tangentwoman

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Reversing myself

Back to work today.
Fridge is fixed, but people suck.
Misanthrope, again.


[with apologies to Steakbellie, master of the haiku]

Monday, July 14, 2008

Stir-crazy

On Friday, I worked at home, which I hardly ever do, and I got tons done, despite the constant din of screeching children at the camp that's held across the street. I swear, these three girls sang that "I'm a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world" song for 30 minutes straight. I am curious what got them started on that song -- didn't it come out before they were born?

Today, I am working at home because I am awaiting a call ("sometime between 8 and 5")from the people coming to look at (and, I hope, to fix) our refrigerator/freezer, which has been on the fritz since probably Thursday. Owing to the gray, drizzly, but blessedly cooler weather, it is remarkably quiet. The grayness and the quiet are making me kind of sleepy, which is not so conducive to the working, but was much appreciated during the two-hour conference call I wrapped up, especially because I don't know how to use the mute function on our phone (thank goodness, I do know how to use speaker, because two hours is a long-ass time to be holding the phone up to one's ear).

Now I am secretly wishing for someone to prank call me with the old, "Hey, is your refrigerator running?" because today, the joke would be on him. "No, in fact, it is not."

How do kids make prank calls these days, now that everyone has Caller ID? I was never big into the prank calling per se, but I remember for some reason my junior high friends and I would call up boys we liked and either (1) hang up (which became dangerous by the time I was 10 or 11, when everyone used *69 to dial the last caller) or (2) stay on the line and ask to speak to [NAME], NAME being the girl among us who liked that particular boy. Somehow, we were certain that, if Mike's mom answered the phone, and we asked for Kristin, and she said, "I'm sorry, there's no Kristin here," Mike would overhear her and think, "You know, there is no Kristin here. But I wish there were. I should totally go out with Kristin."

Anyway, nothing makes me want to go out more than being stuck inside, because of course if I leave for 10 minutes to get a sandwich, the service people will call exactly within those 10 minutes, and then we will have to go through this whole rigmarole again later in the week. Believe me, this happened ALL the time when I worked in customer service for the air conditioning company.

"But I just went to pick up my kid from school!"
"But you weren't there when we called. We told you we'd call to verify that someone would be home."
"But I just left for five minutes!! Send him back!! Can't you send him back?!"
"I'm sorry, ma'am, he's left the area. We'll try to get him back later today, but we may need to reschedule."
"I'm going to come over there and shoot you if you don't send someone here THIS INSTANT."

So I will be staying put.

I'm also learning from the back-to-back work-at-home days that I could not do a job where I worked at home all the time. It's surprising to me, a little bit, but I actually miss the buzz of the office and having people to talk to all day long (even though I'm grateful for uninterrupted work time for specific tasks that I get done much more quickly at home).

And although Tucker is awfully cute, his repertoire is fairly limited, as it turns out: play dead in the living room; play dead in the sunroom; lick self inappropriately; saunter off for some water; plop back down in living room. And although I can make snarky comments to him the way I would to whoever happens to be walking past my office, it's somehow just not the same. So, good to know for my next gig: Opportunity to work at home as needed? Good. Daily work-at-home arrangement with no opportunity for in-person human interaction? No good.

Wednesday, July 09, 2008

World's biggest dumbass (today, anyway)

Today started out badly. I have had two successive nights of not being able to sleep -- I fall asleep fine, and sleep fairly soundly at first, but yesterday I woke up at 4:15 and couldn't get back, and today it was 3:11. I had to catch a 5:58 train to D.C. anyway, but not ideal, and when I was asleep I had anxiety dreams about leaving my work bag at home and being totally unprepared for my meetings.

So in real life, I remembered the bag, but literally a minute before my train arrived, I realized I'd left my cell phone in the car in the parking deck, across the tracks, two stories up. Now, I probably leave my cell phone behind every other month or so, and it's usually an annoyance but not a biggie. Today, though, I was staffing not only my big boss, but HER big boss, i.e. the biggest boss, on a packed day of congressional meetings, on a day when there were tons of votes going on and potentially lots of last-minute scheduling changes. So, suffice to say, not a good day to be without a phone.

Luckily, I had a couple of things going in my favor: my work-issued Blackberry does have a phone function, amd I was able to get special dispensation to use that function given the circumstances. And, bless him, the Smelmooo retrieved my real phone from my car and kept an eye on incoming calls, and basically was my secretary for the day, so it all went off without a hitch, and the biggest boss was none the wiser (I was still freaking out a hair when my big boss got on the train at the next station, and I had to come clean to her).

So it all worked out, and it was actually quite a successful day on the whole. And I was feeling quite proud and relieved when I finally got to lose my suit jacket and throw my hair in a ponytail and pee at Union Station before we caught our train home.

And then, I am not making this up, the woman in the stall next to me peed on me. Well, on my shoe and on my pants leg, which I suppose is slightly better than peeing on my skin, but still, vile. I understand not wanting to sit on those grody seats, but if you're gonna squat (which I do), have SOME semblance of aim and respect! I understand a little bit on the seat, maybe, if you're not squatting deeply enough, but really? All over the floor, and so far off-base that a fairly considerable amount splashes into the adjoining stall? Unacceptable, and did I mention just plain GROSS?!

But sort of par for the course today, I guess.

Monday, July 07, 2008

Ouch! And other random thoughts

So, I was un-friended on Facebook. Props to Facebook, actually, because I have no idea when I was un-friended. It tells me every time someone sneezes, but a high school classmate (who has more than 300 friends and is clearly not discriminating) was able to drop me without my even knowing.

I sort of can't blame her for dumping me; she found me when I first joined Facebook, and she wrote on my Wall, and I never wrote her back because I didn't want her 300 other friends knowing what I was up to, and I hadn't quite figured out that you can just send a private message through the system, so I never got in real touch with her. Which is fine, although if I had, I'd have told her that I found, during my spring cleaning a couple of months ago, a picture of us from our ninth-grade semi-formal. Maybe I will scan and post it, and tag her in the photo, and she'll want to be friends again, if only to get me to take down the photo of her in a dress with puffy, fuschia satin sleeves.

Also on my mind:

-- I have been obsessed with my fiber intake for the last couple of weeks, ever since I rode the morning train to D.C. with a colleague who pointed out that my staple early-morning train breakfast (a single-serving bowl of Special K, a Diet Coke and a water) is insanely low in fiber. I'd of course never considered that before -- come on! the ads tell me Special K is good for my diet! -- but now that my co-worker flagged the issue, I'm reading breakfast-food labels like never before. And now I need to rethink my train routine, which makes me unhappy, especially because the 7-11 doesn't sell single-serving containers of any high-fiber cereals. Hmmm. A dilemma.

-- My fiber obsession triggered a voice in my head from an '80s television show, which I initially attributed to Square One TV, but this morning it hit me that it's, in fact, from Perfect Strangers. I don't remember the exact circumstances, but someone makes an inappropriate poop joke, and some stuffy old lady, all offended huffs, "Well, I never!" And Balki, of course, replies, "Eat more fiber." My brother for some reason went to a taping of Perfect Strangers, and said that Balki seemed to be all coked up. This does not surprise me.

-- Twice in the last week, the Smelmooo and I have gone to dinner parties capped by make-your-own-sundae bars, both of which included freshly-baked brownies. Heaven. There is nothing I like better than a make-your-own-sundae bar.

-- One of my co-workers this morning said, "There's something I need to tell you guys," with a tone that suggested that she had super-big news, like that she was having a baby or something. But, in fact, she wanted to tell me about a wedding she'd gone to that featured what she called Mashed Potato Sundaes during the cocktail hour. Which sounded like one of the grossest things I could imagine, until she explained that it was basically a martini glass filled with mashed potatoes, with a toppings bar featuring bacon and cheese and all kinds of toppings. Which actually sounds kind of yummy, if you call it a fixin's bar or something. But it is not a sundae.

-- My parents' good friends did a family vacation the same week we did, and they actually hired a professional photographer (they did not wear matching shirts). I saw their daughter last week, and we swapped war stories, and I think we came out about even. Their shoot took an hour and a half, which I think would've been worse than our 15 minutes of family fun. But now my mom is hot on getting professional photos done at the Jersey shore this fall. Eh, it'll make her happy, and it won't be the end of the world. But I think I will lobby hard for coordinated, not matching, wardrobes.

-- I normally have an anti-talking policy at the gym, but the other day, I was on the elliptical next to the Smelmooo, catching up on my People, and I could not help exclaiming, "Wow, that's a big blow to US Weekly, losing Joey Bartolomeo to People!" And the Smelmooo looked at me like I was speaking a foreign language. I can't blame him. I tried to backpedal, explaining that she went to Colgate and our alumni newsletter did a little write-up on her, blah blah blah, but he was, quite reasonably, hearing none of it.

-- I'm inexplicably sad for Drew Barrymore and her latest break-up, and very happy for Nicole Kidman, although I'm not so much a fan of "Sunday" as a baby name (perhaps because I know a dog named Sunday?). I am wholly uninterested in the whole A-Rod/Madonna scandal.

-- I secretly enjoy Flavor of Love, and even less secretly enjoy Rock of Love, but I think that I Love Money is too awful even for me. It seems almost worse than the Real World/Road Rules challenge, because these people are actual grown-ups (although at this point many of the RWRR alum are, too). As much as I love Heather and will be rooting for her from afar, I don't think I can stand to watch.

-- The Smelmooo and I watched about a hundred movies this weekend, and I actually enjoyed Definitely, Maybe, which I did not expect. I still don't get what the big deal is about Ryan Reynolds, but I liked him better in this movie than in any other. I'm still skeptical that he and Scarlett will make it, maybe moreso after seeing her in The Other Boleyn Girl. I read one review that suggested Scarlett would've been better cast as Anne, and Natalie Portman as Mary, an idea that made watching the movie more interesting -- I kept thinking how each actress would have approached the other's scene if the roles had been reversed -- but I'm not sure that it would've been a better movie if they'd swapped. It was so icky and preposterous by the end, I wouldn't have enjoyed it regardless of who was playing whom.

-- I just saw a commercial for Starburst Gummi Bursts. Please, please, stop the madness with the unexpected liquid inside of candy and gum. I inadvertently took a piece of Chewles-like gum from Minnams's gum basket the other day, and I was so startled that I yelped and spit it out like a six-year-old. Which I did not do when I was served scallop ceviche at one of the ice-cream-sundae bar dinner parties. I decided I needed to be a grown-up and eat at least some of it, although I briefly debated feigning an allergy or even a pregnancy when I overheard one of the other guests apologizing to our host that, although she loooooooves ceviche, it's a no-no given that she's expecting. But I wanted to be a good guest, so I dug in, even though I hate scallops, and I sort of needed to chase each bite with a big sip of beer to tamp down my gag reflex. Which I thought was stealthy and slick of me, but which the Smelmooo told me was completely obvious, which it probably was, particularly coupled with him taking half of the scallops off my plate. But I get points for trying, right? And I did gobble up my ice cream sundae.

Thursday, July 03, 2008

I'm not giving a rose to Doug Benson

So, I can’t believe I’m actually giving the movie Super High Me ("based on a joke by Doug Benson") a second thought, because my reaction to it was just a hair to the negative side of indifference. There was lots of random footage of DEA agents busting legitimate dispensaries in California, and I didn't feel like that hung together with the rest of the movie, but whatever. And I was sort of fascinated by this contraption called a volcano that basically filled up a giant plastic bag that Doug sucked on for his first hit of the morning.

But the thing that really rubbed me the wrong way was that, during the first half of the movie, in which Doug is doing his 30-day abstinence period (from both pot and alcohol, and it was never clear to me whether he reintroduced alcohol during the 30 days of pot-smoking), there's this weird little scene where his mom breaks her glasses, and he has to send her a check to cover the cost of new glasses. He points out, kind of bitterly, that he pays for pretty much everything for his mom. And, scene. And, never brought up again.

I figured that it would have to come up later, like when he was in the thick of his 30 days of smoking he’d somehow be unable to help her out when she needed it or something (although that would have been off-message for what I think he was trying to demonstrate), or that in one of his therapy sessions something more about his mom would come out. You know, you show a gun in the first act, it has to go off in the second? But no mention at all, and it makes me think Doug Benson -- who I love on Best Week Ever, particularly when he does rose ceremonies -- is kind of a jerk. Why make that public, your mom's financial troubles and the fact that she depends on you, if it's wholly unrelated to anything else in the storyline?