classes. More fake plants. Computers. Televisions. Microwaves. A weight bench. Kitchen table and chairs. Not one, but two coffee tables. Chairs from Laura's cottage from when she redecorated. An organ. No, a real organ. That plays music. Perverts.

The two rooms? Are unnavigable. I cannot reach the closets. There is stuff in my garage. When they left, there was black dirt ground into my cream colored carpet. I cringed when I first saw it, but that's what I get for not sweeping out the garage. It took physical restraint on my part to keep from grabbing the vacuum right then, but I figured that was a bit too anal-retentive, even for the girl who pulled over on the Jersey Turnpike to change her shirt when she spilled Diet Coke all over herself because she couldn't stand the thought of wearing something with stains. STAINS!!!!

They finally left. Spring was more than pleasant about the entire thing. The only time I got to talk to the boys by themselves the only thing I had time to say was, "Well, this is awkward, isn't it?" They laughed, then Spring came back. After they left, I vacuumed, opened the wine and got back on the phone.

So, while I am storing enough stuff to house a Guatemalan family in comfort and style, I am still without the breakup story. All I can say is, Grant? You owe me. Can't wait 'til June!

I Hate People

We have a little cafe in my office building where they sell salads and sandwiches and chips and whatnot. Today, the special is taco salad, complete with tortilla chips sprinkled decoratively around the paper plate.

I go into the lobby to go to the ladies' room. A woman is walking back to her office with her plate of taco salad. As she's walking past the elevators, a chip falls off her plate.

Instead of leaning over, putting her drink on the ground, picking up the chip and the drink and going back to her office to dispose of the floor-contaminanted chip? She proceeds to kick the chip behind a planter, breaking it into a million tiny pieces in the process. Thereby making it impossible for anyone else to pick it up without a vacuum.

She then looks my way to see if I've seen her. I ignore her. Then I mutter a derogatory comment under my breath as I go into the bathroom.

Because that's the way I stand up to people. By doing it quietly. Under my breath.

Apocalypse? Now!

I was on the phone with my mother last night. We hadn't talked in a couple of days and were trying to catch up. I was about to tell her about a house I recently saw so I could get her to talk me out of the horror of buying it when she cut me off and said she had to go.

Why?

Because American Idol was about to start.

My father is rolling in his grave.

Shut Up

I almost killed a girl at Ann Taylor Loft last night.

I went looking for pants. I'm right between sizes and things fit weird and why do all the skirts this season hit right at the fattest part of the calf? Why? It would be okay, maybe, if they were skinny skirts. Little Audrey Hepburn cigarette skirts. But they're flared. And that's not right. So. Pants.

I grab a bunch of stuff and go into the dressing room. There are three of us in there. A dressing room with about eight stalls. Two other people are in there. I quickly find out their life stories.

There's a mother and a daughter. Mom is right around fifty. Daughter is in her mid-twenties. Daughter has problem hips, thighs and boobs. This, in reality, means she's fat, but she won't actually say this to the sales lady to whom she's describing her problem areas. She says, at one point, that she's between a size 14 and a size 10. I saw this girl. She's about 5'4". If she's seen a size 10 in the past year, I'll eat my shorts. Or that ugly skirt I can't wear.

Mother and Daughter, rather than getting dressing rooms next to each other, pick rooms at complete opposite ends. I'm right next to Mother. Daughter has a voice like Fran Drescher's midwestern cousin. I proceed to listen to the following for the next twenty minutes:

"Mom, I love those jeans."

"I so wish I'd worn a white bra."

"I so wish I'd worn flip flops."

"I really should've worn a white bra and flip flops."

"Faded jeans are the style, Mom."

"Dad will love you in those."

"Who is that on the phone, Mom?"

"Which way does this tie?"

"Do they have flip flops out front?"

"Oh, I love these capris!"

"You should totally get those in black."

"Do you have this in a bigger size?"

Non. Stop. She wouldn't shut up. I'm muttering under my breath, describing all the wonderful methods I'll use to kill her. I'm certain that her mother heard me, because she was as silent as a mouse the entire time. I literally had to leave the dressing room to go wander around, telling the employee that I had to get out of there to clear my head. I think she thought I was upset by the fit of the pants I was trying on.

Which I was, but not that upset.

Litter Boot

When I get ready in the morning, my cat frequently jumps up onto my bathroom counter. She believes that, by walking back and forth across the counter, she has the ability to make me dry my hair faster and run downstairs to feed her as soon as possible. This hasn't yet worked for her, but she keeps on trying. I have to admire her tenacity. You know, when I'm not picking her up and dropping her on the floor or pointing the hairdryer at her in an effort to frighten her into submission.

Last week, she jumped up there when I was finishing my hair. This involves product called "Bed Head". As best I can figure, this is stuff they've taken from the La Brea tar pits (with which I have an unhealthy and unending fascination), dye it blue, infuse it with coconut-scented oil and market it to midwesterners. Who "they" are, I don't know, but I suspect they're also involved with blending the seven herbs and spices involved in KFC's addictive recipe.

So I've got this stuff out on the counter with the lid off. The cat is walking around. And, as Murphy's Law posits, whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Cat, meet hair goop. Next thing I know, there is a cat-paw shaped indent in the goop and the cat is scrambling across the counter, leaving great streaks of blue stuff on the marble. I'm yelling, she's howling, 47 cents worth of goop is down the tube.

I finish my hair, finish getting dressed, and go to find the cat. Who apparently decided that the safest place to hide from my wrath would be the litter box.

Litter, meet hair goop.

The cat would not let me approach her, so she spent the remainder of the day with a litter-coated hind foot. She kept shaking that leg, hoping to dislodge the offending particles, but was unsuccessful in everything other than making me laugh.

Until I came home from work to find her and her littery paw splayed out on my white duvet cover, surrounded by goopy clumps of litter.

Good kitty.

ETA: Thanks for pointing out the typo, Kim. Yes, I feed my cat. I don't feel her. Because that? Would be wrong.