sour grapes

egocentrism is not without its pittfalls. perhaps if i didn't see myself as quite so much the center of my own little universe i'd spend alot less time feeling slighted.
i say this after feeling personally and specifically persecuted after receiving an invite over myspace to join some kind of jewish american singles group, and after indulging in some quality fuming in the car this afternoon, consumed by the conviction that attractive men pushing baby carriages exist for the single purpose of making me feel jealous and spiteful.

there goes the neighborhood

it's not that i was surprised that the sheffield garden walk was a big, drunken frat party. i knew exactly what was in store for me. and it was totally worth it to spend an hour and a half ogling the lead singer of better than ezra...

it was also worth it, just in the overhearing of this conversation between tiny blond girl (in her tiny shorts and tiny tank top) and nondescript guy (who was admittedly attractive in an abercrombie kind of way):

girl: "hey, i think i know you!"
guy: "really? how do you think you know me?"
girl: "i think we made out in a bar!"
guy: "really?"
girl: "yeah! some bar in viagra triangle!"

it was even better than the other abercrombie guy whom i passed right as he was loudly belching into his cell phone.

drunkonomics

you will be happy to know that my bad attitude is fixed.

i had a little meltdown in the office today, and forced my blogmate to stop what she was doing (actual work) to deal with my anger at school, namely, my complete lack of understanding of the famous economics guy (hmm... feg? it's so simple and perfect) running this course i'm taking. turns out the feg thinks we all understand calculus, or at least variables, and definitely supply and demand. but the feg is teaching hospital staff, not economists, and we health care people are not theoretical types. at one point a few years ago i told my blogmate that working had killed my capacity for abstraction (and to her great credit, my blogmate consoled me that at least i'd ever had it, and noticed when it was gone). so, ever helpful, my good blogmate suggested several practical strategies for surviving the feg, including getting help from her brother, who turns out to be an economics-for-dummies instructor, or from my sociologist friend who actually picks girls to date based on their understanding of statistics.

i have a better solution: gin. it turns out that one g&t makes indifference curves more tolerable. perhaps after two, i will forgive the feg for assigning reading that we never discuss in class, and after three, i might forgive the fact that this class is supposed to be about health research and not economics in the first place.

don't talk to me about the law of diminishing returns. i don't want to hear it.

mb:1. sea lions: 0.

you will all be happy to know (and unsurprised if you know him) that mb did not get eaten by sea lions today in the alcatraz challenge. in fact, he thinks he took 17th place overall and 3rd in his age group. this for a 1.5 mile swim through choppy sea water and a 7-mile run up hilly switchbacks, none of which we actually have in chicago, so he did well.

meanwhile, back at the ranch, i have to learn that just because i am biking on roads and paths with many other people this weekend, that does not give me free license to mumble obscenities like i typically do while driving. on my bike people can actually hear me, which has been problematic. a very surprised triathlete putting on his socks certainly did hustle to get out of my way, though.

head above water

i have no idea how i earned the college reputation of being the zen roommate. granted, in our house of 3, my roommates were a pierced angry feminist social work/chemistry major and a tiny punk neurotic microbiologist who's allergic to everything, so that might not be saying much. but it certainly doesn't fit my recent bouts of irrational anger.

briefly, the good mb is training for some event this weekend involving flying to san francisco and swimming from alcatraz to the mainland then running 7 miles. in preparation for said event, many negotiations have been had regarding training swims in lake michigan. i had recently lost a long-standing bet in which he insisted that the ohio street beach is a mecca for crazy triathlete swimmers and i told him crazy triathletes did not deserve their own mecca. having discovered said mecca (there are lane ropes in the water and up to 100 people at a time decked in head-to-toe spandex), i finally agreed that we could go swimming there. does mb accept this graciously? of course not. he blinks at me a few times and says (to his girlfriend who has just conceded that she is wrong) "i was actually hoping we could drive to the point and swim in the big scary open cold pointy waves, because that will more closely simulate the conditions at alcatraz." so now every single time a swimming-related negotiation arises (which in our household is frequent) i am immediately angry. even though i like swimming, and even actually like swimming in the big scary cold pointy waves off the point. but what kind of person takes his girlfriend's concession of defeat and pushes even further? and then, this weekend when we finally agreed to a morning of swimming and lounging at the beach, found out that the beach was closed (e coli), and on my return later to discover a re-opened beach, i thought i was doing the right thing and called mb to have him join me for the swimming i assumed he desired. do i get any thanks? no, i get "i think you like to do too many things. can't we just sit instead?" sit? am i the one who's planning to fly cross-country to plow through sea-lion infested 50-degree water? so, in conclusion, swimming = angry.

with the upcoming event at alcatraz this weekend, i thought that my random angriness might be over, but fast forward to my current enrollment in this summer course through work that teaches research methods and cost-effectiveness analysis and such. now, my vocabulary is pretty good, but i could not for the life of me understand why every single instructor needed to use the word "heuristically" in every lecture. each time it comes up i have gotten a little madder. do they need a thesaurus? then i asked mb to look it up online, and discovered that "heuristically" means "rule of thumb," or "a set of guidelines based on estimates or best guesses instead of actual data." this explains why economists love it. i concede.

in the end, i have a new job that lets me take classes, a hobby involving playing at the beach, and a new word that i can use for just about anything and sound smarter. and blog material to satisfy my recently-deserted blogmate and self-appointed critic sm (which reminds me, s, when you were in law school i can count on one hand the number of phone calls i got from you, so if i don't have a blog for a few weeks while i'm trying to be in school and start a new job, i don't want to hear it. you're long since forgiven for the few-year pause in correspondence, but if it happens while you're in new york i will show up on your doorstep anyway and demand to be entertained. heuristically, of course. i think.)

defensive action

before my blogmate has a chance to publicly mock me about my consistent and obvious sports watching bandwagon-ness allow me to self-deprecate.

yet again, my life has been taken over my obsession with the final rounds of a sport that i normally care nothing about. if you ask my blogmate she'll tell you that i do this all the time.

i understand that as a 50% french person it's my moral and genetic obligation to care about "football" (i think you can only spell it "futbol" if you're actually a fan of ridiculous, latino-style, "gooooooooool"-screaming commentating, a phenomenon that i personally find to be extremely irritating).

i've always been a bit of a disappointment to some of my french relatives, mostly for my inherent american-ness, but also for my inability to serve any useful function in the spontaneous soccer matches that take place before, during, and after summer gatherings -the rules are such that everyone plays, shoes or not, skirt or not, and that wrath of my grandmother when you've taken out her geraniums is the price you pay for participating in the national pastime.

the truth, i've never really cared about soccer... until now... for the following reasons...

1) respectable excuse to repeatedly hang out in bars in the middle of the day
2) recognition from my boss that this is important, such that he actually makes sure i get out of work in time
3) keeping up with the jones' - i don't know if it's a chicago thing, but EVERYONE is talking about this. it's like reading middlesex or eating sushi - it's necessary data gathering so that you can talk to people at parties
4) chance to publicly love france
5) weird visceral satisfaction - for some reason i keep doing this
and, finally
6) REALLY HOT GUYS with nice legs and really emotive faces who cry like babies when they lose and rip their shirts of when they're happy. i spend most of my waking hours conjuring up schemes by which i get to marry zinedine zidane.

is there a support group for this?

at least you can pick your friends

one of the many nice things about my blogmate's new neighborhood is that she lives stumbling distance from the four corners (affectionately self-dubbed T4C) on taylor street. admittedly, liking T4C is about as challenging as liking death cab for cutie - it's a perfect bar, right down to the light fixtures.

yesterday, as my blogmate and i sidled up to the bar with the cribbage board while we waited for mb to get back from swimming, i instantly fell in love with bartender. tall, punk, devastatingly attractive british boy with an almost comically sexy british accent. he was like a character in a nick hornby novel, without the requisite broodiness. i was so busy gawking at him that my blogmate was left with a pretty lousy cribbage partner.

eventually another hot british guy with an equally soul-melty accent ("what'll you have, love?") replaced the first, and just as i was thinking that i was never going to another bar ever again, the music was muted and everyone turned their attention to the metromix review of T4C that came on TV. apparently "hot bartenders" gets billed just below, "ten beers on fancy european taps," and "tater tots" as the bar's main perks.

before i could get good and depressed about the reality that i wasn't the only one who knew about the dreamy bartenders, in came twinset with a personal crisis that i found so entertaining that i forgot all about my new soulmate(s).

for reasons that are ultimately generous and nice, twinset's mother-in-law is moving to chicago this weekend. let's start out by saying that 1) this is not a surprise and 2) twinset is fundamentally pleased with this decision. they've been talking about this at least as long as i've known them... so it's a bit of head scratcher that suddenly this whole thing is going down in such a flustered state of chaos. it seems that all of a sudden mother-in-law sold her house (somewhere east-coasty) much faster than anyone had anticipated, leaving twinset and her husband not very much time to work out alot of details like, where was she going to live?, and how was she going to get here?

but the real question has become, what are they going to do about the baby grand piano, which apparently must accompany mother-in-law to chicago? apparently there are no relatives anywhere up the eastern seaboard who want this piano and NO ONE (not even mother-in-law) actually plays the piano, but someday potential grand children may need piano lessons.

twinset and her husband live a 2 bedroom lofted sort of place downtown and cannot, WILL NOT accommodate this piano, so the decision has been made that the baby grand will go with mother-in-law into her (drumroll please) ONE BEDROOM DOWNTOWN APARTMENT.

as you can imagine, a transcontinental piano move is an expensive, big deal. and it's probably not a reasonable suggestion (though it mother-in-law did put it out there) that the piano could get put on its side and shoved in the walk-in-closet.

my blogmate, mb, and i were in stitches by this point, with mb saying that if it were a shiny white baby grand that he himself could make room for it, fulfilling some kind of john lennon fantasy in which my blogmate played it while wearing a white ballgown and he stood by and gazed at her while wearing a white tuxedo. we all made helpful suggestions like, "maybe your mother and law can put down an egg-crate and sleep on top of the piano," and "maybe one day you guys could use it as a baby crib." then we started placing bets on how long it would take for the piano to wind up in twinset's apartment, as we described vivid disaster scenarios on moving day. "what it the piano exceeds the weight restriction of the freight elevator?" and "what if it won't fit through the door?"

good times.

friends with desk jobs

coming home from a stroll (read: shopping) around lakeview this afternoon, i was feeling cheerful until i got to my building. first off, big box addressed to me sitting outside the front door, clearly marked "dell" on the side. only slightly less effective than "steal this piece of expensive electronic equipment," if you ask me. i'm also marginally annoyed that i couldn't trade in the free wireless router for, say, a cheaper computer, since i already have a wireless router, but that's another story.

anyway, i quickly had to shove the "why are the dell delivery guys idiots?" thoughts out of my head to make room for, "why does the lobby smell like feet?" and "why is the elevator making such creepy lurching movements and horrible sounds?"

i was feeling cranky about these things for a minute, but then i checked my email and immediately felt better. i'd like to formally thank my good blogmate (mgbm) for bringing her good friend sm into the mix... mostly because between mgbm and sm i now get TONS of emails.

to my extraordinary delight, sm loves many of the things i like, such as figure skating and boys. recently, she has joined me in compulsive buffy the vampire slayer watching. her play by play of the experience makes me 1) feel better about my own unhealthy obsession, 2) re-experience the entire series, and 3) have many messages in my inbox all the time. it's great.

sm has become so predictable in her buffy-related correspondence that when i got a completely anonymous text message on my cell phone that only read, "omg! oz is a werewolf?" i knew who it was and what it was about without any hesitation.

further enhancing my internet experience has been the fact that, despite having what i suspect is a fairly hectic work schedule, mgbm has been sending me many, funny little emails lately, mostly in the "i hate everything" variety.

so let's drink to mgbm, sm, friends with time to email, the internet, and buffy the vampire slayer... and angel, because he's hot.

all systems go?

i'm really not one for conspiracy theory, or even one to revel in the incompetance of government agencies...

and i understand that euphemisms sometimes serve an important social function...

but i was listening to a story this morning on NPR about the upcoming NASA launch of space shuttle discovery and i found it pretty interesting.

apparently the 20 highest ranking NASA guys had their big vote the other day - the launch is scheduled as planned, even though the chief engineer and the head of SAFETY voted "no go."

now, i know absolutely nothing about rocket science, but this decision makes me nervous.
the HEAD ENGINEER and HEAD SAFETY GUYS think this a bad idea and we're doing it anyway? disconcerting on a tangible level, and also in more of a spidy sense way. aren't they just asking for something bad to happen, what with going ahead with a launch inspite of this very public vote.

the most entertaining aspect of the story was actually the "go" executives talking about why they were pro-launch. sure, there have been a few "loss of vehicle incidents," but these no go votes represent "healthy debate."

i'm not reassured.

SWM seeks punctual SWF

by the time i was done with my work day and my blogmate had completed operation buy-new-plants-for-new-backyard, and by the time we were both done battling northside, pre-cubs-game traffic we were both ready for a beer or three. it was thus with much relief that we finally managed to find each other at the village tap. i drank stella and she drank molasses (otherwise known as rogue hazelnut) and we munched on spinach and mushroom quesedillas feeling pretty darned good about ourselves...

and that was before we'd even realized how good we had it.

come to find out that my good blogmate had been wondering why she been greeted with such a welcoming grin by a certain suit-wearing gentleman hanging out in the bar, awkwardly without escort. she then arranged herself at a table such that she couldn't see what i was seeing which was a markedly attractive, well-dressed man pacing nervously around the bar, until he was finally joined by a similarly nervous woman who greeted him with a rather stiff handshake.

it was only then that i reported my discovery of the obviously internet-type blind date that was happening to my soon-to-be enlightened blogmate, who finally understood the frantic pre-drinking that she'd been observing while she waited for me.

we then proceeded that have a good, prolonged laugh at the new couple's expense, and developed various creative, though ultimately unfulfilled schemes to send the guy a drink as a condolence pride for 1) being on a blind date 2) having his date show up WAY late and 3) being busted for it by us. that said, we're not quite that mean, and we decided to leave it alone.

and i decided that i had another airtight reason not to go on j-date.

foreplay

as a general rule i try to avoid work-related shop talk on the blog. if i have to talk about my job i try to generalize things as much as possible, maintaining the illusion to my audience (and mostly to myself) that i'm just like everyone else.

but screw that.

i've had some minor health problems in the last few weeks that have resulted in my having to share various bits of very personal information with various doctors, all of whom have turned out to be uncomfortably aged-matched male peers. if you're a single girl and you're a pediatrics resident, the absolute last person you want examining you is single, boy as your internal medicine resident, especially when you work at the same hospital as him. it's just weird.

when the nephrology fellow wanted to know when i'd last smoked marijuana and did i prefer sex with men, women or both, that was awkward, but at least the weirdness was blunted by his being dorky and married. today when i went for my kidney ultrasound i was especially horrified to discover that my test would not be done by the fat, middle-aged radiology tech i was expecting, but by a young trendy resident with cute shaggy hair who was, let's just say it, hot... and definitely not wearing a wedding ring. i would have been completely mortified by the situation if he hadn't been so obviously mortified. instead i decided to lay back and have a good internal laugh at the comical absurdity of the situation.

"so you didn't want to wear a, um, gown?"
"she said i didn't have to. do you want me to?"
"uh, i don't know. i guess this is fine."

excrutiating.

and this is all before he couldn't actually find my left kidney and needed to call in his boss, who proceeded to school him in front of me,
"i've told you before you need to set the internal edge definition to 2" (or some other piece of technical hoopla that i didn't understand).
by the time it was all over i was lying along on the stretcher, covered with ultrasound gel, feeling like i needed to smoke a cigarette.

all i can say is, you don't really know awkwardness until a cute radiology resident puts an ultrasound probe down your pants.

there goes the neighborhood

i understand that there's nothing edgy about living in boystown. but that's part of its appeal. it's safe, the gardens are well groomed, and it's quiet. or at least, it used to be quiet.

a few months ago i woke up to the sounds of a loud, fairly awkward shouting match taking place in the street below. it was one of those domestic arguments that you really don't want to overhear - i felt a little embarassed just lying in bed listening to it, not only for its obviously not being meant for public consumption, but for it's awful, psych 101 quality, to the tune of, "YOU'RE UGLY! YOU'RE UGLY ON THE INSIDE!" painful, right?

not as painful as the fight that woke me a few days ago, i think between the same two people. they carried on long enough for me to make a number of observations about them, the first being that they were loud, obnoxious morons who both seemed to have been the recipients of exactly the wrong amount of education. enough schooling to know a few 3 syllable words, but not enough to know quite how to use them, or to quell the overwhelming springer factor. it started out with alot of "YOU'RE SO HYPOCRITICAL!" and "WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I HAVE THAT OBLIGATION?" before things started really degenerating. to follow there was alot of "FAT SLUT!" and "LAZY WHORE!" and finally a resounding chorus of "NO YOU SHUT UP!" before the cops finally came.

classy.

hatred on wheels

i hate everything.

no offense to my blogmate and mb (mbm & mb...) but today i hate bicycles and the people who ride them.

after spending the better part of last week wallowing in congested, vomiting misery on my couch i was finally forced to pull myself together and go to work today... but from the second i left my apartment it was all wrong. i was pulling out of the driveway before i realized that my nice hot cup of coffee was still sitting on the kitchen counter, and on the road less than 3 minutes before everything went to hell. i was specifically aware that bike the drive (the yearly cyclist love fest where they close off LSD to cars for some good, old-fashioned two-wheeled fun) was happening this weekend, but specifically thought that it was happening yesterday. i'm still way too chicago-dumb to attempt an efficient maneuver through city streets without any help from mapquest, and proceded to work my way south in a slow, disorganized way that was anything but sexy... and that landed me at work a good 20 minutes late.

things might have moved a little faster had it not been for all the wholesome, happy, bike-helmeted families that were meandering their way westward, obstructing not only my usual route to work but also clogging every intersection between me and my destination.

i'd like to think that my irrational rage was born from my own, inner outdoorsy-ness and my sadness that i couldn't join in on the fun. but really i'm just a bitter girl who hates everything.

yours in hating everything,

as i've previously mentioned, i've recently picked up the habit of serially text-paging my blogmate messages that only say "i hate everything" or some variant thereof.

please add weather to the list of things that i hate.

as my blogmate recently pointed out, i compulsively check my email every morning when i wake up. what my blogmate probably doesn't know is that like clockwork, when i'm done checking my email i check the weather forecast.

but there's no point. in addition to never having any email at 5:30 in the morning (unless my blogmate was up late and desperately needing to tell me something), the weather has absolutely no bearing on my life.

though i resent, in theory, the fact that it's late may and still consistently darned cold outside, neither rain, nor sleet nor hail change things for me at all. nice weather, nasty weather, either way i go to work and come home and only experience the weather for the duration of my drive down lakeshore. ok, i'm occasionally inconvenienced when it's raining as i walk the 12 yards between the parking lot and the door, but that's about it.

in fact, the impact the weather has had on me lately me is to 1) make me extremely resentful when people tell me how nice it is outside and 2) make me miserably sick for the last 6 days. not sick enough to keep me home from work. just enough to give me that crappy, death-warmed-over feeling.

my miserable allergy-attack-cold thing led me to walgreens today, where the guy behind the counter wouldn't sell me any generic sudafed because i didn't have ID. i'm two weeks from turning 29 and i'm getting carded for cold medicine.

i also hate cold medicine, my need for it, and my lack of ability to buy any.

to our very good and guilt-ridden friends...

you are all lovely people.

mb and i are very excited about the upcoming move, and have been talking about the various stages of packing, gas leaks, throwing things away, etc. with many of you. and like good friends, you have all been happy for us. we love you and are excited to welcome you to our new home in a week or so.

let us set the record straight to ease your collective conscience. we are hiring movers. i have never seen so many confused and vaguely guilty faces, ranging from the explicit "umm, i know it's my job as friend to offer to help you to move -- do you need me?" to the more subtle "yeah... ummm... so my sister? is also moving that day. sorry, would love to help you..." to the joyful "sweet! no more third-floor walk-up?"

we understand your reluctance to move our furniture -- you've already helped us so many times in the last three years, have lost toenails and watches on the steep wooden back staircase, have lost parts of your cement front driveways while i come careening through in a truck whose size exceeds my driving skills. we are also reluctant to move our own furniture. and to those who have regularly asked "you're HIRING? like paying MONEY? that doesn't seem like you," yes, even we think it's worth it this time.

so rest easy, thank you for three years of lifting, dragging, lending showers when ours stops working, laundry when ours stops working, etc. your next job will be to come admire the new place. there will be beer. we'll keep you posted.

self-subversive?

excellent. plan avoid-yuppie-lifestyle is well underway.

after a pleasant conversation with a co-worker about her husband and kids, and her laughing about how much more exciting the single life must be, i headed off for work saturday morning. when mb picked me up (raining, no car, etc.) we returned to casa hyde park, which had been brewing a huge gas leak all day. this seemed to explain mb's headache and nausea, i guess... so i called and argued with the building manager for awhile, who finally came up to check out the situation, decided that he personally did not smell any gas, and left. i called the gas company, who in 30 minutes showed up and validated our concerns by saying that they could smell it halfway up the stairs. now having a new connector of some sort, we opened all the windows, turned on the fans, and decided to have that single night on the town my friend had been mentioning. mb made the wise suggestion that since we're leaving hyde park in 2 short weeks, we owe it to the 'hood to spend our evening here. fish and chips at the very deserted pub were good, but memoirs of a geisha was not. that movie is pain heaped with awkwardness complicated by suffering and more pain. an hour in, i poked mb and mentioned that the movie was a little weird. he whispered back that he'd rather be sniffing gas fumes. so back we went, and spent the rest of our most awesome evening in a now gas-fume-free but freezing apartment.

so now things are well-ventilated and everything, and we're getting ready to move soon. (aside: we think the new place should have a name, like the kennedy's "wexford" or something. we're debating between "snootington" and "fancington." any votes?) lest i worry about our immediately fitting in to the new neighborhood and becoming the yuppies that we fear, the place won't look clean or conservative any time soon. when i mentioned that i'd picked up 20+ copies of a local lgbt paper, i didn't mean for packing gifts, i meant for packing our apartment. our granite counters and stainless steel appliances will easily be tempered by the million scantily clad men smiling from the pages of the chicago free press.

even better, mb reminded me that some of our new neighbors are mormons. he's planning the welcoming statement now: "hi, i'm mb and this is my live-in girlfriend. it's great to meet you! hey, would you mind giving me a hand carrying this crate of booze wrapped in soft gay porn?"

we're going to fit right in.

help a girl out

why didn't someone tell me that chicago free press was a gay men's newspaper before i picked up 20 copies of it for packing filler?

material girl? a flight of ideas.

i am rapidly but anxiously reaching the conclusion that stuff is good.

after months of mocking my blogmate's dental hygiene preferences, i recently purchased one of those new battery-operated auto-rotating toothbrushes. i can honestly say that my teeth haven't felt this clean since, well, since i last saw dentists regularly. (i'm sorry, but on the south side the only dentists i've found who take my insurance are named rufus, and i can't get past it.) so i'm pleased with the new discovery (and mb is super jealous), but added to my increasing love of pedicures and accessories... it's becoming a problem. we're also moving in a few weeks, leaving behind our undergrad-style walk-up where the floors slant and the lights dim when the microwave comes on, in favor of a newer place with extras like washer-dryer, central heat and air, shower that (hopefully) works on demand.

so here i am, feeling a little guilty and trying to avoid the slippery slope, feeling good for the decision not to replace stella right away and share mb's car for awhile, and who is trying to interfere? my parents. they think it's completely unreasonable that i not have my own car and are calling every other day to find out if i've bought another yet. their reasons thus far:

"but you need one"
"but then you won't come visit us"
"don't you work?"

so i think the material line is jagged. i'm completely willing to justify a much more frivolous though inexpensive option like electric toothbrush (mmmm...) but getting more stubborn by the phone call about not replacing stella, which i could probably put to better use than a crest uber-kleen or whatever. i'm not sure where the line is; i'm currently planning to save money by taking a wine-making class down in beverly, but then buy a big wine rack to house the case of cheap wine that will then come home with me.

so i'm inconsistent. or maybe i'm doing just fine, and the electric toothbrush and wine rack are just fine as long as i don't have gold chains for my palm pilot holster like guido. that's the best thing about guido. all of the rest of our idiosyncrasies smooth right over.

goodbye guido, bye-bye beefcake

at 2:30 AM this morning i found myself lying wide awake in bed, completely unable to fall back asleep, trying to sort out which unpleasant factoids about my ex-boyfriend were actually true (yes, he did get married to someone else uncomfortably close to the time we broke up, no, he i and did not get married and divorced in october of 2003). i fell back asleep just in time for my alarm to go off at which point i dragged myself out of bed and actually managed to get myself to work a few minutes early, giving me just enough time to enjoy a nice bowl of oatmeal before getting started on my day. but a leisurely breakfast wasn't really in the cards for me, and no sooner than i had walked in the door i found myself bombarded by angry phone calls from angry people who had me convinced that i was a blind, incompetent moron.

i was feeling pretty lousy about the way the day was going until i looked around and noticed the conspicuous absence of our visiting intern guido (or at least that should have been his name - he also went by beefcake or "that body builder guy")...

then things started looking up.

working with guido was a double whammy of awfulness. for starters, he was possibly the most useless rotator we've ever had. i'll never know if he was actually as thick-headed as he seemed to be, but i've never seen anyone demonstrate such an astounding lack of work ethic. getting him to do anything was like hitting your head against a wall.

for all his uselessness, he might have gotten away with it had he made a little less of an aesthetic spectacle of himself. he was completely ridiculous. he was about as thick as he was tall, with a shiny bald head and perpetually red face. not his fault, except that one could only become so muscle-y by spending all one's waking hours at the gym (possibly with the help of anabolic steroids). and he wasn't just huge and thuggish. he wore horrible clothes - baggy pants with pleats in weird colors with tight shirts and shoes and belts that always perfectly matched and were always just a bit too ornate. he would then adorn these belts with various gadgets, all held in holsters with little gold chains. palm pilot, cell phone, beeper, stethoscope. he even had holsters for his ridiculous pens. i realize that it sounds silly to hate someone for their choice of writing instrument, but every day he would show up with a different, big, shiny, obnoxious fountain pen. you'd think with such a flashy pen he'd write something down occasionally, but you'd be wrong.

so although i keep emailing and text-ing my blogmate messages that only say, "i hate everything," i at least have the solace of knowing that i never have to see guido again.

freak show

ok. now, i understand that 1) i have no love life at all and am in no position to casually wave off potential suitors and 2) that i am not infrequently guilty of the crime of randomly and inappropriately becoming infatuated with people i don't know and cannot have. seriously- farbeit from me to criticize someone for their romantic whimsy. but the following scenarios have occurred this weekend and i take this constellation of events as a bad sign.

1) at the uber-trendy vida lounge on cinco de mayo some 22-year-old guy in a sox jersey and big (stupid) sombrero actually groped my chest under the thinly veiled guise of examining my blinky corona necklace party favor.
2) at a random dive bar on milwaukee and addison a greasy pony-tailed man in one of those baja hoodies that were so popular in 1993 approached ck and i to see if either one of us gave a good massage, because he had just beaten up his friend and his friend could sure use a good massage.
and finally
3) roy the cable guy came knocking yesterday afternoon (interrupting my transfixtion on my mind-numbing, error-ridden spread sheets) and after craning his neck around the door to see the inside of my apartment tried to strike up a conversation about my listening to boy dylan and how much he loves bob dylan and what's your name and you should call me.

really???