the sloppy copy

The most comfortable feeling in the world is when you accept a day-long job interview at a place out-of-state.

You fly in the night before, are wined and dined by your potential supervisor, and dropped off at a swank-ass hotel. And then the next morning, she meets you for breakfast at said swank-ass hotel. But before that, you take approximately six hours getting ready because you’ve already messed up a couple job interviews before this one (at least, you think you must have because – duh- you’re still going on interviews) and you are determined that this is going to be THE ONE.

So you do something you never do: you wear pantyhose.

Oh, and also makeup.

And straighten your hair.

Okay, so three things you never do.

Anyway.

You’re feeling like you’ve got this shit on lockdown, son, with your suit and heels and combed hair and brushed teeth. And, come to think about it, you owe at least some of that confidence to the ‘hose. Your shockingly-white Irish skin has the potential to frighten and blind those who gaze upon it for too long. But beneath a layer of nylon, you suddenly become Christie-fucking-Brinkley prancing on a goddamn beach in Antigua.

Wait, did I say nylon? Because I meant the Devil’s fabric.

Lured into a false sense of confidence, you sit through a series of 78,039 interviews with 120,393 people. Then you are taken on an extensive tour of the place.

Which includes a lot of walking around.

Outside.

You are smart: you packed flats and blister-block and Band-Aids for this part of the adventure (damn right, I did! says the uber-confident go-getter inside you). You even anticipated the 900-degree temperatures and soul-crushing humidity: I have extra deodorant and body spray and even extra makeup for touch-ups LIKE A GODDAMN BOSS you are saying.

You did not, however, realize that it rained recently and the entire out-of-doors was one giant festering pool of mosquito-breeding standing water. Also, your personal body chemistry is, essentially, mosquito crack.

The tour is at the end of the day, and your interview-anxiety prevents you from noticing much discomfort until you arrive back at your hotel.

Then, like a ton of bricks, it hits you and you must take off the nylons oh my God oh my God oh my God what is going on?! Dear Sweet Lord what has happened to my legs?

You remove the Devil’s Fabric from your person, only to discover that your legs from about mid-thigh down are COVERED in mosquito bites.

THIS IS NOT AN EXAGGERATION. 

And not only are they covered, but they are swollen and itchy and… black and blue? As near as you can figure, the tourniquet effect of the ‘hose has somehow compressed each bite so that and caused actual bruising. Like – seriously? What the fuck?

So you hobble down to the little convenience “store” in the lobby of the hotel and feebly ask for some fucking Benadryl, wanting nothing more than to dull the pain. And you shuffle back up to your room and lay absolutely still on the bed, watching cable television and praying to Jesus that if I’m going to die of gangrene at least let me get this stupid job first. 

And by the morning your legs are yellow and green and still swollen and still itchy and you have a flight to catch but, actually, it doesn’t matter because you miss your connecting flight and end up having to spend the night in Atlanta without your suitcase so you spend one more night laying in a hotel bed praying for death to come quickly.

*                                          *                                       *

Epilogue

You get the fucking job.
Like a boss.
A crippled, swole-up boss.

First, someone made popcorn at work. And it wasn’t burnt!

It smelled so good. And I wanted some. Very badly.

Either that, or I was having mini-stroke. Whatever. Moving on.

Second, I set my heart on making some popcorn when I got home. Truly, it got me through the remaining two hours of work.

Third, I got home and went to my cupboard.

No fucking popcorn.

This is where my brain sort of temporarily stopped working and I did that irrational-desperate thing where – even though I knew I had no popcorn because I just-then remembered making the last bag a few days ago and thinking to myself “Oh, pick up some more popcorn next time you’re at the store” – I started to tear apart my kitchen.

I removed damn-near-everything in the cabinet where the popcorn is generally kept. Oh, maybe there’s a stray bag hiding behind these boxes of tea! Oh, I KNOW there is. THERE HAS TO BE ONE MORE BAG BACK HERE.

Then I remembered that I used to keep my popcorn in a basket on top of the refrigerator. This was, of course, over a year ago. BUT MAYBE I MISSED A BAG WHEN I MOVED IT.

No dice.

That’s when I realized I was a crazy person. A crazy, popcorn-obsessed person.

And I got surly.

Because I didn’t have anything that remotely resembled popcorn. No nuts. No crackers. Nothing snack-y nor crunch-y.

So I ended up eating a caramel instead, which is essentially the least popcorn-like food item ever.

Woe is me. My life is HARD, y’all.

Sigh.

Something is seriously wrong with me, and much as I try to play it cool, one of my coworkers is on to me.
We’re sitting in a row at a laminate counter, our computers and phones side-by-side – no cubicles. And it’s so dark. Why are there no overhead lights?
I feel like I’m drunk. No, not drunk: drugged. I keep moving in slow motion. The cord to my mouse keeps getting tangled and I can’t maneuver it to click where I need to go. Not that I remember where to click next. I keep making rookie mistakes. No, not rookie mistakes; they are the mistakes of some sort of crazy, drugged person.
My hand slides along the mouse and it jerks forward; I click a button that makes everything I had up on my screen disappear. I quickly press the button on my phone that makes it not ring – I can’t be taking calls if I have no programs up! I am panicking. One of the housekeepers is watching me at a distance. She, too, seems to think something is very wrong with me. I call out for my coworker for help. He leans over, presses one button, and everything is back. He probably asks if I am okay. Because, as I said before, I’m acting like I just swallowed a fistful of Xanax.
I go back to my last call. Seems I forgot to ask several Very Important Questions – I am embarrassed because I’m sitting so close to everyone else. I try to call the person back. Only I’m whispering this time, because I don’t want everyone to know what I’m doing. Because hunching over the phone and whispering into it isn’t suspicious at all.

Realizing that I look super-shady, I explain myself to a coworker who didn’t ask for an explanation. Then, in some sort of paranoid fit, I somehow pick up my computer, my phone, everything, and move down the hall and around the corner. Then it becomes more clear that I am working in…a shopping mall? Because now I am in a more well-lit corridor, my computer and phone on the floor outside an open store. There, I see the same housekeeper as before. I go up to introduce myself, because apparently now I am back in my old job, and she is going to be the new lead for my building. She does not shake hands, because she says they are dirty, but she is eyeing mine – they are equally filthy.

Time skips around and then I am taking a phone call. The caller tells me that he is going to pull some sort of prank / grand gesture at his college and he needs to get his satellite radio out of his car. The prank involves climbing on the roof of a building and playing the 60s station on his radio – which is locked in his car.

Feeling helpful, I decide that I’ll just sing some 60s music to him instead. And this is what I sang:

And then I woke up.

In a fit of – I don’t know? Frivolousness? Insanity? Frivosanity? – I decided to look for a nice warm winter coat on the internets. I was dismayed by what I found.

Exhibit A:

HOW DOES THIS KEEP YOU WARM?
Not a coat.

Exhibit B:

Okay, this picture doesn’t make it look too bad, but I couldn’t link to the pic of someone wearing it. In that pic, it looked like some horrendous suit-type jacket that you’d see a 62-year-old State Comptroller wearing.
NOT A COAT.

Exhibit C:

This is what happens when a Hefty bag and a muppet buy three shots apiece at last call and go home together.
NOT A COAT.

…aaaaaand then I gave up.

I am a grown-ass woman with a problem.

I don’t know what to do with my stuffed animals.

I’m far too selfish to give all of them away, even to friends’ children. I’ve steadily done so in the past, but now I’m down to the core group that I just can’t part with.

Is that nuts?

Probably not. I could be saving them for my own, unborn, children. Right?

Except here’s the thing: I tried putting them in a garbage bag the other day, so that I could put them in storage.

But I couldn’t.

Like, because they would suffocate or something.

Ok, I didn’t actually think that. Seriously, at least. But the thought of them getting all musty and gross in some outdoor storage shed? Nope.

I mean, I don’t have them lined up on my bed or anything… but they are in a plainly-visible pile on a shelf in my bedroom.

I thought about taking them to my parents’ house and leaving them in my childhood bedroom there, but those sneaky so-and-sos are slowly reclaiming the room as their own. It’s like they own the house or something. The last time I stayed the night, I was told I could “sleep in the computer room.” More and more of those little odds-and-ends I never knew what to do with are being boxed up and brought to my apartment whether I want them there or not. And I’m not sure Gordie Cow could withstand the stress of moving back-and-forth so many times. He’s seen a lot, y’all. Had a rough life.

So the next time you come over to my place, do me a favor and kindly ignore the (literal) elephant in the room until I can figure out what to do with him. Thanks.

First: there’s are a lot of songs about being “too late,” y’all. I was going to pick some catchy lyric to use as the title but I couldn’t. Too overwhelmed with choices.

Second, but really most important: Christmas is doneso. In the past. Over. Yes, my tree is still up and yes, my gifts are still beneath it. Unwrapped, but still there (does any other family do that?). But the ravaging of colored paper is finit.

And I couldn’t help but notice that I seem to be a few gifts short this year.

I mean, I don’t want to be one of those people, but I just wanted to hypothetically toss it out there that I won’t pitch a fit if your gift comes a little later this year. I mean, it’s already late. But I won’t be angry. So don’t think you should cancel it or anything.

As long as it’s this, of course:

http://www.hammacher.com/product/10963

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,200 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

It makes me mad and, depending on the person, breaks my heart to see someone think they’re not good enough. Now I’m not talking about unrealistic shit – I am not “good enough” to be president. Or run an ultramarathon. Or be a lineman for the county, no matter HOW BAD I want to sing that song and…just really feel it, ya know? I just hate that new years’ resolutions somehow imply deterioration, not growth, during the preceding year.

We are humans, and imperfect, so there’s always gonna be room for improvement – I want to bitch about the public less at work. I want to remember to water my plants. I really want to learn all the words to Wichita Lineman – but these are goals, and they can happen any day, any time. An easy-to-remember calendar day be damned.

Ahem.

That said…

It’s difficult to not get swept up in the promise and, well, magic of this day. I let my mind wander a little this morning and got a little silly thinking about the things I could do every day for a year if I just started now. Eat a balanced breakfast. Call my mother. Start saving for my move to Wichita County. And I realized resolutions aren’t really all that destructive after all if we don’t let them get the better of us.

Because we all need a small vacation, even when it don’t look like rain.

Also, this, if you’re a little confused:

You know how it feels when you’re sick to the point where you cannot/will not eat anything? Because the consequences are, let’s say, less than pleasant? But eventually you start to feel what you assume has to be hunger, because you haven’t eaten in what seems like fourteen days, so you decide to “test it out” by sort of half-licking, half-chipmunk-gnawing at a pretzel with the salt chipped off? And for the first couple lick-gnaws, it’s okay, you’re feelin’ pretty good about this. So you graduate to taking a bite, like a real-person-sized bite, and then suddenly BAM. No. Not working. It’s like you imagine your stomach or intestines or whatever suddenly seizing up into a giant spazzy knot while the voice of King Triton is roaring Noooooooooooooooooooooo! 

Why King Triton?

*shrug*

So, accepting the fact that you’ll probably just starve to death (even though it’s probably only been, like, five hours since you last ate), you just decide to go to bed.

And then you wake up in the morning and it’s like – whoa. Birds are singing. The sun is shining. You feel completely and totally fine. Like, you can’t remember what it feels like to be sick. At all. So after you finish praising Jesus and calling your Mommy to tell her you feel all better, you sit down to a bowl of Raisin Bran.

And it is the best, most delicious, meal you’ve had in your entire life.

GUYS. GUYS. GUYS. 

CHRISTMAS.
IS.
TOMORROW.

OMG. OMG. OMG.

But.

This means the Christmas music is ending.

Sigh.

Alright, alright. I know that probably makes most people want to break out into a chorus of Hallelujahs (Ha! I knew you liked Christmas music!), but for the first time in three years I wasn’t force-fed holiday tunes for 8 hours each workday. And yeah, I miss it.

I am a sucker – a sucker I tell you! – for Christmas songs. Granted, there are a few that make me want to deafen myself with the business end of a #2 Ticonderoga,* but for the most part I love ’em all: the good (O Holy Night), the bad (I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas) and the ugly (I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus…as performed by the Jackson 5).

So as a gift to you, I present (ha! get it?) you with this gem; the end-all, be-all of secular Christmas music:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g4lY8Y3eoo

Oh, God. Her voice. I damn-near weep with joy when I hear Judy Garland sing. This one in particular gives me goosebumps. 

Merry Christmas, friends.

*ie Santa Baby.
So. Much. Rage. Against. Dumb. Song.