henry "big mama" henry - or - why i want to marry a park ranger

even though my blogmate just outed my inability to tie together my vaguely amusing observations and experiences...

it seems that other people are managing to make the hurricane funny. like me, my uncle decided to drop everything and run to d.c. to visit my ailing grandmother, who, by then, was not so much circling the drain as she was slugging down egg nog and very much enjoying the company of her entire extended family... and i do mean ENTIRE family, including my ex-aunt, ex-uncle, and ex-step-cousins... holy dysfunction batman!

getting back to the story, my uncle showed up with a new orleans newspaper (and enough beer to inebriate an elephant) which had an entire section dedicated to funny (if not quite sad) pictures of objects displaced into bizarre configurations by the ferocious winds of katrina, complete with avant-guard captions like, "fridge on roof," and "door on telephone pole." my uncle seems to have made a sport of reading the "death notices" (apparently there's some technical reason why they can't be obituaries) and trying to read between the lines about how and when they actually died. henry "big mama" henry was actually viola "big mama" henry, but my uncle's slip of the tongue made me giggle for a good 20 minutes (probably had something to do with my helping him drink his case of yuengling).

after visiting my grandmother and boozing it up with my aunts and uncles, i hopped on a (tiny) plane and made my way to hot springs village arkansas (touted as the world's largest gated community... home to cheap rental condos) to booze it up with my parents.
when i was younger i couldn't understand my parents' need to hide away in BFE for the holidays, but now i really look forward to the annual antisocial fest. one of the highlights of my sojourn in the ouchita national forrest was the bald eagle watching boat trip out on lake ouchita, complete with loaner binoculars and charming (and quite knowledgeable) park ranger. i came to the conclusion that dating a national park ranger would be almost as useful as dating a computer geek- someone who could help convert me from wannabe out-doorsy to actually out-doorsy. plus, i'd finally have a suitable other half to go on double dates and weekend hiking trips with my blogmate and mb.

other highlights were visiting the bill clinton gift shop in little rock and eating beef jerky with my dad (at my vegetarian mother's complete revulsion). not only was the beef jerky quite tasty, but i made the rather exciting discover that one serving has only 80 calories but 13 grams of protein. less fun activities included slaving over the 1000 piece puzzle of an the palais de ville in paris (which we'd bought at my insistence at walmart, along with the beef jerky) and having to gulp down mediocre chicken fried stake at petit jean national park on christmas day.

it's a good thing my standards are low.

merry x-box

my always-astute blogmate mentioned today that one reason that it's sometimes hard to post on our blog is that she thinks of one funny thing that she wants to share, but wants to share it in some larger context instead of what it actually is, which is "this one tidbit of this one thing was funny." with that, let me share a few highlights of a very merry midwestern christmas devoid of any context...

-friday night fish fry with mb's family at "daytona north," a nascar-themed bar in which 2 pints of new glarus, one pint of various-alcohols-mixed drink, one miller and a soda cost $11
-my realization that jeans and a brown gap cable-knit sweater are not festive enough 12/23 wear, compared with mb's sister's hot pink cargo pants, sequined tank top, black velour hoodie and enough cubic zirconium to stop traffic
-mb's brother's excitement at receiving low-profile athletic socks: "wow! now i can have the look of miami in the weather of wisconsin!"
-six hours with butterknife and new-husband-of-butterknife (phob? p-hob? you really need an acronym) playing "apples to apples," a game involving matching the most appropriate (or least appropriate) noun cards to an adjective card, which sounds very nerdy, and is in fact very nerdy, but made more fun by p-hob's insistence on matching "sultry" with "anne frank" and "sensual" with "helen keller"
-the fact that 2000 years past its prime, my father still considers rome to be the center of the universe
-my dad's timeless aphorisms: "some things are like grandma and grandpa... you just leave them alone."

all in all, a very fun- and cookie-filled few days. now my blogmate and i are both back at work, both back on, again, a relatively soul-sucking project, made better by the fact that we're in it together. already we're competing for the "who was the biggest idiot today?" award. more to follow.

when life hands you lemons...

while my blogmate and i occasionally tell each other stuff over the blog, more often we engage in avid pre-blogging, either because we just can't wait for the other to find out just how witty we are (as if we don't both check the blog every 45 seconds), or because we're considering writing about something that seems a little too delicate to be blog-appropriate. over and over again, for example, we came to the conclusion that blogging about the hurricane was probably wrong.

with that, it's time to introduce you to our our good friend ck. my blogmate and i have both grown quite fond of ck this year. we openly envy her irish-ness, her extensive knowledge of north-side pubs, and the fact that she often has good work gossip. while there's abosultely nothing funny about the fact that ck just lost her aged grandmother, i did find it a little humurous that my blogmate and i clung to her every word as she described going back to ireland for the funeral, where her huge family rented out a b&b for the week and had a designated bar that served as a rendez-vous between family functions. "is it wrong to want to go to irish funeral?" i asked my blogmate.

now it's a couple of weeks later and my own aged grandmother as rapidly dwindling, throwing a major wrinkle into my holiday plans. again, nothing funny about it, except for the ridiculous packing dilemma that has ensued. ironically, it all seems to come back to the hurricane. this was supposed to be a fun week, with evenings spent at fire-place-containing wine bars (who knew there were so many?), and careful prepartion for my annual weekend in the boonies with my parents. with a suitcase full of fleece, wool socks, chocolate and bourbon i was supposed to head out to arkansas to meet my folks at an abandoned golf resort to join them in their yearly binge of anti-socialism (that the festivities were slated to take place in arkansas and not the usual northern alabama is actually also a hurricane by-product).

but now my grandmother has fallen quite ill, and i have to zip off to washington dc to see her. a lifelong new orleans resident, she's now resettled in maryland post-hurricane. hence the packing dilemma. i might be going to dc where i have to look respectable enough to talk to doctors at a nursing home. i might be going to arkansas to go hiking and have christmas dinner at the state park lodge. i might be going to a funeral in new orleans (packing challenge #1), in which case i might as well go to my high school reunion in new orleans (which justifiably would merit three weeks of wardrobe planning), and will be certainly be going to my favorite new orleans dive bars with all my friends who happen to be in town (and at high risk of running into several ex-boyfriends requiring a degree of cuteness that takes alot of effort for me). so not only the weather, but also the circumstance will be completley different in all of these potential locations. how's in the world does one pack for such a trip?

one of our research gurus at work once said, "don't ever be sad about your data- you can always find something to say about it." maybe the same thing is true about blogging. that or the filterlessness is getting out of hand.

like fine wine

i hope i get funnier with age. you'll all be rolling on your high-tech floors-of-the-future at my incredibly sharpened blog-wit, if only i age like the relatives mb and i saw this weekend.

we spent the weekend in sunny milwaukee being very good people by visiting our grandparents that we won't see over the holiday. i don't know which visit was more entertaining: mb's grandmother's tirade about how she can't stand playing cards with the others in her building anymore because they keep falling asleep mid-hand, coupled with a misguided attempt to change the cable-tv-music-station away from classic country in favor of something the kids were into nowadays (resulting in a very awkward five minutes of listening to megadeth with grandma)? or my grandfather's proud stories of getting the good gimbel's suits for $15 by befriending the german-immigrant buyer and, in a stylish holiday first, introducing mb into the family tradition of bestowing upon unwitting visitors the results of said bargain shopping? i especially loved the size-up mb got once grandpa realized there was another male to become a recipient of his stores and stores of tj maxx bargain hunting. "what size? no, i know. wait." slow pan up, slow down, then disappearing into the closet. if mb were female i think he could sue for harrassment for that ogling.

our older relatives all get to have their quirks, and we all smile and laugh about it. i can't wait. when i'm older, i want the following eccentricities:

1) long rambling pointless stories
2) a wordless single-eyebrow raise when i think people are full of it and am unable to suppress my sarcasm
3) undying love for the same sweater or pants over and over again regardless of how repetitive or how style-less
4) insistence on buying loads of cheap stuff at marshall's and tj maxx, then wondering why i have such a full closet and still nothing to wear

hmm. guess i don't have to wait for my aarp card, then.

consumer rambling

in the blissful hysteria that characterized my frenetic dash around lakeview this afternoon, having survived yet another marathon of standardized testing, i found another opportunity to basque in consumerism and draw meaning from the meaningless.

first stop: $1.99 dry cleaner where i dropped a pile of sweaters that were, let's just say it, disgusting.

then on to the bank where they seem to have gotten rid of drive-through tellers altogether, resulting in alot of fumbling with envelopes and such as i deposited off the annual hanukkah check from my parents (which, in theory, is to be spent on new laptop, but in fact, is getting spent on piecemeal on various other more impulsive purchases like mascara

mad dash through the housewares store in search only of cheese cloth (yes, i really do have use for such an item), nonetheless walking out with arms full of other kitchen items that i suddenly couldn't live without (am i really going to use a rolling pin?).

moving on to marshall's to get the socks that i abandoned this weekend when faced with the grim prospect of waiting in the pre-christmas saturday afternoon line. there i acquired a pair of sparkly j-lo brand sunglasses to replace my sadly defunct pink faux dolce & gabanna (purchased at the sadly defunct french market in new orleans) and engaged in a bizarre silent war in the purse isle with a fabulous little asian girl who seemed convinced that i was after the dooney and burke purse that she had her eye on. it was particularly silly since #1) dooney and burke purses are way out of my price range, even at marshall's, and #2) they're ugly and #3) scary girl didn't actually know which purse she wanted but was gripped by the overwhelming fear of my finding it first.

last stop: liquor store, to assemble the accoutrements needed for spiced wine (i told you i had a use for cheese cloth). i blame my blogmate (with whom i was chatting on the phone) for the frenzy of christmas beer buying that ensued- suddenly i had to find out if honey-apple beer is really yummy or really disgusting. $100 later, after shamelessly flirting with a nice looking guy in scrubs (who sadly turned out to be a med student- no surgeon for me), i walked out of binny's ready to go on a good old fashioned drinking binge.

back home, i unloaded the car and asked myself, "does lugging a big-ass box of booze up the stairs count as exercise?"

virtual blogmate

here's the other of us!

slim's nephews

i'm working my way through slim's table, a narrative written by a u of c sociologist in the '90s about time he spent with a group of men who congregated regularly at valois see-your-food cafeteria here on 53rd st. (good book, although it seems to be less about my favorite breakfast joint and more about interpersonal relationships between retired black men. really, is this author the first person to notice that black men care about each other's health and happiness, and have self-respect? also, i sincerely want to know how the middle of a college neighborhood can be repeatedly described as "the fringe of the ghetto.") anyway, recently my blogmate and i been trying to get some studying done, and remembering that we were never very good at sitting at home engrossed in book-learnin', have been trying out local coffee shops as places to read. i would like to invite the slim's table author to come study with us, because times have changed since the musty dusty 1990's.

first stop: borders hyde park at 53rd and lake park, right across the street from the infamous cafeteria, est. 2003, curious to former hyde parkers who remember the neighborhood as only jimmy's woodlawn tap and the co-op, now looking *gasp* yuppie? borders does a booming business in its coffee shop, and i got the only table left in the house. sadly, not much studying got done, as i was sandwiched between a throng of black men in their daily rotation around a chess board and a patchouli-scented circle talking about police brutality and drawing analogies between the self-actualization of black men and sperm swimming to meet the, umm, embryo. (a for effort, but i didn't have it in me to correct the birds and bees...) it was honestly like being in slim's table 2, but the repeat themes of daily gathering place as identity formation and (surprise!) self-development was even funnier in a typically white-bread location.

feeling like perhaps hyde park had gotten too cool for me to study here, i spent the weekend up in lakeview alternating book-learning with christmas shopping (and naturally demanding that my blogmate do the same). slim might have enjoyed meeting his fat white star-trek-watching brothers all gathered at the borders in lakeview engrossed in a loud conversation about their escapades with women in college... except that here the themes were bad flannel as identity formation, and apparent lack of self-respect, because the "escapades" described clearly all involved women who refused to sleep with these guys. (who tells that as bragging rights???)

we learned a lot about our neighbors this weekend. at the belmont library nobody knows how to use inside voices ("i'm LOOKing for a BOOK on alTERnative CHInese GARdening??? no, GARdening??? GGGGGAAARRdening?"), at the coffee shop someone thinks we're law students and wants us to petition for something or another, at duke of perth someone thinks we're accounting students.

i draw the following conclusions:
1) if i want a neighborhood within ten years to overflow with new luxury condo developments featuring granite countertop and hardwood flooring, i should hire someone to write about how ghetto the neighborhood is.
2) we must look young and cute if strangers think we're law or accounting students, which would make us several years younger than we actually are.
3) if i were a sociologist, it would be much easier to get work done.

yet another way to waste time...

just what i need. a website linked to my email that lets me make little pictures of a skinny, fabulous me with hip clothes and trendy backdrops.

looks can be deceiving

my blogmate convinced me to blow off my responsibilities this morning in favor of serving as moral support for the pick-up of her injured car from the body shop. in exchange, i used the trip to the north side and time off work to get a much-needed haircut.

wandering down broadway perusing my options (quickly avoiding anything with "salon" or "coiffeur" and mulling over "cost-cuttery" and "supercuts") i stepped into the cheapest one i could find with the largest array of product in the window (supercuts). as i waited my turn, i assessed that my choices of hairstylist would be either the pierced tattooed guy with the man-pixie 'do, or the cute woman with the head full of beautiful curls. since i have, well, less beautiful curls than that, i quietly kept my fingers crossed for the curly-haired woman to be ready when it was my turn.

fifteen minutes later, i was sitting happily in the chair of the man-pixie having my layers fixed amid a discussion of which was a worse drunken college activity: drunk-dialing your ex, making a mix tape of all the versions of bizarre love triangle you could get your hands on, or drunk-dialing your ex in order to play for them a mix tape of all the versions of bizarre love triangle you could get your hands on. our conversation hit a natural pause, and only then did i notice another customer, clearly in awkward agony, sitting in the chair of the beautiful curly-haired woman as she expounded upon the various ways in which her virus had caused her to have warts in her private area, and how she could have had it for years, and how it could affect her cervix. as i desperately tried to come up with a new conversation subject to not overhear any more about genital warts, the man-pixie muttered to me, "this is getting old. i've heard this topic several times already."

i win.

at least i have netflix

ok, it's not that i mean to talk about boys all the time, but as long as these things keep happening i feel obliged to report them.

the other night i assembled a small army of wingmen and women and headed off to another night of south asian theater destined to elude me. you might wonder why i'd choose to drop an entire evening struggling to keep my eyes open through a staged reading of indian political drama. my purpose: stalking my newest crush- yet a another theater guy (this one, at least, is an actor, and a darn good one at that). arguably if i had known that we'd be ambushed into staying for the post-reading discussion i would have dedided that no boy was worth it. additionally, had i known that survival would only earn me ten of the most painfully awkward minutes of my life i would have realized that this particular boy was definitely not worth it.

from this rather painful experience i conclude:

that i'm 100% in agreement with my blogmate: the only function of post-theater/film discussions is for the snotty participants to basque in the sound of their own voices,

and

that i can't shoulder the burden of awkwardness when cute bengali actor actually concludes an already uncomfortable conversation with, "hey, a bunch of people are going across the street for, um, libations... but i'm not going... i'm going home."

seriously. three hours i could have spent watching buffy the vampire slayer.

it's a small world after all

yet another reason to hate blind dates.
i came home the other day to a rather surprising message on my answering machine. a colleague/friend had called to tell me that a friend of a friend was a single, jewish, sociology grad-student at u of c. if you calculate the odds, i'll bet there's more than one single, jewish, sociology grad-student at u of c, but i had a hunch that this might be the same single, jewish sociology grad-student at u of c to whom my blogmate introduced me a couple of years ago. and i was right.
the last time i check there were 9 million people living in chicagoland. how did this happen?

multicultural high-brow

we seem to have stumbled onto a good theme here.

during that same evening of drinking with my co-workers that precipitated this whole train of thought, i asked the jameson-snubber (js?) if he had really sent me a message the other day in portuguese. i hadn't thought about it much at the time, since we were busy and i figured out what he was talking about, but three days later was wondering why he'd picked portuguese to thank me for my help. so we discussed his various travels a little, established that his portuguese came from three weeks visiting friends in portugal plus its similarity to other romance languages, etc.

i mentioned that if js had a need to communicate with his co-workers in portuguese, i'd be happy to be the recipient but he might also try my friend dwtacc. his surprise at her brazilian heritage was entertaining in that everyone thinks she's every ethnicity but her own, but funnier was his doubt that they'd communicate well, what with the whole portugal/brazil thing. i know he just meant that different countries have different dialects and all that, but it really sounded like js thought his three weeks in portugal would be too pure for her life of understanding the language. i let him dig himself a little hole before telling him i was sure her undergraduate portuguese major would surely iron out those differences.

i don't intend to disparage the poor jameson-snubber who just didn't know dwtacc to know what he was saying (although i'm secretly hoping that dwtacc will somehow use this information to her advantage and then tell me about it). i only use it as an example of my growing theory that prizing individuality and unique experiences has its limits. we all get through education and interviewing for jobs by talking ourselves up, trying to convince everyone to hire us because we have something special that they can't get anywhere else, packaging our eclectic experiences like they grant us a unique position to understand the world. but does it hold up? i think a set of experiences gets you into a certain job, social circle, academic standing, whatever, and after that initial acceptance those experiences are pretty much a version of what everyone else has done. is it special that js speaks some portuguese? yes, if he worked in a gas station in northern wisconsin and was trying to get out. and yes, in that i don't speak portuguese. but does it make him better at his job, or funnier over a beer, or quicker getting someone to sleep with him?

i kind of wish i'd spent some time in college working the cash register at fleet farm instead of all the resume-padders, so i could be less of a hypocrite while i rant.

ps: blogmate, mb just found the jason mraz cd i bought before moving to chicago.

the 3 p's of high-browing

sadly, i think my blogmate is right. those who use the word proletariat seldom are the proletariat. that was probably even true in the age of emile zola.

nevertheless, i give full credit for use of the word, and would like to add a few more to the list. i think you'll find that proletariat is the only one allusive to gloriousness.

my second favorite (after some debate and some time spent on dictionary.com) is plebeian. my former roommate (also known as the bride) introduced me to the word during the long debate about what we were going to name our (now tragically deceased) kitten. i was voting for miko, but tb decided that he was just to plebeian for such a sophisticated name. we ended up settling on emile, which (in retrospect) is only relieved of snotty connotations by its reference to the aforementioned writer.

finally there's pedestrian, as in "your taste in literature is so pedestrian." this ridiculous statement was made by one barista to another (i overheard it when i, myself, was employed as a coffee girl), who apparently failed to realize how absurd it sounded. baristas, admittedly are a bizarre breed of service industry types. really they're lower on the totem pole than waiters, cocktail waitresses and bartenders, but tend to be more artsy and well-read, thus feeling entitled to call other peoples' taste pedestrian.

i don't know what else to say. power to the people?

down with the ship: take 2

in the ongoing saga of work being especially soul-sucking these days, my immediate team and i decided to re-invent a long-standing work tradition. it is customary that at the end of a long month, teams celebrate by going out to dinner together. it may only be november 16th, but we decided that this month has gone on far long enough, and decided to pre-empt the end-of-month civilized dinner with a mid-month beer binge. lovely.

the highlight of the evening?

one of the guys was expounding on the virtues of grey goose, and how he doesn't think jameson is good enough (and my faithful readers already know what an affront this is to me) compared with single-malt something-or-other, and his eighteen languages that he speaks, and his mastery of technology, etc... suddenly one of the women, just as educated as this guy - but two beers apparently goes a longer way for her - starts shouting...

"you have to learn to live with the PEOPLE! join the proletariat! i am the proletariat! look, i use little words! you're all, 'look at me, i'm slumming it! i ate duck pate instead of goose! tee hee!'"

now, as i argued, the true proletariat doesn't know the word proletariat, but regardless, i think plans were made to drink schlitz together, which works out well for me.

going down with the ship

while 99.9% of our loyal readers already know what it is that my blogmate and i do for a living, and while the few that don't probably don't care that much (or have already figured it out because, let's face it, we're pretty transparent)i think that i can preserve our (flimsy) cloak of anonymity and still dedicate some time and internet space to ranting about our profession and its current state of suckiness. again, as 99.9% of you are close personal friends of ours, you've probably already noticed that we're in foul moods these days, and if you've got any sense you're steering way clear of us... unless, of course, you are mb and can't really avoid the cranky or you are one of our colleagues and are just as miserable as we are.
at the end of the day, i suspect that things are seeming extra bad because our long, grueling hours of work all seem to for naught. it's bad enough that we're never seeing our beds or bed partners (or, in my case, failing to acquire bed partners), but our efforts are seeming increasingly futile. as my boss put it today, "we're basically rearranging deck chairs on the titanic." my blogmate describes it as soul sucking, my other boss just keeps saying, "my flight for fiji leaves in 20 minutes," and i keep scribbling the words "giant martini" on bits of paper and passing the notes to my coworkers.
however you want to describe it, it just ain't good.

the devil is in the details

i know it's been a long time since we've posted. work has become something i can only describe as soul-sucking for the last few weeks, and also, i'm lazy. but here is a brief amusing tale:

mb is well known for being a very numbers-oriented guy. doesn't understand the point of competition in music or art or really anything that can't be quantified. life has gotten very good for mb with the advent of google earth, now allowing him to measure every run, bike ride, and swim in lake michigan, so never again would he have to (gasp) *estimate* the distance of his workouts.

enter the upcoming hustle up the hancock race. mb decided to register himself. and me, for that matter, which is going to be a separate funny story. currently i can't hustle much of anywhere. i can sort of saunter to my coffee, meander to my beer, wander to the tv... are those races? anyway, mb was distraught to realize he didn't know exactly how far in miles the hustle-up-the-hancock is. when he asked me, i suggested that it would be impossible to calculate without knowing the pitch of the steps, width, etc.

undaunted, the next day mb showed up with detailed diagrams of staircases and an estimate for his upcoming hustle. where, you might ask, did he get this information?

"i happened to run across an office building stairwell standards manual."

he *happened* to run across a *what*?

i laughed for two solid minutes.

mb, i mock because i love.

skin deep change

my blogmate and i are always talking about how we should probably update our filterless profile a little bit in order to better reflect our cultural evolution. i, for one, am dragging my feet, largely due to laziness, but also because deep down i know that these changes are mostly cosmetic. while i've softened my position on camisoles and pointy shoes (to the extent that i actually wear them from time to time) i don't think things have changed that much. another fall in hyde park- when over pumpkin lattes we (okay i) gaze at the fleece-vest-wearing shaggy-haired boys- no doubt the future urban planners and comp lit professors of america. yet again i'm a slave to post-season baseball in spite of my lack of regular season commitment. i've acquired a few cds, some of them good, developing my love of "bubble-popping" (thanks blogmate) euro-trash music, and am only occasionally able to distinguish between the good 80s music that i was too unsophisticated to appreciate the first time around and the new stuff that sounds just like it. and though i still haven't managed to go to the map room or get back to cleo's i'm adding the bungalow lounge to my to-do list of bars, at least while they're serving pumpkin martinis. i guess the problem with cataloging my progress is having to face my lack thereof.

screening for creepies

when i was just getting to know my good blogmate (she'd correctly surmised that i had no idea how to drive in a snow storm and was riding home with me) she told me about a benign but weird guy from work who'd apparently misinterpreted her friendliness as romantic interest and started calling her at home. "i've never been good at screening for creepies," she said, in explanation for how she'd allowed such a thing to happen.

given my heinous run of bad dates you'd think that i'd be better at screening for creepies, but it seems that i've allowed the infiltration of a similarly benign, though decidedly weirder creepy.

by the time his e-mail came i was getting pretty used to hearing from random, long-lost friends. it was in the weeks following katrina and the "oh my god is your family OK?" shout-out was getting pretty routine.

the back story is that jb is a friend of a friend who i dated for something like 3 weeks my freshman year of college (yes, 10 years ago). by "dated," i mean got drunk and kissed at a series of parties before figuring out that he was a weirdo at which point i stopped returning his phone calls. he was very nice, pretty cute, and i think very smart (physics major, which at the time impressed me) but something about him was really off.

so 10 years later he sends a random, "hey i hope you don't think this is weird but blah blah hurricane, blah blah saw our mutual friend at the high school reunion and i just thought i'd see what you were up to" email. a quick background check (i.e. called our mutual friend) confirmed that he was just as weird as ever, so after appropriate delay (3 or 4 days) i wrote back a cordial, "hey, family is fine, i live in chicago, how are you?" sort of thing. he then came back with a much longer email in which he revealed that 1) he really is a weirdo an 2) he's still an undergrad. with that, i put an end to the interaction (mentally), deleted the email, and left it at that.

a week later it came- ANOTHER email. this one a "hey, just wanted to make sure you weren't not answering because i sounded weird- sometimes i come off weird in emails, by the way i'm coming to chicago soon do you want to get together?" had he been more specific about when he was coming i might have found the energy to fabricate a specific excuse, but under the circumstances it seemed meaner to throw a blanket, "gee, sorry, i'm really busy," than to yet again ignore the email and hope that he'd go away.

fortunatley he doesn't seem to have picked any serious creepy, stalker-ish attributes and i suspect that this little episode has come to a close... but it's left me asking myself a couple of questions:
#1) how did i let this happen?
#2) how can anyone be so awkward over email?

for the former, i have to be honest with myself and admit that 1) i was flattered (initially) and 2) i was secretly hoping that he'd shed his creepy tendencies in college and become a nice, cute, smart guy.

the latter is more troubling. i have contended, both on this blog and in my frequent and adamant refusals to go online for dating purposes, that ANYONE can project a cool persona over email. i myself often suggest online that i am witty, calm, and collected when, in fact, i possess none of these attributes. that this guy not only fails to supress his weirdness, but suggests that his emails exaggerate it is pretty concerning. sometimes honesty just isn't the best policy.

ten things i hate about france

i suspect that it's misuse of the blog (disrespectful maybe) for me to dump out two weeks worth of accumulated observations and rants, mostly for the purpose of distracting myself from the unsavory thing that seems to be happening to my computer. as much of an internet junkie as i've become since my acquisition of DSL, i'm fairly uptight when it comes to downloading stuff, and am at a loss to explain why i've suddenly been invaded by some kind of nasty virus that in one feld swoop deleted half of my pictures (moments after i'd completed the laborious task of reorganizing them). i've been sitting here for the last two hours, agonizingly watching norton do his thing, and need to think about something else.

without further ado:

#1) bats
#2) stinky cheese
#3) public bathrooms
#4) the way that train platforms, underground walkways, and even secluded historical monuments all smell like public bathrooms
#5) lack of water pressure
#6) bunking with my grandmother (never in my life have i ever heard anyone snore so loud)

actually- i can't even come up with ten things. i'm a hopeless francophile and might as well admit it.

how to succeed in business (without really trying)

today over lunch at work, a group of co-workers and i couldn't help but shift our conversation to the new student worker, and her apparent lack of disregard for basic rules when trying to make a good first impression. in the last two weeks we've seen her ignore her main responsibilities, lie about completing assigned basic tasks ("did you look up that report?" "umm, i don't know." "can you go look it up and get back to us?" "ok [disappears for five minutes]." "well, do you have the report?" "what?" etc.), leave important meetings and march back in twenty minutes later with a mouth full of very crunchy food...

i take the position that it is not difficult to at least look like you care at work. i took the liberty at lunch of starting a brief list of ways to feign interest and competence:

1) head control: nod slowly and meaningfully at key points during meetings. avoid eye contact with the speaker, squinting a little to indicate concentration, until a key point has been finished and you are sure you will not be asked to answer a question or take on a new project. seek out eye contact and look like you've just understood something very clearly when a superior's pet teaching principles are made; then speed your meaningful nod just a teeny bit.
2) if you are falling asleep and you're being watched, start dutifully writing down a list... of something. groceries, errands, anything. take frequent breaks like you're taking notes on the conversation. you can, of course, take notes on your actual job, but it's not necessary.
3) if having trouble maintaining a look of interest, maintain eye contact with your co-workers' more stylish shoes, and make mental notes of who might have new footwear you can complement them on later. if your co-workers' shoes are boring, consider buying new shoes yourself and admiring your own feet.
4) if, god forbid, you are asked to report on a project's status, take a deep breath and then do not slow down. say everything you can in one breath as fast as you can, leaving no breaks for someone to correct you, ask you a question or assign you more work. if you have no idea how to explain something, look your boss in the eye and say "i think we all expected this;" if you don't have hard data conclude "the trends are stable;" if you didn't finish an assigned task, tell them "i need to follow up on this to be absolutely sure."

what else? everyone's job is unique, but i think most rules apply to all jobs. can anyone help my poor student? add to the filterless school of fake?

the honorable mention for best effort goes to...

next year i'm skipping marathon season and heading straight for the wild scallion urban adventure race. i think my training is well started.

my day started out innocently enough, with a plan to head to little italy to cheer on my good friend dwtacc at mile 18 of the chicago marathon. i was all armed with mp3 player, water bottle, asics, and a pancake breakfast so i could run her in the last 8 miles. i made it successfully to downtown via metra and out to taylor on the blue line, and found out from the starbucks-sponsored pacing info station that she had just passed the halfway mark. knowing i had plenty of time to catch her, i relaxed and watched such notable passers-by as kermit the frog, a few elvises, a farmer chasing his cow... but by the time i'd heard dj buono play his third round of the same motivational italian techno (blogmate, he totally has the same cd you just bought me!), and i still hadn't seen dwtacc, i headed back to starbucks to find out where she was... and they said she'd passed me an hour ago.

feeling deflated since i'd been planning for months to run her in, i trudged back to the el, and called mb and another friend to commiserate. they assured me that i could get the blue line back in time to catch her big finish. just as i stepped onto the train, though, my friend called me back to announce that according to the starbucks(tm) pacing system, dwtacc's pace had dropped off and i could catch her in the south loop if i ran. so i got off the train at halsted and started hauling through the industrial southwest downtown as fast as my legs could carry me, dodging buses, tired marathoners wrapped in foil, loiterers at the greyhound station, all while switching phone calls between mb and my friend who were glued to the pacing screens on their computers. just as i got to the finish line, mb called to tell me that the computer said she wasn't past 24.8 yet, so i could get her for the last mile. feeling inspired once again, i took off down south michigan weaving around police barriers to try and find her... until mb called me two minutes later with "yeah, never mind... she finished five minutes ago." doh.

from this attempt i conclude the following:

1) does the wild scallion include a segment of jumping curbs and police barriers while talking on a cell phone? 'cause someone should want me on their team. i ruled.
2) if starbucks is the new sponsor of the race pacing system, i think this is another reason to prefer caribou.

happy birthday, dwtacc. sorry, girl. it wasn't for lack of trying.

blog-iversary: a year in review

so i honestly thought when i proposed starting a blog to my good friend, that there was NO WAY it would last more than three posts, or that anyone but us would read it, or that there would be things funny enough to warrant review. and it might not actually be that funny. but in honor of the one-year birthday of filterless, a few memorable lines (to us, anyway...)

1) only people with socially stigmatizing diseases get to live fun lives.

2) i had no idea you could have an awkward silence all by yourself.

3) lesson#3: kick self for not liking the guy who tried to make the 3rd date a weekend in napa

4) i have mixed feelings on a one-street ghetto. how can something both be an oxymoron but also true?

5) i've spent the last 2 days laid up in bed, dying a slow painful death of what i can only imagine is tuberculosis.

6) whatever the reason that rcfog didn't immediately (or in the face of my amazing persistence) succumb to my adorable charm, i'm sure that i might be in more favorable standing had i not hit the bottle quite so hard. it's hard to know when alcohol switches from social lubricant to enough rope to hang yourself.

7) i feel like there's a lesson in here somewhere, but i think i'm just too hungover to see it.

8) the journey of a thousand miles begins with one plastic penis

9) i am anxiously waiting to accompany my blogmate to unitarian service, because i heard the classical music is good, and because i have a theory that unitarians are skinnier than average but have more-frequent-than-average receding hairlines and evanston-professor's-wife-ness, and i feel it's my job to scope the place for men for my blogmate while she gets her religion on.

10) in the spitty, foggy haze that characterized my drive to work this morning, double non-fat latte in hand as a monday morning self-indulgence, i got cut off by "mac dog 1," as designated by the license plate of the big-ass black sedan, driven by what i can only presume was a big ass.

11) how many adjectives do you take in your coffee? the issue at hand: whether schmoofy lattes are rendered socially acceptable when they are seasonal. is it somehow OK to order a nonfat decaf pumpkin spice latte because of its association with autumn and halloween? clearly, ordering a soy halfcaf sugar free vanilla double latte is just annoying.

une fille et son blog

as we near the one year mark, we're pushing our blog to the limit, this time with a live, transatlantic broadcast. once again, i've decided to spend my precious weeks of vacation kickin' it with my french peeps. if you're constructing an image of me as a chique parisian sipping espresso in a cafe, thoughtfully jotting down poetic musings about life along side of the seine, think again. my blogmate and i have done the math, and in the end, the best we can figure is that life in rural france is not unlike life in rural wisconsin, complete with monster truck rallies (even if no one would come with me last year) and above-ground swimming pools. i'm fairly certain that the french even have party-barge equivalents, although theirs tend to cruise down canals of more historic importance, complete with dilapidated (but fully operational) locks. while the annual family stroll down one of said canals, marvelling not only at their 300 year old stone work, but also at the elite party-barge occupants isn't on my short list of favorite french countryside pastimes, here are a few that make the cut:
#1: sheep shearing as a spectator sport - i'm SOL this year as it's too cold for scheduled de-wooling
#2: calf/lamb birthing, also as spectator sport
#3: assorted berry-picking
#4: sleeping until noon and blaming it on jet-lag
#5: inept tennis playing on the court that doubles as the school playground and site of the annual town bonfire
#6: tearing through town (population 200) with the windows down with the music thumping, drawing the locals from their houses so they can stare at me in slack-jawed amazement
#7: capitalizing on french etiquette - drop by to see anyone and you're guaranteed a cup of coffee
#8: political sparring with my uncles who hold me personally responsible for george bush's existence - i come from a long ine of registered socialists
#9: remastering the french keyboard
#10: pre-dinner apperitif with strange, yummy liquors and tasty snacks

you're getting exhausted just reading about it aren't you. i'd complain but instead i just say c'est la vie...

"thank god we can choose our friends"

as most of you know (or have easily extrapolated), my blogmate and i are pretty good friends. to the extent that i'm a fairly well-adjusted person, i can often credit my emotional well-being to her willingness to listen to the details of my life as told in play-by-play form, and from her i get all sorts of validation... or at least distraction. it's not really her style to talk me off yet another ledge by telling me that i'm a good person- her brand of friend-therapy is usually to derail me from my self-destructive rants by taking me shopping, or by finding my trademark self-deprecation so funny that i, in turn, at least feel good about my budding sense of humor.
and while she was pretty apologetic in giving me athletic socks and fudge for my birthday this year, i actually thought that this was a wonderful constellation of gifts and was yet again thankful to have such a considerate blogmate... especially when there was a second round of birthday present a few weeks later involving a reversible strawberry purse.
it was thus with great delight that i presented her with her birthday gifts this afternoon. on the surface it was standard stuff: a book and a CD. for the record i think that book + CD is not only a good present, but kind of a classy one, and i have used the synergistic power of these items to impress a few (now ex-) boyfriends over the years. but as you also know, thoughtful and classy aren't really my strong suits... instead, my blogmate is now the proud owner of an out-of-print (but available on amazon) sociology book (somebody's dissertation) that showcases the goings on at our very own valois (that's "vuh loise") "see your food" cafeteria on 53rd street AND "italian dance anthems + euro hits," which i had unwrapped, listened to, and burned before i gave it to her.

among other things, i think we might be getting to the bottom of our collective musical bankruptcy.

blogger in the big apple

here i am in brooklyn heights, once again wishing that i was as cool as everyone around me. i'm now convinced that no matter who you and where you're from, you always feel like a dork when you're in new york (i really wish that didn't rhyme that way). people in this town just look better, wear better clothes, hang out in better bars, have a better assortment of deep fried foods at their neighborhood festivals.
transiently, at least, i've felt like i was getting the hang of it (or that it was just rubbing off). after a satisfying day of wandering around the city, my friend mbk and i met my brother at an unbelievably cute bar in the village (exposed brick, good music, waitress that was so pretty and stylish that i couldn't stop staring at her- although that may have been because she'd apparently forgotten to wear pants). even my brother has become trendy- i'm not clear on how he's making his hair do that or how he's pulling off such a vintage-y look when i know that he only shops the clearance rack at old navy. we had dinner at a vietnamese restaurant in chinatown (somehow i've randomly ended at the same vietnamese restaurant in chinatown three times) and, with weird fried sesame rice dough balls stuffed with red bean paste in hand, dove headfirst into the mayhem that was the 78th annual san genarro festival in little italy. the streets were lined with all sorts of interesting vendors- rosaries, fried oreos, pope figurines, fried twinkies, faux-lv purses, sweet breads. we were very disappointed by the much-anticipated "shoot the freak" game, which turned out to be a stationary guy in a protective suit getting paint-balled by little kids. equally dissappointing were the world's smallest woman and the world's smallest horse.
i'm leaving new york with one of those uber-stylish necklaces bought from a street vendor in times square (that's remarkably similar to something my grandmother wears) and a $16 shiseido eyelash curler (bought at the shiseido outlet in chinatown- it should have been $25). that i'm making these kinds of purchases suggests to me that i've crossed some sort of line into fashion-land. the lessons i've learned are these: 1) it's all about accessories and 2) i shouldn't be allowed to buy anything within 2 weeks of meticulously pouring through the harper's bazaar fall fashion double-issue.

i want to be a non-conformist, just like everybody else

south park last night had stan joining the goth kids following his break-up with wendy. ("dude, if you want to be a non-conformist you have to drink coffee like us...") today, in the midst of a long-overdue but typically ridiculous adventure involving my blogmate and i driving in circles in the north suburbs trying to find suitably low-brow lunch in an office park, we reviewed our own phases of music identity, and mostly why they'd failed. highlights?

1) consensus that we'd both tried to do the phish/widespread panic jam band scene, but while we liked the music on cd, didn't like the live scene enough, mostly because we weren't high enough, and that it takes too much pot for a newbie to be high enough to enjoy phish solos.
2) consensus that we'd both tried the raver look, but while we both enjoyed the baggy jeans and little dr. seuss t-shirts, that i was vaguely surprised to discover that the look seemed to come with bad techno music, and that my blogmate was unwilling to drop acid and lose hours of brain control just in order to wear cute t-shirts.
3) me reassuring my blogmate that i never really was a goth, but that i had lots of friends who were goths, and that my college roommate and i spent lots of saturdays making fun of them as sport.
4) both of us going through a surprisingly angst-less nine inch nails phase.

fast forward to current musical tastes:
5) my blogmate's desire to be a better music critic, but unwillingness to spend time learning about new bands, and resultant embarrassment when around our much more music-cool friends m and n.
6) my desire to like indie rock, but as i eloquently stated, "my problem with indie rock is that i don't like it..." and "i kind of just want to listen to happy music like jack johnson without the embarrassment of actually liking jack johnson."

so our tastes seem to be informed by our sloth.
enter butters, also from last night's episode: "i'd rather be a crying little pussy than a faggy goth kid."

but while we may be lazy on the discovery forefront, there's no end to how much energy we can spend hating mainstream trends. i was pleased to discover:

7) i don't love coldplay x&y. it sounds like old u2 but more boring. i do, however, love the vh1 i-love-the-whatever-decade episode where two guys hypothesize that everything looks more dramatic when you play coldplay in the background, and promptly re-enact a) touching each other, and b) touching each other to coldplay in a slow-mo gay-love-scene demonstration. as my blogmate said, "coldplay makes great homoerotic background music."

so. since i think our readership has more energy and taste than we do, we hereby invite suggestions for new phases of music and artists we should like. criteria? a) we are cynical but not angry. b) no broken-down-and-self-important (i.e. counting crows). c) we accept "barbecue" as a valid genre.

thank you for your support.

you had to be there?

while i find the intricacies of my love life (or lack thereof) endlessly fascinating, i've had to accept that this topic probably isn't nearly as interesting to our loyal blog readership, and i'm trying to cut back. in making this decision i've discovered that once i've talked about boys, shopping, and beer, i'm pretty much tapped out. having exhausted my repertoire but remaining steadfast in my refusal to let the blog die, i'm taking on a new approach: blogging about events i didn't witness and know almost nothing about:

as a good number of you already know, my blogmate's brother got hitched to butterknife last weekend. as a preamble, i'll tell you that i only met my blogmate's brother (whom i have no choice but to dub mbmb until i remember what other name we use for him) once over icecream (at the sadly out-of-business ice dreams) a couple of years ago, and have never met butterknife. nonetheless, i've been hanging over my blogmate's every word for months as the wedding plans have unfolded. come to think of it, i seem to recall being kept pretty current on the ring-buying and proposal as well. anyway, as my blogmate is out on yet another outdoor adventure weekend (it seems i have wedding planning and outdoor envy) i decided to take on the rendering of the wedding story.

my personal favorite anecdote involves one "great uncle father bob" who made a last minute announcement that he'd be joining the priest up on altar during the ceremony, resulting in butterknife's rather flamboyant entry into the church which involved what i can only guess is more profanity than is customary in a place of worship.

apparently butterknife was able to settle down a little after "chillin' in the bride get ready room" and proceeded to have a very nice wedding in spite of the throng at the altar and the occasional outburst from the audience. i'm told that the bride and groom landed on a somewhat whimsical priest who takes the fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants approach to wedding ceremonies (i.e. rehearsals are for sissies) and managed to grossly miscalculate the handling of communion.

from my blogmate's recounting i can also tell you that there was a posse of rowdy engineers from mbmb's days as a rowdy engineer, the expected number of terse, funny comments from my blogmate's terse, funny dad, and the rather interesting cultural interaction that results from hard-core italian meets hard-core wisconsin dutch. for those of you who are neither one of those (present company included), rest assured that we're all included, even if we are lumped into great-uncle father bob's culturally-sensitive wedding-prayer category of "whatever."

i'm very proud of several of the wedding guests, most notably m for showing up with her sassy new haircut and managing to get good and drunk, n for managing to work bon jovi lyrics into his best man speech, and my good blogmate, who managed not to fall flat on her face in her uber-stylish but cripplingly high-heeled custom-made, sparkly steve maddens.

neither rain nor sleet nor hail

on the way home from work today i passed a postal police car and amused myself most of the way home trying to imagine what sort of postal emergency would warrant the use of such a vehicle. i understand that there are all sorts of legitimate postal crimes and that mail fraud is a very serious offense but it's hard for me to picture the elaborate and highly dangerous mail heist that would involve the use of lights and sirens and high-speed chases.

i sniggered all the way down lakeshore drive until i passed soldier field which is currently being used as the staging grounds for the american idol trials. not being of the artisitc persuasion myself, maybe i don't understand what it is to be an aspiring vocalist in search of glamour, fame, and oodles of money- but as i passed the throng of american idol potentials wrapped all the way around a football stadium (i think to the tune of 50,000) it occurred to me that maybe i'm the odd one out.

to wrap up my thursday afternoon ponderings i have to ask myself: wasn't one nauseating reese witherspoon romantic comedy that shared the name of an overplayed pop song enough?

don't buy me some peanuts or cracker jacks, because they'll get stuck in my teeth

my apologies to all real baseball fans out there. but last night my blogmate and i scored free tickets along with two co-workers to watch the cubs play the cincinnati reds at wrigley field in what will be the most amazing seats i will ever see in my lifetime: 6th row behind home plate. and how did we celebrate the occasion? old style in plastic cups and the most intelligent baseball discourse i'm sure home plate has ever heard:

"sooo... three strikes and you're out... and then three outs until the next team is up... and then when both teams are done, that's an inning, right?"
"wait, which one's derrek lee?"
"aaawwww.... oh, wait, that was a good thing! yay!"
"hold on; i'm trying to see if derrek lee is cute. i can't see his face..."
"no, it's not his face that's cute..."
"does anyone think it's weird that they all wear white uniforms when they slide in the dirt?"
"does anyone think their uniforms look like pajamas?"
"does anyone know if the uniforms are a shirt and pants or all one piece?"
"hey, you said you didn't care about baseball! you're totally watching."
"how can i tell if it's a ball or a strike?"
"how can i tell who's winning?"
"i'm glad we're behind the net. i'm afraid of fly balls."
"did you know garciaparra is married to mia hamm?"
"girl, i know that part!"
"twinset saw them together at bijam...."
"do you think mia hamm is here?"
"quick! has anyone seen any celebrities? it's my dream to watch baseball next to john cusack."

all you can tolerate

mb and i spent labor day weekend in the upper peninsula of michigan, enjoying a fun few days of mountain biking, hiking and swimming in a very wavy lake superior. i'm sure i could find something in me about nature or getting away from the city or something, but instead let me focus briefly on one of the best things the northwoods has to offer: the all-you-can-eat buffet.

coming in at number three for funniest all-you-can-eat: friday night fish fry. while quite welcome after twenty miles of biking dirt roads along cliffs, there's something funny about a whole table with nothing but piles of unmarked battered [presumably] fish. i didn't care really what it was after being outside all day, but it's still a little disturbing.

number two goes to the restaurant next door's breakfast buffet, which advertised a selection of hot foods plus a "fruit bar." excellent, we thought. it would be nice to eat something fresh. but "fruit bar" turned out not to hold actual fruit, but four different colors of fruit whip (you know, that cream stuff with colored pieces of some kind?), lemon pudding, and grapes.

but solidly above the pack was the new lunch buffet near my parents' place, which i attended on returning to their house to prepare for my brother's wedding. $5.45 buys you a ticket to a chinese-japanese-mongolian-barbecue-dim-sum-sushi-american-italian smorgasbord. you know you're dining in style when a glittering lite-brite-esque picture of an eagle on a mountain hovers over ham-and-pickle sushi next to 8 options of greasy chicken pieces next to tater tots next to egg rolls in which nobody told the chef you can't substitute sauerkraut for regular cabbage, all topped off with a soft-serve ice cream machine.

mb said it best: the reason we got higher educations and left our small hometowns was so we could come back and look down our noses at them for sport... but we don't really want to lose token-hick-in-the-city status either. so i think we have to employ selective memory (if the first buffet wasn't very good, why did we think the next two would be better?) and a love of the ridiculous. if we keep putting ourselves in all-you-can-eat country, we can enjoy our assumed superiority with statements like "really, mother, you must know about pedicures" and "what do you mean, there's no starbucks or jamba juice for the next 100 miles???" and when we come back to the city we can claim disgust over the unhealthy food we just ate over some butt-firming pseudo-yoga (thanks, blogmate!) before deciding we're better than the yuppie frills of the city and going in search of a city fish fry and cheap beer. good thing we don't mind contradictions.

memories of portia

my college roommate had a hedgehog named portia, who was adorable but angry and dumb, a bad combination. she used to run away from us to the corners of the room, where she promptly got confused under the radiator, rolled up in a little ball, but then was too big to get out from under the radiator. she stayed there one time for hours until she figured out that if she would relax she could escape. kind of a live chinese finger trap, i guess. anyway, in honor of portia, here's a blogpet for us. he even gets stuck in the corner of the screen:

adopt your own virtual pet!

hair of the up-dog

i've allowed the accumulation of an unfortunate amount of blog backlog, so i'm putting a couple of blog projects on hiatus.
one is my thus far unproductive attempt to put some sort of humorous spin on the hurricane aftermath. not there's anything funny about it really, but as a new orleans native i was able to make some fairly amusing observations about my parents as they settled into their newfound refugee status.

yet unblogged is the account of my adventurous, pre-hurricane weekend in atlanta. in and of itself, it was the uneventful visiting of friends, punctuated by the expected amount of drinking and silliness, and the unexpected morning of frantic parent-finding, as we realized that all of our families were in mid-evacuation by the time we dragged our hungover selves out of bed.
more surprsing was my realization that i do so many things with only marginal proficiency. one of my atlanta friends kicked off the weekend by taking me to her saturday morning power yoga class, an experience that turned out to be quite humbling. having only been exposed to butt-firming pseudo-yoga, i was totally unprepared for the pain and misery that accompanies doing actual yoga in a 90 degree room. i think the instructor (guru?) had a hard time keeping a straight face.
that night we moved on to another trendy activity... and i got my ass handed to me once again, this time by salsa dancing. let's be clear that i never pretended to be particularly skilled when it came to yoga or salsa, but i knew enough lingo to have convinced not only my friends, but apparently myself that i could at least fake it for a couple of hours.
i stand corrected.

a small, balding cultural phenomenon?

every girl attracts their own brand of weirdo. for example, dwtacc draws every dark-haired medium-skinned guy with an accent in the chicagoland area, because they all think she's their particular brand of ethnic. i am much less exotic - i am a magnet for vaguely nerdy short men with receding hairlines. not that they're trying to ask me out - they all want to tell me about their dreams for a fancy car.

this started back in college when i drew the short stick at work and had to go to the copy room with the weird guy to make new brochures or something. he kicked things off with a very disturbing beavis-and-butthead cornholio impression (i'd like to see you keep your composure when you've never seen beavis and butthead before and suddenly a small man yanks his shirt above his head and starts screeching about his bunghole), and then, seeing my discomfort, proceeded to convince me of his classiness by telling me all about the money he planned to make, the fancy car he would drive, and the fine home he would own, once he became a rich lawyer. since i was in the middle of a bunch of rural sociology classes run by hippies that taught things like sustainable agriculture and cooperative business practices, this didn't get him very far. later, when i moved to chicago, i was at dinner with a friend when he started, again, telling me about the car he would buy after his promotion. when i didn't look impressed enough, he asked me "wouldn't you rather date someone with a nice car?" i tried to explain that i was uncomfortable with the idea of spending so much money on a luxury item and was much happier taking the bus out for burgers, he just looked confused. more recently, at work one of my co-workers parked himself next to my desk and started telling me how much he hated minivans, and hoped to buy either an suv or little sports car. unprompted, he told me "i feel like someone's car should be sexy and support their lifestyle."

this is becoming a disturbing trend. i'm not surprised that short balding men want compensatory cars, or that any men hope electronics ownership can bring them sex... i just want to know why they all want to tell me about it. it can't be because of my deep appreciation for cars; my own colorful auto history has consisted of a 1979 chevy impala wagon with am radio and no heat, and my current 96 plymouth whose check-engine light warns me regularly that i am about to have unscheduled stops in random places throughout the midwest. it can't be because they want to date me, or i would hope they wouldn't share their whole m.o. can someone help me think of a way to remove the "please, share your thinly veiled desperation" sticker from my forehead?

the symco society pages (aka i never met a latte i didn't like)

has anyone ever read those reeeeally small-town newspapers? or columns about some neighboring village with no real news to report except blurbs like "mr. and mrs. fred jones were at the home of violet and jack fisher last evening for a game of bridge"? it occurs to me that our blog reads a little like that... with that guiding principle in mind, a tale of two girls trying to run errands on a thursday afternoon:

my good friend twinset and i had both finished work early on thursday, and since i'd been on long work shifts recently and had some amount of errands to do for my brother's upcoming wedding, she kindly agreed to be my chauffeur around the city doing what girls love best (buying things). it seemed like a fun idea...

in retrospect, twinset and i firmly believe that the whole thing went bad the minute she tried to drive down 53rd street toward martin luther king dr. to take locals to little italy instead of lake shore drive. lesson #1: don't EVER drive down 53rd st in hyde park. it's a commercial strip where, for some reason, NOBODY is in a hurry and EVERYONE double-parks or just stops in intersections to wave to their friends.

ten minutes later, we had made it ten blocks and were on our way. we arrived finally in little italy for the successful procurement of candied almonds for wedding favors, plus cannoli and chocolate treats for twinset and me. perfect, we thought. now just some lattes for the road and we'll be on our way. lesson #2: although you might think a local italian bakery is a better place to buy lattes than starbucks, you would be wrong. twinset and i are not coffee snobs, and have both been known to drink whatever swill comes our way. but this was foul. my dad taught me that no self-respecting italian drinks cappuccino after 10 am, so either this was passive-aggressive vengeance for us ordering the wrong drink at the wrong time, or the milk had been sitting out since 10am cappuccino hour.

latte-less but still determined to have a good afternoon, we promptly got stuck in traffic a few more times, punctuated by twinset telling me things like "i just know this leads to armitage" only to find ourselves in industrial parks, and eventually found our way to the last stop - trader joe's. lesson #3: don't tell the driver of the car anything like "see, [twinset], i'm so glad i'm with you! all of these things might have been frustrating, but as long as we don't let it get to us it's fine..." because that statement might precipitate, say, running said car alongside a cement pole and getting big scratches in the nice clean paint job. doh.

but a good time was still had by all. i got my errands done, twinset determined that her husband would never see the car scratches before she got to the body shop, and we laughed over her stories of finding herself at the gym on a treadmill next to one of chicago's national celebrities. anyone who can describe said unnamed celebrity as "my GOD, he smells DELICIOUS even after he's done running!" can't be too mad at me for the inconvenience of the afternoon. i hope.

the bottom of the barrel

i came home from work the other day feeling particularly defeated and decided to curl up on the couch in my favorite pink pajama bottoms to drown my sorrows in three-buck-chuck and spend some quality time with the gilmore girls. i eyed the half-empty bottle of wine on the counter and weighed my options. sure i could do the civilized thing and use a glass, but i'd finally finished washing a giant pile of dishes. for a second it seemed reasonable- nobody would have to know that i'd sunk so low. i'm not sure how long i stood there in the kitchen having an internal debate about whether i was ready to give in and become a completely barbaric pig, but i somehow managed to come to my senses and decided that if i was going to drink alone on the couch at 6:30 on a weekday the least i could do was to use stemwear.

the magnets that hold everything together

my fridge used to be a testament to my young hip life. it chronicled all the fun i was having with my young hip friends and consisted mostly of pictures of us in varying states of intoxication, interspersed with racy commercial art and postcards from the exotic places we were all traveling. but times change, and now my fridge has become a shrine to those same friends' babies. not that they aren't the extraordinarily cute offspring of people who are very important to me... but it's getting a little ridiculous, given that i still function at the level of "ohmigod, billy asked me to the dance(!)" or, at best, "monsoon has $5 lychee martinis on wednesdays!"
i take a little solace in the apparent fact that my silly antics serve as a constant source of amusement to my blogmate, dwtacc, and twinset, who are willing to not only listen to me carry on about said topics, but often act as accomplices. for one thing, it makes me a feel a little better about my failure to evolve into adulthood... and "hey [n#4], a bunch of us are going out for beers tonight," requires me to fabricate entourage on short notice.

emerging from their cocoons

i learned something important wednesday night: goths come out to play on michigan ave at sundown. in the middle of an otherwise very yuppie evening night of meeting mb downtown for a picnic at the free grant park music festival, we found two sad little goths huddling in a little corner of the front garden of the art institute. on the way to dominick's on roosevelt after the concert, a whole goth-gaggle was straggling its way over the bridge. maybe they were on their way to meet the first two sad little goths - i don't know, i can only imagine they all know each other - but i was left with the impression that michigan avenue is a special place for people with spike collars and white face paint.

in other notes, what is it with these people who have never heard of pontoon boats?? i found another besides my chicago-native co-worker, this one a philosophy grad student that mb and i swim with. on trying to explain my fun-filled weekend of floating around on mb's parents' party barge, our philosophical friend asked "so, can you... live... on these... pon-toon boats? at least when i explained that they were basically floating boxes with gerbils for motors, he managed to conclude, "so, i guess you bring lots of beer, then?"

the rise and fall of neurologist number four (n#4)

it's not for lack of trying.

ok, maybe i didn't try so hard, but my blogmate put up a good fight.

it went like this:

i kinda thought i had a little bit of an in with n#4. not enough of an in to do anything about it myself, mind you, but enough that i felt the need to talk about it a whole heck of alot. with the clock ticking, my loyal blogmate absorbed the hint and took matters into her own hands. "game on," she said this afternoon, grinning ear to ear, having just invited him to join us for our collective sorrow-drowning at the local bowling-alley slash bar. then there was a scurry to find to some entourage which resulted only in the recruitment of mb, whose company i always enjoy, but whose presence only promised to create an inadvertent air of staged double date. i'll save for another day my experience with, and subsequent distaste for, double date traps.

my worry was all for naught, as it turned out, as n#4 didn't show.

game over.

not that the outing was a total loss.

we expanded my growing list of potential boyfriend deal-breakers to include non-tongue-in-cheek belief in supernatural phenomena, and crossed another guy off the list based on our (relatively unfounded) suspicion that he was a divorced hyperchristian, rather than an atheist computer programmer. it wasn't totally unfounded, actually. the wwjd bracelet and absence of wedding ring that i could have sworn was there the last time i saw him gave it away.

i also took advantage of my time at lucky strike to think about an unfortunately unstable girl at work who gets so stressed out that her hair actually falls out. maybe i'm a horrible person for repeating it, much less finding it funny, but she's such an antagonizing head case that it's nice to have confirmation that it's not my imagination... and that if my biggest problem is my inability to get n#4's attention maybe my life's not so bad.

figures

i could set my watch by the certain predictable phenomena in my life.
like the fact that every purchase i make of a super-cute, super-cheap, white article of clothing results in my spending twice as much time and money looking for the necessary undergarment to wear under it.
or that while i somehow manage to pass myself off as witty and charming to my girlfriends (i think) without trying very hard, the presence of any cute neurologist (take your pick) turns me into an inarticulate stick in the mud.
being a girl is hard.

like a broken record

all in all it was a good weekend, even if it started out with the discovery that my blogmate has been publically mocking me... ON THE BLOG!

getting back to the point, i really did get to do fun stuff. the high point was decidedly all the sleeping i got to do, but i also went to the chicago botanic gardens with twinset, caught up (albeit on the phone) with DWTACC, went to a pro-soccer game, discovered that many soccer players are hot, discovered that many soccer fans are hot, discovered the phenomenon of the soccer geek.
soccer geeks are, for the record, not hot. they travel in packs, sing annoying songs, and wear really ugly soccer paraphrenalia. having spent a decent chunk of my life on the farm in europe i have a certain respect for soccer obsession, but it's just not as becoming on mainstream, denim-shorts-wearing, middle-aged american men.

all this weekend activity was good distraction from the rather disturbing fact that i have a crush on yet another neurologist. i don't understand how this keeps happening. the current infatuation is, for a change, not indian, but he's equally well dressed and speaks with an adorable eastern european accent which becomes even more adorable when he gets punchy, swears, and then apologizes for swearing.
the sad thing is that it looks like if i want to do any stalking i'm going to have to get in line. apparently i'm not the only one with a thing for neurologists.

re-claiming my low-brow roots

there have been some dangerously yuppie exploits described here lately. high-brow ethics seminars, climbing professional ladders, wearing decent shoes out to dinner... we can't pretend it doesn't happen. i confess my ridiculous excitement about the upcoming opening of a whole foods in the south loop.

now, i don't apologize for the yuppie leanings: last weekend's co-worker birthday expedition to the all-you-can-eat chocolate feast at the peninsula hotel was sooooooooooo delicious and fun! plus i think my blogmate might have had enough of quick-shot's pre-chocolate bar drinks that she managed to spill just enough of the evening on her dress to keep us all from being too classy. :) but i am saying that every good yuppie needs to balance a little. so this weekend mb and i are heading back to wisconsin for some much-anticipated brunch at the come-back inn, and an afternoon of a clearly non-yuppie sport: booze-cruising on his parents' pontoon boat on a small lake near madison.

my excitement about this weekend's plans reminds me that you can take the girl out of the boondocks, but you can't take the boondocks out of the girl... while discussing my weekend plans with a chicago-native co-worker, she looked at me blankly and said "what's a pontoon?" riiiiiiight. because when lake michigan is your lake, you ride on sailboats and large watercraft, and have probably never heard of a party barge. the polite-but-disinterested look i got when describing an entire afternoon of floating around with cheap beer made me feel like maybe i'm not too much of a city girl yet, in spite of the pedicures and new non-ripped jeans and all. good thing.

there's no place like home

i've spent the last couple of weeks sitting in on an ethics seminar. as boring as it sounds, for me it was a very refreshing change of pace. for one thing, all i had to do was sit there and listen. i was also free from the oppressive thumb(s) of my countless bosses. i guess i also learned some stuff...
but the most exciting thing about the whole experience was the people watching. these people were not part of my usual entourage, and while i found most of them to be friendly and insightful, there were a couple who definitely cought my attention.

in third place was a very high strung young lady who is in my line of work at a parallel institution accross town. her research mentor (who also happens to be my research mentor- ok, i guess there was a little bit of an oppressive thumb factor) sent me her way, thinking that we had similar research interests, not knowing that he was sending me into a land mine of, "look, i just can't deal with having to help anyone or keep any appointments. i don't think i have the time or energy to deal with you!" from this is i drew the conclusion that there are those of us who are filterless, and those of us who are neurotic and rude.

coming in second was a rather charming, very metro-sexual canadian guy of some exotic-looking ethnicity that i couldn't put my finger on. in casual conversation i actually found him to be pretty charismatic, but man did i get tired of hearing him say, "that's ridiculous! that would never happen in canada!" he lost his cool every single day about the various and sundry stupid and/or nasty things that americans do driving everyone crazy (and this was a pretty mild mannered bunch). but while i found his approach a little off-putting, i do have to ask myself, "why in the world do i not live in montreal?"

finally, there was little miss philosophy. little miss philosophy was a very intense, very put-together platinum blond who was so stylish it was kind of ridiculous (i didn't know cole hann made flip-flops), and was either very pretty, or kind of scary looking (i couldn't decide). little miss philosophy is finishing up her PhD in philosophy while sitting on various important sounding boards and committees and was really really really passionate (more like aggressive) in her arguments with everyone about everything. she was always going on about things like personhood, and had a special way of throwing around lofty words that don't actually mean anything. my personal favorite was, "how can you say that? it's counterfactual!" i've done alot of thinking about the possible meanings of "counterfactual," and have come to the following translations:
1) you're wrong
2) that doesn't make any sense
3) i don't get it

so as much i've enjoyed my little sojourn back into the world of academics, i'm looking forward to being a droid again.

power trip

i seem to have gotten to a place at work where people do something they've never done before: listen to me. it's odd. i'm not a terribly loud person, and my prevailing theory on work so far has been

1) don't screw it up so badly that i get called to any of my million bosses' offices (try saying "bosses' offices" five times fast)
2) don't do so terribly well that i call too much attention to myself and draw extra work
3) try not to make enemies
4) try not to make such good friends that i get hit on by same-sex co-workers who send me flowers and wine

so far i'm running 75%. but my point is that i try to fly under the radar. how, then, is it that in the past 72 hours, that when i ask a question i get an answer, and when i wonder if everyone could just be quiet and reasonable for a minute, people are actually quiet and reasonable, and when i have something to add to a conversation, people pay attention? all, really, in the last 3 days. i am the same person. and let me be clear that at work, i am definitely a lowly minion. (not a peon anymore, as ng has pointed out, but the next step up.) it's starting to get to my head already, i think - i've come just short several times of telling other arguably-more-important minions exactly what i think of their ideas.

so i need suggestions on what to do with this fun power while it lasts. my thoughts?

1) convince my underlings to launch peta-like crusade to free all the trapped office paper into the wild where it belongs
2) give everyone ridiculous, slightly degrading nicknames and refuse to call them by their real names (hmm, sounds like this blog!)
3) count how many days in a row i can find someone to go and bring me a cookie without asking me why i can't get off my butt and do it myself
4) something involving my power drill, which i bought excitedly a year ago and have never used

taking ideas.

everyone sucks except you.

ok, so maybe it hasn't been the world's finest 24 hours, what with getting called in to work extra last night at the last minute for someone who will never pay me back, locking myself out of my apartment, finding out that today is ticket-the-cars-in-chicago-that-don't-have-city-stickers-and-laugh-all-the-way-to-the-bank day, and getting back to work today to sort through a bunch of paperwork only to find out that the office people pulled all the wrong paperwork for me to go through. but for all that, still lots to smile about:

1. thanks to my gracious and more-organized blogmate for spotting my lunch since i didn't have my wallet.
2. thanks to the lovely m for being excited to see me at work last night, and telling me i'm better than [the missing girl] anyway.
3. thanks to l for making me a cup of tea when she saw the stack of papers i was lugging around this afternoon.
4. thanks to the weirdly grumpy but affectionate woman at the currency exchange where i bought my belated city parking sticker, for barking lots of orders at me like "you have to be SURE about your license plate number. are you SURE?", "cash only," "$120. and 50 CENTS. FIFTY CENTS!" but still managing to follow the whole exchange with a big left-sided smile and thank you.
5. thank god i'm not leon, my creepy downstairs neighbor, who i think is in serious financial trouble, as evidenced by the "citibank versus leon" signs all over his front door.

and last but certainly not least:

6. thanks to my weird little building manager for at least having the modesty to wear his tighty-whiteys when he answered the door to my request to be let into my apartment. (ew. i mean, does it take that long to throw on shorts???)

a birthday apology

in honor of quick-shot's birthday today, i would like to hereby retract any statements my blogmate and i may or may not have made regarding any distaste we may have for fanciness. we support fanciness, and yuppieness, and all going out and fun in general. it's just the prevalence of said fanciness, as evidenced by floofy martinis in every sports bar in the city. yes, we want to go out for dinner with you the day after you're done hanging out with your boy. and yes, i will wear clothes without holes in them. just maybe not fancy jeans and heels. i might even order a martini in your honor.

righteous indignance

first of all, a warm welcome to two of our newest blog readers! as my good blogmate and i have stated before, we think the best way to encourage our readers to comment is to write directly about them. with that, let me begin my protest of a recent conversation:

my blogmate and i are lucky enough to work with these two women who, although they work in a department related to ours, don't see us every day, and we know each other better socially than professionally. this is generally a good thing, because they're fun girls (and not just because one of them used to be a bartender and can mix 26 drinks in 4 minutes). but i stopped by their office to say hi the other day, and we started discussing their impressions of the people in our department. it turns out they've decided that my blogmate is the more laid-back of the two of us, who can tolerate more disorganization, and i'm definitely the anal-retentive one who can't stand it if someone doesn't adhere to policy. this they base on a particular day where i showed up wearing an orange shirt and orange socks.

now, it doesn't actually bother me that they think i'm anal retentive, although my blogmate is the one who keeps getting nominated for stuff like the form-making committee and i'm the one who has lost my work id five times in the last year. and it doesn't bother me that they're making this decision based on one of my apparently notable clothing choices. i would, however, like to protest that they think my outfit was consciously put together, since this was my extensive fashion reasoning:

1. i have a pair of bright orange socks with little daisies on them, and as much as i love them, you can't wear orange socks with just anything.
2. i had a clean orange shirt which is furry and comfortable, but which has a hole in the side that needed covering.
3. too much orange and a need to cover the hole in the shirt meant i stuck my black fleece vest, which i bought for $4 from unique thrift store in bridgeport over the top of the ensemble. (it's funny, quick-shot, that you think this was a put-together look, because my blogmate asked me repeatedly the whole winter when i was going to stop wearing that thing and put it in the laundry already.)
4. add the less-wrinkled khakis and head for work.

quick-shot's partner in crime will note that when she read our blog profile, she questioned me on our dislike of designer jeans, and i couldn't even answer her question about what constitutes designer jeans, since the only jeans i know about are the the one pair i have with a huge hole in the butt, and the other pair i have without the huge hole in the butt.

so. miss quick-shot and miss fancy-pants (your official blog names until you start participating enough to give yourselves new ones), i may do a lot of quirky things, but putting effort into my dress is not one of them.

ps. don't think i'm letting you get away with "oh, j___? he's nobody..." either.

revenge of the nerds

conversation between ng and i seems to keep coming back around to our respective dorkiness. it's a natural instinct, i think, among those of us have always been a little nerdy, to put it out there all at once, lest you inadvertently give the impression that you're actually cool and then get all tangled up in maintaining the illusion. it all started as i was trying to give him a little bit of blog back-story to get him caught up. i put my foot in my mouth trying to explain about the bizarre events staged by my blogmate's theater geek neighbors, forgetting momentarily that ng actually is a theater geek. he absorbed the ribbing rather well, and put out his theory that we all have some degree of inner dork. i argued rather adamantly there's nothing closeted about my dorkiness- that i wear it all on the surface for everyone to see. i'd like to think that it's an endearing quality, but i'm probably wrong... actually, i might even be wrong about the inner dork part.

in spite of my constant complaining about having to work all the time, here i am, putting in an entire day that is totally self-inflicted. granted it's for exorbitant amounts of extra money (see multiple past blogs referencing my love of shopping). this action in itself might be considered dorky, but really it's about shoes.

anyway, as i was getting settled into my temporary work space (i.e. surfing the internet), i discovered that not only could i not print anything, but that my computer wouldn't even acknowledge the big fancy laser printer sitting right next to it. after trying all the tricks i know (high-tech stuff like making sure it was plugged in) and even attempting the add-printer wizard, i gave up and called IT.

aside: i think that the all the installation wizards so graciously provided to us are actually some kind of cruel joke being played on us by the microsoft computer geeks (probably well-deserved, given the forthcoming computer-geek mockery that ensues). it looks like idiot-proof, user-friendly stuff, but i, for one, still can't ever accomplish the task at hand and feel even dumber about it because they make it look so easy.

the IT guy on the phone was pretty patronizing until it became quite clear that he couldn't fix my problem. he did, however, access my computer remotely- i'm always a little creeped out when that happens- there's something freaky about your computer executing all these commands (with the mouse arrow moving all around) when you're not the one doing the commanding. (for those of you who are mystified by my intense hatred of horror movies, my fear of possessed computers ought to convince you that i'm not faking it).

so phone IT guy (PITG- p could also stand for patronizing) gave up and dispatched live, in person, frenetic IT guy (FITG). FITG was every bit as peppy as PITG wasn't. he was tickled pink to even have found me (and more importantly the printer), and i have to say that he got full credit for finding his way through the maze of hallways, as i was totally incapable of explaining where i was. i spent the next 15 minutes in a tiny room with one highly energetic dude who was so surprised by his inability to fix the problem that he crawled under my desk on hands and knees to check things out (i wasn't sitting at the desk at the time)- he'd correctly surmised that only frank mechanical failure could explain his apparent lack of computer prowess. he was the happiest computer geek i've ever seen. i was less happy, since it turned out that my problem was lack of some kind of internet access so that my printer can talk to the server which can talk to my computer- this problem can only be fixed if someone takes financial responsibility for my office and pays for the service.

though i've already demonstrated how un-computer-savvy i am, i can't deny my fascination with FITG. besides, doesn't it seem like connecting the printer directly to the computer would eliminate the proverbial middle man and obviate the need for funding? maybe i have some inner dork after all...

cat dung, fake dragons and beer: a week in review

in an effort to catch up on my blogging, here is a clif's notes version of my last several days...

1. my neighbor's cat poops in my pepper plants. thankfully, my neighbor seems to notice and comes to clean out the peppers. even more thankfully, i just learned last night that the cat belongs to someone else, because the distraught owner was standing outside wondering if my neighbors were home because she really wants the cat back. despite what happened last time i let a stranger into the building (see the story about the chatty wet goth), i reeeeally wanted to let her in so her cat could stop pooping in my plants.

2. mb is especially dismayed that even though my plants are getting pooped on, his plants are still suckier than my plants. he did some kind of pruning job on his hanging plant that leaves about five leaves drooping over the side of the pot. maybe if we leave it on the ground for the cat to go to work on it, it will survive?

3. my musical-producer-wannabe neighbors have been back regularly. seriously. how can college boys singing in british accents in a back courtyard take themselves this seriously? how can i find out what they're doing? i already tried showing up at intermission with a gin and tonic wandering around their "stage" smirking. taking suggestions.

4. 4th-of-july bachelorette party antics in minneapolis: great weekend spent with my brother's fiance (known hereafter as butterknife for her amazing ability to need stitches when using said dull object), saw their new house, bridal shower went well. let me just say that no bachelorette is as noticeable in a bar as the one who shows up with a veil decorated with white lights that run off a battery pack that sits on the back of her neck. three cheers to our friend who designed that one. :)

5. my love of vicarious living is continually aided by my blogmate's new boy, who works in stage design and seems to have opinions on weighty subjects like where to purchase the best theater dragon and how to apply latex face masks. ooohh... maybe he could come critique my theatrical neighbors? or bring them a dragon?

...last week butterknife told me that from my stories, it seems like i don't actually work. point taken. but who wants to hear about paperwork? if i had a job where i bought dragons, i might tell those.

touche'

i may have mentioned in passing to my blogmate and a vegetarian co-worker that my strategy for convincing mb to like new foods was to describe it in more boy-friendly terms. so, not "potatoes and tofu in yogurt curry", but "potatoes and extra protein with sauce!" not "quiche," but "breakfast pie." etcetera. straight out of the simpsons episode where the woman selling hummus and tahini calls it crunch patties with flavor sauce, i know. a co-worker commented, kindly, that it sounded a little like talking to a child.

but lest i develop any feelings of superiority, mb got me back. in hearing about my blogmate's excitement over her new wireless high-speed internet, i naturally decided i wanted one too. the only problem is that mb has a large spiffy desktop computer which clearly does not need to be moved anywhere, and my laptop is a software-overburdened little machine that makes lots of clicking noises before it decides to do anything and is missing the letter x. but since the weather's been so hot lately, and the only air conditioner is in the bedroom, i thought that was my big chance to sell to mb that if we had a wireless thing-ey, we could surf the internet in air-conditioned comfort.

so i made my pitch, casually, in a conversation about the weather. mb patiently asked lots of questions, none of which i could answer. "how big is the box?" "i don't know." "does it plug into the wall phone jack and then there's a wireless connection from there?" "i don't know." "can the neighbors use it or is it protected?" "i'm not sure. i think maybe you can guard it somehow." "are you sure it's just $80 for the box and there are no additional charges?" "um, that's what [my blogmate] said." "you just want one because [your blogmate] has one, don't you? i was wondering how long it would take before you'd ask..." *insert laughter*

i hang my head in shame.

spa day gone wrong

once you break the seal and start allowing yourself yuppie indulgences it's all down hill.

my blogmate and are both fairly new to well, having paychecks, and for the most part we plant our feet in firm opposition to fanciness, insisting that we are, in our hearts, low-brow.

but we're starting to crack. first it was the latte. then the storage solutions. sooner or later we were bound to discover pedicures. after weeks of talking about it, we finally decided on a day for the much-anticipated day of foot care to celebrate my having turned 28 and her having run 28 miles (ok, i know that's not quite right, but go with me here). off we went for the post-marathon pedicure at the somewhat shady nail place near her house in hyde park. it was pretty standard stuff. toxic fumes filled the air as the emplyees barked mostly unintelligible orders to us about where to sit and what to do.

the woman who did mine made it clear by her body language that not only was she not interested in helping me achieve pretty feet but that she was pretty gosh-darned resentful at having to deal with me period. how it was my fault that the foot-soak tub-thing was overflowing i couldn't say. i was done with my pedicure and had marginally nicer feet about 6 minutes later.

my blogmate, as it turned out was just getting started. i've given her a decent amount of ribbing in the last few weeks about her desperate need for foot grooming, but really- i was kidding. unfortunately for her (and me, the bored onlooker) she landed on the world's most compulsive manicurist. this guy went at it with the clippers and cuticle pusher and motorized buffer thing for, no joke, 2 hours. it was excrutiating for her (and for me, the bored onlooker). the guy got so carried away that he actually made her big toe bleed. apparently they don't do any kind of first-aid training before they let someone take sharp objects to people's feet, on account of this guy had NO IDEA what to do about the bleeding. eventually my blogmate willed the bleeding to stop and the world's most compulsive manicurist finally got around to actually painting her toenails.

by the time it was all over i'd lost the will to go to they gym and decided that i should just get my traumatized blogmate to a happy place with food and beer.

the end of an era

after months of dragging my feet i've finally done it. i've cut the cord- literally.

dial up, we've had a good run. i'll never forget the time we spent together...but it's time to move on. i'm sorry.

so i've joined the ranks of well, everyone, and gotten myself a high-speed internet connection AND a wireless router.

it's hard for me to put into words how proud of myself i am for getting it set up all by myself, and how giddy i am about being able to rove around my apartment with my laptop, checking my email every 30 seconds, not tripping over the long, twisty phone cord with whom i've developed what i suspect is an inappropriate relationship.

the 25 five foot phone cord and i go way back: back to when i had a big enough apartment to actually need a 25 foot phone cord. its insidious presence in my house, its having had both little clippy ends broken such that it doesn't latch into the phone jack properly, its CONSTANTLY being in my way. i have to say, as i collected it up (unwinding it from the various pieces of furniture under which i attempted {unsuccessfully} to conceal it) i hesitated, wondering if i really had the heart to throw it straight into the trash can. "what if this whole DSL thing is a dream?" i asked myself." without the wherewithal to actually sever all ties, i've decided to let the cord take up temporary residence in the corner, in some kind of internet purgatory while i search for the gumption to send it to phone cord heaven.

what can i say, old habits die hard.