Luscious

Oh. It is a perfectly luscious week in the news.

First, Gonzales quit. I was running late to work yesterday so I heard the first few minutes of The Diane Rehm show. When asked what had finally driven Gonzales to resign despite the continued support of President Halfwit, one of her panelists talked about how he would go to a U.S. Attorney’s office and the U.S. Attorney in question wouldn’t show up to meet him; about how when he would speak to a group, the group had to be scolded into standing up and applauding loudly.

Dance lawyer-monkeys, dance!

President Halfwit says that Gonzales’s “name was dragged through the mud for political reasons.” If by political reasons, George means that Congress felt compelled to curtail the Attorney General’s quest to gut the Constitution, violate the law, and install President Halfwit as Dictator for Life, then he has a point. Otherwise, who does he think he’s kidding?

Just because someone is your favorite whore, doesn’t mean he’s not a whore.

So, yeah. Goodbye Gonzales. Congratulations on “Living the American Dream” by destroying America. Hope you face perjury charges, you filthy cocksucking yes-man.

Gonzales quitting was a fine thing, yes, but I have to say that I’m even more excited about Idaho Republican Larry Craig getting busted for “lewd conduct” in an airport men’s room. Reading about this was like biting into a perfect, crisp apple fresh off the tree. Crunchy and sweet and juice-dripping-off-my-chin glorious.

Although perhaps less vitriolic in his hatred of gays and lesbians than his party cohorts, his votes against allowing gays to marry or offering them protections as victims of hate crime victims is enough to cause me to turn on him and call him out for being yet another hypocritical closet case.

Had he been content to be another pathetic bastard trying to subdue his self-loathing, I would feel sorry for him. However, since he felt compelled to ameliorate his personal sense of shame by attempting to inflict it on others, I feel justified in the following in laughing hysterically at his plight while relishing his public humiliation and, I hope, the impending premature failure of his political career.

I am especially pleased by the stupid desperation of trying to get his Senatorial Wee-wee played with in an airport bathroom. What? No time in the schedule to pay a visit to a truckstop?

Prisoner's Dilemma

The good news is, my co-workers have started making coffee. The bad news? Someone has introduced decaf into the building.

Our break room has three identical coffee pots. One of these things is not like the other. Some communist has put decaf in one of the coffee pots, and I have no way of knowing which one.

With good coffee, one can generally tell decaf by smell. One can certainly tell by taste. It’s like someone playing a chord incorrectly—something is just missing. There is a note that’s just missing from even the best decaf coffee.

Now, I have friends who for various reasons have given up caffeine. Sort of the way mother pandas sometimes forsake their young, or guppies eat their babies, but that’s their business. They’re good people and I don’t judge them. There are even occasions on which I have been known to order decaf, namely, after dinner on a school night with dessert. Tiramisu without coffee is crime against nature, and if I know I need to get sleep shortly after leaving a restaurant I will order decaf, as long as I know that it has been made from what were once decent beans.

With bad coffee, though, there is no point to decaf. Bad coffee already tastes out of tune. The one real perk is the jolt of wakefulness and the way it can sometimes evoke decent coffee. Bad decaf, though, is just . . . bad. When Jesus looks down from heaven and sees His children drinking decaf coffee, He cries. He did not die on the cross so that sinners could drink decaffeinated Folgers. He wanted us to enjoy his Father’s blessings. Do you know how hard it is to hold a tissue to dry your Holy Tears when you have big, gaping holes in your hands? DO YOU?

Whatever. I don’t care what other people choose to put into their bodies. Their diets of canned peas and stale Krispy Kremes are none of my affair. But the first time I figure out that the reason I’m falling asleep at my desk because I accidentally drank decaf I’m replacing it with Euro Roast cut with methamphetamine.

Lovin' the Late Shift

It is 7:30, and I am beginning to believe there is a very real possibility I might die at work.

"Why," you might think to yourself, "Katie must be so relieved! She's been so bored at work for months! Surely, she must at least feel relieved that she's needed; that she's accomplishing something!"

No. But thank you for playing.

I'm sitting at Corporate Happy Fun job with a headset perched on my ear in the extremely unlikely event that we're going to get a phone call between now and 8:15 CST. How unlikely, you ask? Well, about as likely as me one day explaining String Theory. To a chimpanzee. With a lobotomy.

Considering the monumental waste of time this is, I'm not that incredibly upset about it. At this point, my entire experience of Corporate Happy Fun America has been one of unmitigated human folly; I have ceased to expect anything better. I knew that the occasional late evening shift was part and parcel of this particular job, so I really shouldn't complain.

BUT . . .

My fellow late-shift suckers have, at least in theory, the possibility of being in some way useful. Plus, as an added bonus, they make a fuck of a lot more money than I do. Which means that they should have to sit here, and I should get to go home and take of this stupid bra. 7:40 is too late on a Monday to have to wear a bra, I think.

Instead, I'll just sit here for another 34 minutes and think about what I want for dinner. I think that cheese will figure prominently.

The Best Hangover Ever

I have the best boyfriend in the world, perhaps the best boyfriend in the long and storied history of boyfriends. If my boyfriend were a car, he would start reliably, get 300 miles to the gallon, and vacuum his own floor mats.

Why, you ask, am I waxing so fond of the boy?

Because he took me out and he got me really drunk.

After days of feeling ineffectual and useless at work and random other bummers that made me want nothing so much as to take to my bed, Jason decided that he was taking me out for drinks. Nothing fancy, just he and I and our friends in a bar.

It was glorious. Hours of gin and tonic and conversation about things that had nothing, NOTHING to do with Corporate Happy Fun Job: writing, art, the dispensing of romantic advice. For the first time in days I feel as though the wrinkles in my cortex are not filled with dryer lint. I enjoyed people! Wit! There was actual laughter, instead of wizened and bitter chuckles.

Plus, if last night’s company and cocktails wasn’t enough, as an added bonus today I just. Don’t. Care. I am exploring new and unplumbed depths of professional indifference. Right now, this instant, I truly believe that I’m earning every penny of my paltry fucking salary by holding my chair in place. My god. This is absolutely brilliant.

Not Cranky

Last night, through a liberal mix of alcohol and venting, I managed to work through my excess of vitriol and nastiness. After sleeping in a bit this morning, I woke to find my mood had lightened immeasurably and that I no longer derived a low-grade physical excitement from the mere thought of throwing canned goods at the heads of bosses, co-workers, and other drivers. Crisis averted. I don’t really know what all contributed to yesterday’s exceeding pissed-offedness, a combination of things, I suppose.

One factor, I’m sure, is that it has been unremittingly hot and miserable. It’s so unpleasant that going outside for anything but traversing the distance between one air-conditioned location and another is out of the question. Further exacerbating my sense of heat related isolation is the fact that I’ve been relatively broke. Normally when I’m poor I can walk the dog or something to get out of the house for an hour or so. Yeah. That’s so not happening. Right now the dogs are lucky I’m willing to open the door long enough to let them out; the thought of taking Bennet for walkies is patently absurd.

I know the hot weather will most likely come to an end sooner rather than later. August is the time of summer when it seems like the warm and green will stretch on forever, a never ending cycle of long, hot days and humid nights filled with the songs of crickets and cicadas and white noise of air-conditioners. The fact is, though, that summer will soon exhaust itself and give way to fall.

Indeed, most of the kids around here are already back in school. Somehow that just seems wrong to me, to have kids return so early and cut them off from the glories of going to the pool and sleeping in and staying up late. It seems strange to drag kids into the classroom before we’ve even had the whisper of a promise of the autumn. Even though I understand the reasoning behind it, the thought of being 16 and staring at homework instead of lying in my friend’s hammock and staring up at the sky kind of breaks my heart a little.

Cranky

Due to a lack of Tanqueray and a simultaneous lack of funds, I find myself at home pursing an affair with my first true love. Vodka.

I have had one of those days where I found myself unable to suppress or ignore the irritants endemic to being a pink collar wage slave. Instead, every typical and minor annoyance made me want to heave my coffee mug at the wall. To be graphic, today was like a yeast infection when you’re taking antibiotics. It was hugely unpleasant and annoying, and it was caused by the normal course of things being all fucked up.

Behold, a brief overview of the things that made me crankier than usual. I apologize for any misspellings or grammatical foibles; I’m busy trying to get a tad tipsy.

1. I would like someone to explain to me why it is that men in offices cannot make coffee. I mean, I know they’re busy making more money and exercising their throbbing male privilege, but give me a fucking break. If I come into work one more time to find a swallow of coffee cooking down into a post-industrial sludge in each of three damn-near empty coffee pots, I’m going to brew a pot using my own urine to serve the slugs in my office.

2. I’m tired of people acting cartarded. You know what I mean, any cocksmack who gets behind the wheel of a vehicle and immediately loses the ability to behave like anything but a fucking douche. You know, like the moron who couldn’t manage to get the ass end of his ginormous piece of dysfunctional Detroit shit out of my way so that I could merge. Fuck you. Fuck your little kid pissing on a Chevy symbol. Can you not see that I need to go home and get a drink? Can not the world see that?

3. Having read/seen a recent spate of stories regarding women who were sexually assaulted and subsequently screwed by the system, I’m left to the conclusion that the only logical course of action for someone who is raped is to kill her fucking attacker—that will at least be something like justice. Apparently, when being screwed against one’s own will, once just isn’t enough.

4. Fuck a bunch of St. Louis summer. 103? Can we just cry “uncle” and be done with it? Damn . . .

Post-Wedding Guest Wrapup

As expected, this past weekend’s wedding was quite nice. The bride and groom seemed appropriately smitten with one another. The groom’s mother, who has a bit of the control freak about her, managed not to stroke out. At no point did it look like the bride was about ready to kill herself or someone else, which at this jaded point in my life indicates to me that the wedding went off without any significant hitch. Either that or she had the forethought to partake of Lord Xanax, in which case she is a woman who is wise to the world and an excellent choice for a life’s companion.

The only exception I can take with the wedding was that there was a bit too much Jesus Cum-By-Yah shit for my liking. The minister/pastor/preacher/whatever was a brother-in-law to the bride. He seemed a nice enough fellow, if you ignore the excessive clean-cuttedness of his appearance, but for the love of a non-denominational god, I was left wondering if he had just learned the word “covenant” and felt compelled to use it in sentences so that he would not forget it. I’m not sure, but by the time all was said and done I think that all the guests might have been entered into a covenant with him, Cum-By-Yah Christ, the Holy Ghost, and perhaps the neighbors and the local mental health organization.

I for one have little tolerance for organized religion in general, and evangelical organized religion in particular. Although I am genetically Catholic (none of the faith, all of the guilt!), I refuse to partake in any religion that finds women to be unfit vessels for the word of god. If one accepts that Jesus was the son of god born to a virgin mother, then one accepts that a loving human mother allowed her son to suffer and die for the sins of all mankind. That counts as a pretty big sacrifice, methinks, and apparently indicates that god thought a woman was a fit enough vessel to bring his word to us. Otherwise, would god not have just sent Jesus, or built him out of sticks or something? And I’m having none of that original sin bullshit, either. I decline to believe that the stupid are god’s chosen.

Frankly, I don’t buy any of the major articles of Christian faith except that Jesus was a swell fellow with some pretty good ideas. I have been known to chat with Mary from time to time, but that has more with the limitations of my own ability to cope with reality than actual faith.

Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

There were in attendance any number of people with whom I went to high school. All but one either ignored me or didn’t recognize me. I’m guessing the former because, well, I don’t really look that different. Frankly, I don’t care so very much because my butt was smaller than that of their wives. I try to pretty up that fact however I like, but I’m not one for lying. In the river of any life, are there not shallow patches? Yea, verily.

The romantic history of the bride and groom was sweet and poignant and all kind of Lifetime Movie Network. As I was departing, I had a chat with the groom’s mom, who summed it all up, “He’s loved her forever.”

Well, that’s something, isn’t it?

But not everything. In the end the test isn’t the love he’s had for in the past, it’s the love that he has for her tomorrow and 10 years from now and beyond. That’s what a marriage is, isn’t it? The decision to love someone today despite the occasional desire to strangle him or her?

Bleh. Enough with the mush. We will endeavor shortly to return to our regular schedule of complaints, rants, and wild speculations.

Saturday Plans

When I don’t have to go to pink collar wage slave job #2, my Saturdays generally consist of sleeping in, followed by perhaps brunch with the boy and some sort of effort to extricate my house from borderline chaos and filth with which I seem destined to surround myself. The evenings often involve friends and dinners or bars, again assuming that I am not working.

This Saturday, though, an old friend of the family is getting married. Our parents have been friends since they were in high school, and our mothers were pregnant with us at the same time. Our families have shared countless barbecues and midwinter parties, and some of my fondest memories of early childhood involve playing with Paul.

Perhaps, if she seems a laughing sort, I will tell his bride how Paulie and I used to play Star Wars in a blue plastic pool in his backyard, or how every summer he seemed to have a ready supply of box turtles. If I get really drunk, I might be prevailed upon to relate my earliest memory of the dashing groom, that is, him pitching a howling fit because the cold butter had torn a hole in his bread at the local pizza place. Although that last might be a story I just save for the other people who went to high school with us.

As Paul and I grew up, we found that we had fewer and fewer interests in common. When we went to high school together we were certainly friendly, but in the distant, nod to one another in the hallway kind of way. Now as adults, we see one another for major events but not much else. Still though, I am very happy for him and his family, and I’m looking forward to meeting his new wife and to hearing about their excitement about their new life.

I like weddings as a general rule, as long as the other guests don’t devote overmuch time to conversing with my cleavage. There is something life-affirming about the human willingness to fly in the face of evident futility and accumulated knowledge and promise lifelong devotion to another. It warms my chill little heart to see people behave with so much hope and so little reason.

That said, though, today a quick little wave of dread washed over me as it occurred to me that this wedding will be widely attended by people who attended my embarkation of my matrimonial Titanic’s maiden voyage just over six years ago. I have seen all these people since I’ve been divorced; it’s not like it will be news to anyone. Hell, most of these people have known me my whole life and probably weren’t surprised that another human being was unable to tolerate my constant companionship.

I feel kind of like a tart who spent a bunch of money to stand in front of a bunch of people with a fistful of flowers and a mouth full of lies. Even though I know that no one but me gives a fleeting fuck about any of this, the fact remains that I do. I sort of feel like I should wear an inappropriate evening gown and my whore-red lipstick to this shindig.

You know what though? I sort of think I should feel this way. Not in some sort of self-loathing-I-deserve-to-be-punished-and-suffer-way, but more that I think it’s important to have learned from that mistake. If it didn’t hurt a little, then wouldn’t that mean that I didn’t, at the very least, mean the words I said at the time that I said them? Even though that marriage was a mistake, and I suspected so at the time, I can at least say that I leaned into the traces and tried to haul that miserable fucker out of the sucking mud of failure.

It should hurt when you break promises, even if they were the wrong promises to make.

This little pang will pass. Tomorrow will be lovely, I’m certain. Perhaps if I’m lucky there will be good music and The Boy will honor me with a dance. That would be a good thing.

Extreme Elimination Challenge: Outdoor Edition

You know what this day needs? A beach. A cabaña boy. Piña coladas. A nice big umbrella so that The Boy can hang out with me and not be killed by the sun, as he comes from a long lineage of cloud-loving people.

Alas, no. There will be none of that. There will only be Monday and boredom, two great tastes that go great together.

I should not complain, I guess, as I had a lovely and relaxing weekend. Between pink-collar-wage-slave jobs one and two, it had been some weeks since I had had a day off. Considering I’m a generally unpleasant person at the best of times, this was doing nothing for my personality. This weekend, though, I took Saturday and Sunday off for a non-camping and float trip.

I’m not proud of it, but I don’t camp. I just don’t. If there is a hell and I wind up there, after a hard millennium of having my flesh flayed from my body by cruel demons, I expect the only vacation available to me will be camping. I like looking at stars and trees and various other representatives from this, our natural world, but I care little for being eaten alive by mosquitoes or peeing in the woods.

The whole not liking to pee in the woods thing totally horrifies my mother. She took my divorce like a champ. The fact that I remain childless doesn’t make her bat an eye. My economic insecurity is just par for the course. But my reluctance to pee while leaning precariously against what may or may not be a poisonous plant? That’s indicative of some sort of maternal failure on her part.

Further, I don’t cope especially well with the great outdoors. I love it in principle, not so much in practice. Any woman whose reaction to the unexpected out of doors is to yell “Nature! Nature! Nature!” while flailing is NOT someone who much needs to be out in the wild.

My other objection to camping is one that is endemic to being a St. Louisan, that is, most of our camping is done at one of several campsites within two hours of the Lou. These campsites are, often, absolutely infested with the trashiest of white trash one can imagine. Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of waking up at Bass River Resort can back me up on the following statement: long-term human inbreeding should be discouraged. While the occasional marriage between first cousins might not be the end of the world, over generations it should be discouraged.

My initial adult experience of camping took place under such unfavorable and frightening circumstances about 5 years ago. By the end of that weekend there was literally no one in a one mile radius of me that I would not have willingly killed with perfect glee. Although my hatred of the people who dragged me into that doomed and fetid pit eventually passed, my disdain for camping remains to this day.

This weekend, obviously, was very different. First of all, I have a much better class of friends at 30 than I did at 25. It’s been a busy five years, what can I say? Second of all, this trip did not involve any of the major commercial camping killing fields so popular among Those Whose Family Trees Have No Branches. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, my significant other on this trip is not a total fuckwit. There is nothing more exhausting than having to worry about the idiocy of someone with whom you are involved. Since The Boy is a pretty stellar traveling companion and all-around thoughtful guy, it took a lot of the dread out of the situation.

This weekend was a camping/float trip in belated celebration of The Roommate’s birthday. Because she is a thoughtful type, she ensured that I had a place to stay that involved window screens and, more importantly, indoor plumbing. Consequently, I got to enjoy much great company and a moderate amount of intoxication in a lovely natural setting with very little of the actual “nature” getting on me.

Overall, I would count the weekend a success. There was a wardrobe malfunction—the hook that holds the swimming suit top in place finally suffered a failure of structural integrity, snapping in two while paddling the canoe. Hysterics ensured, and fortunately my friend had a very brave little safety pin who managed to keep the girls in check for the remainder of the trip, surviving even the trip on the rope swing.

An Open Letter to Johnson and Johnson, et al

Dear Deodorant Manufacturers,

I know that in your quest to corner an ever-larger share of the antiperspirant market, you feel that you must always come out with a new and better product. As you pursue research and development in the service of this, our laissez-faire economic system, please bear in mind the following: as you attempt to impress me with ever-more interesting deodorant choices, my basic needs have not changed.

To wit, I need not to smell like an armpit.

Further, not only do I prefer not to “pit out” as they say, I prefer for my armpits to carry no noticeable fragrance of any kind. No lilies, no pears, no vanilla, no rain, ocean, jasmine, violet, ginger, spicy Italian sausage, or whatever other fragrance experiment might be floating around in a test-tube in your R&D lab.

When I shop for an antiperspirant, I am seeking the most easily ignorable product I can find. I want innocuous. I want unimposing. When my boyfriend asks about the unique and beguiling scent I am wearing, I want him to be referring to my perfume. Not the oily goo that I swipe across my stubbly armpit every morning.

In case your market research has failed in some gross way, allow me to elucidate something for you. The purchasers of women’s antiperspirants are, by and large, women. Most women are in possession of countless gels, lotions, creams, sprays, and powders that can and do assist us in smelling like anything hitherto encountered on this or any other planet. There is nothing that you can bring to this party that I want.

Now, I understand that there might be any number of women out there who enjoy the wide-variety of scents available on today’s antiperspirant market; far be it from me to stand between their armpits and life’s scent smorgasbord. All I ask is that when I stop into Target at lunch time to stock up, I can easily acquire a deodorant that neither possesses its own distinct aroma nor leaves giant, chalky marks on my clothes.

If it must smell like something, make it something subtle and forgettable. Powder scent will do in a pinch.

Yours sincerely,
Etc, etc, etc.

Feeding Frenzy

It is GO LIVE week at Corporate Happy Fun Job. GO LIVE is a very big deal, much fanfare and brouhaha surrounding our stage-one roll-out. Various systems people are wandering hither and yon discovering what we’ve known all along, that is, that this software is about as nice as an economy tub of lube mixed liberally with sand.

In an effort to simultaneously celebrate our GO LIVE and suborn the rebellion in the hearts of the employees, they have been feeding us with in an inch our lives. Today? Cheesecake contest. And cotton candy, sno-cones, and a popcorn machine. The sugar and fat is making us compliant.

I figure if we can’t make this Corporate Happy Fun project work, they are going to cut up the staff and market us as fois gras. Genius, really.

The upshot of this ongoing feeding frenzy is that I have spent the entire day covered in foodstuffs. Cotton candy leavings; coffee that managed to dribble onto my shirt beneath my boobs where I couldn’t see it until I went to the ladies. Fuckall knows what else. On top of last nights unfortunate yard tumble, I am forced to conclude that I am having one of those weeks.