and while you're at it, my laundry is to your left.

it just goes to show you, worry is useless.
well, or maybe it just goes to show you, worry gets you things.

my weekend was filled with the easiest houseguests ever. my soon-to-be sister-in-law (who reads our friends' blogs as eagerly as i do waiting for a covert mention like in the society pages of a small-town newspaper: "mr. and mrs. albert johnson were seen playing cards at the home of edwin krieger last evening...") and her college friends descended on chicago for a weekend of reuniting and bridesmaid dress shopping. since i haven't seen her friends since college, i wasn't sure what they would be like or what we would do to entertain ourselves, since my knowledge of chicago nightlife is largely based on places where i can get pbr for $2.50 or less. perhaps just a touch classier? i thought, and wondered how a non-classy girl like me could pull this off. but my fears were unfounded - a fun relaxing weekend included the chocolate bar at the peninsula, gourmet pizza at my favorite wine bar, painless dress shopping culminating in a selection that looked good on everyone, delicious family-style italian dinner, lunch and witty conversation with my bro's best man and his s.o., a dancing hamster in a chicken suit (you know, typical wedding tradition). but the best part isn't really in those details... not only were there no disagreements, but i had to do so little as host that i'm fairly sure i was unnecessary. m was the dress decision-maker and shopping limiter (yay!), s was the professional style consultant, a was so good with logistics for a girl not from chicago i think i could have just let her drive and see where we ended up. they did my dishes, told me funny stories, verbalized happiness about being, well, anywhere...

for anyone out there who is considering a wedding and having bridesmaid issues, i think maybe you should just hire these.

do you ever wonder what your boss's house looks like? or if you're like most of us, your many bosses' houses? can you picture them according to their personality? one of our bosses is one of these santa-fe-fantastic dressers with the funky jewelry, long gray-white hair, perfect-though-heavy-ish makeup, and carries herself in that elegant way that you always know when she's in the room. naturally, i've heard her place in lincoln park is fabulous with lots of fancy art and possibly breakable things.

i like this stuff. so imagine my excitement when i found out my next career advising meeting with other-boss was at his house. completely different guy. you also always know when he's in the room, because he enters with a big "hi, kids..." for his various underlings. fleece jackets covered in dog hair, talks almost as fast as my blogmate, constantly quoting his own publications but in such a funny way it never occurs to you (well, it never occurs to me) that it's a little weird to be so self-referencing... so he's pretty well-known in his field, and his wife is a famous psychologist or something. their place? perfect for them. big old two-story, older-looking couches and chairs paired around not-new-but-expensive-looking area rugs, fireplace naturally flanked by thousands of dated books, fancy art side-by-side with huge sparkly collages of their children's accomplishments. kitchen with maybe 15-year-old appliances and white formica but equal exchange coffee and croissants from local bakery on understated-fancy copper serving tray. kids' soccer ball right next to souvenirs clearly from exotic travels.

does it take a certain amount of time or money to accumulate a household that matches your personality? i wonder what my own place says about me... cheap, likes hand-me-downs (or tolerates them and paints them orange), has an excessive love of plastic crates filled with outdoor toys that she doesn't use often enough, keeps books clearly from college classes on her bookshelf to make it look like she's well-rounded. needs more closet space, or to throw away more things.

love in the time of google

in my low-intensity stalking of the double indian neurolgists i have, at various points, googled them. it turns out that both of them have many many counterparts running around out there. for example, google "sujeet krishnan" and you get 6 million hits. a humorously large subset of these hits are for websites like "findagroommumbai.com." the point of this is that while, in my stalking, i've never come across any useful or interesting information about my "sujeet krishnan," i've found many other sujeet krishnan's who are "30, never married, and looking to settle down." i've also found that "sandeep pai" is a world-renowned expert in breast augmentation surgery, an IT consultant at IBM, and "a fine catch from good family."

if you can't be with the one you love... google him on the internet and love one of his clones .

the classic chicken-or-the-egg...

so i'm spending these few weeks at work in a department filled entirely by these weirdly-sarcastic-in-that-trying-to-be-worldly-to-disguse-their-dysfunction guys who are, well, weirdly sarcastic and dysfunctional, but also a lot smarter than me. which is fine, but i'm trying to get them to promote/hire me when my current job is finished, so i can't ignore them. i've been trying to learn what they're talking about, but it's hard to break in. in their free time they argue over whether or not the chinese revolution bears any resemblance to... hell, i don't know, i tuned out and started wondering if tonight's american idol competition would be as good as last night's was. (i don't care if it's not intellectual. the guy with the dreads is hot.) you can see i don't feel like i'm doing well breaking in on an intellectual level. so i tried sharing my frustrations about a recent conference i'd attended, in hopes they'd stop talking about china. this worked, to a point. i got two sentences in: "and i didn't understand where they were going because..." and smart-but-dysfunctional-guy number one (who also happens to be a spitter) interrupted to say "i love you. see, the real thing is..." and five minutes later was maybe still agreeing with my conference angst, but in such a way that i had NO IDEA what was going on, except that it involved a dislike of libertarians. but i'd started the conversation, so couldn't stop it. i just kept smiling and trying to hide my panic. eventually sbdg1 stops long enough to get the attention of sbdg2: "hey peter, she wants to work with us!" sbdg2 was unimpressed. i faked thinking i heard someone calling my name and left for a long lunch.

as sbdg1 says, "see, the real thing is..." see, the real thing is that i like what this group does, but this group is crazy. so which came first, the job or the crazy? if i take this job, will it turn me into a crazy? or is it just that only crazy people have wanted this job thus far?

i can't go back there. but i want the job. but i can't go back there. maybe i can learn a lot about politics? or convince them to get into american idol so i can have something to talk about?

love the one you're almost with

what would it say about me if, in my search for love, i decided to substitute one slightly nerdy indian neurologist for another?

i'm afraid i've done just that.

after swooning over the one for months and months and getting absolutely nowhere (the snag in the carpet was his insidious girlfriend) i stumbled upon another and thought, "what the hell, he'd never have to know that he wasn't the first."

not that there's really any story to tell about slightly-nerdy-indian-neurologist #2 either. like the other one, at best he knows my name and might stop to say hi if he ran into me at bar (assuming for a second that i actually went to bars occasionally and didn't just work, sleep, and watch dismally bad movies with my blogmate).

to be fair (to myself), there are subtle differences. slight-nerdy-indian-neurologist #2 is actually slightly more nerdy and than slightly-nerdy-indian-neurologist #1. #2 doesn't dress as well as #1, but to be honest, #1 dresses well enough to be off-putting (while the well-dressed young indian metro-sexual guy is a well-known entity in chicago, populating many a boom-boom techno club and dimly lit martini bar, he's never been quite my style). most importantly, i think my "in" with #2 is less tenuous (friend of a friend vs casual work acquaintance) and he seems a little more accessible.

i'd worry that i was sinking too low, but could this possibly be more ridiculous than my having fallen in love with a second clown?

are these the fruits of my labor?

my colleague and i have been working on a project for the last couple of weeks, and to reward our hard work our boss decided to take us to lunch today. or something like that...
what actually happened is that we mentioned to him a few weeks ago that we'd heard that he likes to bribe his underlings with somosas and we managed to convince him that we'd met criteria for somosa rewards. anyway, he showed up this morning and was giddly like a school girl when he found out that our 12:00 meeting was cancelled- "really?" he asked, "you mean we can have samosas today???"
first he took us through the secret (and to be honest yucky) back entrance. at the door, he laid out the rules: "the samosas are in boxes and there are 2 kinds. i think that chicken ones are really gross. the veggie ones have potatoes and are really good. most people but sauce on them but i don't- you'll probably want to. i'm paying for everything. get something to drink- they're spicy. they play rock music really loud in there so we so we won't be able to talk once we get inside. they always play rock music. let's go."
the place, by the way, appears to be the secret hangout of the shaggy grad students i so love, but i had to keep quiet about that over samosas with my boss, and instead just marvel internally at the wealth of broody comp lit students reading big books over orangina and tofu, feeling sadly mainstream with my clan of business casual clad professionals. at least we're cool enough to appreciate samosas in a dingy liberal arts campus basement...

well, it wasn't cannes.

what an intellectual weekend.

i can safely say that of the movies watched yesterday, undercover brother was the funniest and had the best plot and dialogue. sad, but it beat our other two lofty choices, soul plane and you got served. you got served would have been fine if nobody talked. overall highlight of the day: my blogmate and i sitting on opposite chairs during soul plane swapping a laptop back and forth while she was trying to fix my new job application (her: "this sentence is awkward." me: "i'm trying to sound dumber.") when mb entered the room, mistook her for me (he only loves me for my laptop?) and snuggled up comfortably at my blogmate's feet. i'm glad they're getting along.

somebody help me pick better movies next weekend.

in a collective attempt not to tell work stories here, i am unable to tell the much more interesting stories from my week with quotes like "what is that foreskin doing here?" and "if you do a girl and she not on the rag, do she get pregnant when you put you nut in her?"

sex in the windy city

here's a story: i'm at the drug store with one of my girlfriends the other day. she's got a small assortment of items, including a box of tampons, which of course, won't scan. "you don't know how much these are, do you?" "no, i'm sorry i don't." off goes the checkout guy to price check the tampons, as a massive line forms behind us. checkout guy comes back, followed by assistant manager guy (picture 20 year old college drop-out) who starts flirting with us, "why did you scare my cashier away," he says with cute smile, as said cashier is busily filling out the item description on the special receipt for the tampon mishap. my friend, of course, is completely unruffled, and find myself lost in thought, wondering if events in my life aren't starting to resemble those of a well known HBO series to which i am now addicted (minus the $400 gucci shoes and debaucherous behavior).

my super sweet laundry

have you all seen this cable show "my super sweet sixteen" on mtv (or some similar channel)? some richer-than-rich teenager is filmed during the week prior to his/her big bash. last night mb and i watched with disgust as this girl went to paris and whined that her mom wouldn't let her get some scandalous $10,000 gown for her ball, claimed that all of paris was ruined now because the versace store was closed, hated her parents for not getting her a range rover immediately upon her request, etc.

meanwhile, leading a similarly glamorous lifestyle, mb and i were cooking a fancy pot of 79-cent lentils while running outside in the rain, down the slippery back steps to the basement laundry room... where we found my neighbor leon shernoff pulling our things out of the washers. for those of you who don't remember, leon shernoff is my mushroom-loving star-trek-watching long-stringy-haired trench-coat-wearing neighbor in the basement. needless to say, i feel a little dirty somehow knowing that leon shernoff touched my unmentionables.

16-year-old ava was carried arabian-style into her $200,000 birthday bash by four shirtless members of the loyola polo team, while mb and i cooked beans and dodged the creep in the basement. some people just lead different lives.

who needs a valentine when you can have empanadas?

i've always thought of myself as the neurotic, excessively practical, organized type. but maybe i'm wrong- or better yet, evolving...

i didn't think that anything could ease the blow of being up at the crack of dawn on sunday morning after only a few hours of restless sleep (you'd think i'd have learned to drink water after drinking and not wake up at 3AM completely parched), but as i was packing up my bag to go to work, boy was i amused to discover that the bright green faux-alligator wallet that i bought for $10 at the discount store yesterday is j-lo brand! while i'd feel a certain amount of shame in knowingly acquiring j-lo accessories, i'm delighted (if not proud) to have done it by accident.

after the marathon of shopping with my blogmate we hopped in the car to one of our favorite low-brow hang-outs: the village tap in roscoe village (in keeping with our resolution to only ever hang out in bars with fire places). driving through boys town on the way there we were wildly gesticulated at by a wildy gay couple. i thought they were fussing at me for blocking the cross walk, and even considered that one of my headlights was blown, but i didn't figure out until later that what i had was a flat tire. so after activating the glorious AAA roadside assistance, we did what any respectable 20 something professionals would do- made a b-line for the closest bar. what we found was an extremely cute, trendy, and way-cooler-than-us tapas joint... after a delicious pre-meal of sangria and shrimp empanadas, with name of trendy, way-cooler-than-us techno spanish CD in hand, we watched the AAA guy change the tire and continued on to roscoe village for beer and fries. i tell this story to point on the following: we were actually happy to have suffered the flat-tire mishap, but for which we would not have found the cool new hang out (from now on we will only ever hang out at understated, candle-lit tapas bars) and had yet another night of drinking our way through an automotive disaster.

finally, i'll tell you that yesterday afternoon (before the shopping, way before the flat tire and the sangria) i was on the phone with a friend who was describing an acquaintance as being well-bread, well-educated and precise. without any attempt at the supressing the thought i heard myself respond, "i HATE precision."

have i become a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants optimist?

salsa geeks

you've all seen 'em. painfully white, earth-music-loving, tofu-eating, took-a-class-in-college-and-now-they-think-they're-latino folk who worm their way into the latin dance halls around the country, making us cringe with sympathetic embarassment.
i encountered these miscreants at the old town school of folk music last night- i went there in there in the hopes of recreating the same good feeling i had the last time (refer to "his name is wally and he likes to mambo" for the back story). boy was i disappointed! the lead guy would have been good as an afro-cuban salsa guy had he actually been willing to 1) stop talking and 2) play salsa. seriously, he wouldn't shut up about how we all need to love each other and love the planet and love cuba and love america. he occasionally interrupted his sentimental ranting to play bad songs that he had written or bad arrangements of good songs that other people had written. it sounded like elevator music and for-love-of-god he couldn't get in sync with his back up singer who kept on back up singing without the front guy singing. painful.
finally, there was the incredibidly unattractive shouldn't-an-afro-cuban-band-have-sex-appeal? factor. to the right was the middle aged white guy/ill-timed back up singer. in the back was the canadian drummer who had grossly miscalculated his hair into a slicked back pony-tail situation that made his head look VERY small. finally, on the right was the bass player who was just wrong. jeans too short. hawaiian shirt too hawaiian. hair too long. sunglasses too dorky. dancing WAY too badly.

fortunately, my faith in music and musicians was restored today by the arrival of a (drumroll) NEW HOT CLOWN who strolled around playing lovely guitar music, nearly lulling me to sleep, and certainly causing me to all but forget my former clown love.

there are no jews named peter, but there are two jews living in shreveport.

religion makes people do funny things. observe:

1) my blogmate apparently thinks unitarianism will help her remember to floss more often.
2) mb thinks jesus is a big hippie waiting to share a bong with him in heaven.
3) a former college roommate regularly announced that ash wednesday was her favorite holy day of obligation, even though the ashes made her forehead itchy.
4) another former roommate decided to be confirmed catholic as an adult, mostly so that she could request gifts of neon crosses and our lady of guadalupe candles from her hindu family.

me? much like my tendency to live vicariously through the much more interesting life of my blogmate, i accompany my friends on their religious adventures. for the most part, i keep quiet about my own opinions, not because i agree or disagree, but so nobody finds out my own thoughts are even more off-base...

1) 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.
2) although i truly believe jesus was more active in his revolutionary practices than your average bong-smoking hippie, i stand by mb's assertions, because i like to watch the fallout when unsuspecting fundamentalists try to save him.
3) i accompanied my roommate to ash wednesday services because she promised we could go out for lattes afterwards. but i washed off the ashes even though you're not supposed to, because i am terrified of breaking out and being left with a zit-cross on my forehead.
4) i bought a virgin mary candle from the latino section of my local supermarket to mark my friend's confirmation, and laughed a little, but it's my living room sporting the bobblehead jesus on the mantle. i can't put him away; he was a gift, and besides, i need him to guard the menorah on holidays.

yeah... happy ash wednesday, for anyone who's counting. what's your sacrifice? i knew a guy who used to give up swearing every lent by replacing all obscenities with the name of someone he didn't like ("i ann-burgess hate him so much! i'd like to ann-burgess his ann-burgess...") personally, i will be giving up spewing sacrilege online. right after this.

male pattern dilemma

so not to be mean or anything, but it's suddenly come to my attention that a large portion of the my-age-ish men that i come across (and consider stalking before noticing the wedding rings or discovering the girlfriends) are unambiguously balding.
my first instinct was to succumb yet again to the wrist-slitting depression that accompanies the repeated realization that i'm rapidly aging. yet again i ask myself if i'm doomed to choose between slightly revolting men or dying alone with my inevitable cats.
then again, maybe it's better to know about the baldness up front, becoming smitten by a slightly imperfect, a-little-less-shaggy-than-he-used-to-be grad student, bald spot and all, then it is then to wake up one morning to discover that the shaggy head of hair you used to love is insidiously thinning.

when life hands you lemons...

where's redemption when you need it?

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. the insult prompted the need for more self-indulgence: hashbrowns and biscuit instead of whole wheat bagel. i swear i woke up this morning with the resolution to change my ways- floss more regularly, water the plants, not eat hash browns so often, make my own coffee, and for-the-love-of-god stop being so resentful and cranky. atheism be damned, i think it's time for me to start going to unitarian church already, lest i blame my misfortune on the superbowl- eagles losing, bad half time show, lame comercials, or my missing the post-game simpsons- take your pick...

how much "heartbreak" can one girl take?

first of all: a grammar rant. now believe-you-me i'm not one to correct anyone's grammar or spelling. most of the finer (and not so subtle) points of grammar are lost on me, and i seriously can't spell (unlike some people we know...). however, there are a couple of egregious errors that really get my goat. the sentence ending with a preposition thing makes me crazy. i heard it in a song today (by an angsty alternarocker who clearly ought to know better- i'm sure he went to college somewhere like amherst or pomona)- "we've got so much to be thankful for." it just sounds bad! but the winningest offense has to be the flagrant misuse of quotation marks. you know what i'm talking about. "fresh" fish. 3-garment dry-cleaning "special." "please" label your sample. i'm willing to concede that there are certain figurative uses of quotation marks, but nowadays people seem to use them for "emphasis."

in other news, i now know the clown's name, but guess what- he still doesn't know (or care) who i am. i think i'm just not cool enough to get his attention. i suppose that my obsession with someone who doesn't know (or care) who i am is some kind of marker for my complete lack of prospect, but shouldn't he at least process that i'm unabashedly staring him down? it doesn't help that a woman very senior to me at work totally one-upped me today by doing this crazy high speed run down the hall ending in a no-holds-barred slide into first base kind of thing. i know for a fact that she has no designs on my clown, but he certainly looked impressed. i'm also little worried by the fact that sliding woman is actually my official career advisor. is deliberate (as opposed to my current inadvertent) making a fool of myself to impress a boy what i have to "aspire" to?