the sloppy copy

There is no shame in my game: I am completely and totally OB–SESSED with Pinterest. I visit that site and it’s like Christmas morning for me: an essentially unlimited treasure trove of recipes, craft projects and DIY ideas. Ho-Lee-Crap. It’s a wonder I don’t pee myself, overly-excitable-puppy-style, each time I log in.

From this cornucopia of Web sites I’ve hand-picked a few especially good’uns: either the photography is amazing (trying to take a good picture of a cookie is hard, y’all), the writing is excellent (also hard, y’all), the ideas splenderefescent (I went there) or d) all of the above.

For a very brief moment (nanosecond, really), I contemplated making this blog into something like those which I so admire. And I have actually tried a few times to come up with a super-clever-n-fun post about some project/idea/dessert I’d recently tried to copy/make/bake… I even carefully patterned it off of my best-beloved blogs, but… it ended up something like this:

Mint-truffle kiss brown bites

the clever introduction
I was at Target and my mom saw a bag of cherry cordial Hersheys kisses. And I was all like “Whoa!” And she was all like “I know!” and I was like “Yeah!” and she was like “You should buy them!” And I was like “I hate cherry cordials!” And she was like “Why did you say ‘Whoa,’ then?” And I was all like “Because YOU like them.” So she bought them. And then, I don’t know, she felt bad or something and bought a bag of these mint-truffle kisses for me.

picture posted after being photoshopped for at least 75 hours

But I’m all like “these are good in a one-per-day kind of way, what am I supposed to do with all these?”

But then I got an idea…

apology that the picture looks so bad even though IT DOES NOT LOOK BAD. SERIOUSLY DO YOU HAVE YOUR OWN PERSONAL GAFFER TO LIGHT YOUR KITCHEN?

the series of pictures with vague, step-by-step instructions
Too much work. Do these people really stop, mid-egg-beating, to take pictures?

the actual recipe, in cute printable recipe-card format
Ingredients:
1. Brownie mix. Bag, box, homemade. I don’t care.
2. The shit you need for the brownies. Eggs? Oil? Water? Milk? Cardamom? Fuck. Whatever.
3. A bag of the truffle-kiss things. I got mine at Target. They’re also available wherever mint truffle Hersheys kisses are sold

Instructions:
1. Get a bag of brownie mix. Or a box. I don’t care.
2. Do whatever it says to do on the bag. Or box. Whatever.
3. Use a mini-muffin tin. And maybe don’t use mini-muffin liners because FUCK do those things NOT like brownies! I was peeling that shit off the bottom of each individual brownie for-ever.
4. So grease the pan or whatever.
5. Bake them for almost as long as the bag or box says. Pull them out of the oven. Ram an unwrapped kiss, pointy-side-down, into the middle of each one. It’ll look like this:

pithy caption

the clever close and giveaway/contest/call for comments
I have nothing to give away to you, because the brownies already got ate and no one cares enough about this blog to give me things to give away (like I’d actually give them away! Ha-ha! Joke’s on you, imaginary corporate sponsor!). I’m told they tasted good. I was all like “meh, could take it or leave it” but a couple people damn-near shat themselves with delight when they tried them. So. Yeah. To each their own.

In summary, I don’t think this version would go over as well.

Or would it?

Some snippets.

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I think that I need to preface this thought with a disclaimer: I floss regularly. My dentist takes note of this and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy for doing something that people should just do and I’m regularly appalled by others’ lack of flossing (forgetting sometimes is okay; forgetting for a few years is not) but anyway, my point is: I floss. It’s not a once-a-month kind of deal.
But. Here’s the thing. Each time I do, I unspool a ridiculous amount to use. Like, criminally wasteful. Why, why why can I never remember how much I realistically need? It’s not like I didn’t floss my teeth twenty-four frickin’ hours ago while thinking Hey! Why the hell did I just take so much floss? I did not grow extra rows of teeth in the interim, or participate in some sort of corn-on-the-cob eating contest, or sustain an injury to my hippocampus resulting in the inability to form new memories. I shouldn’t have to Post-it this to my bathroom mirror, but I just might.
It doesn’t help that a standard container of floss contains something like 7 miles of the stuff. I’m not going through a new pack each week or anything. So I’ve grown comfortable in my floss-wasting ways. If I switched to some fancy-pants expensive brand (does that even exist?) would I be more aware of how much I used? Probably not.

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I’ve recently come into quite a few belts. I use the phrase “come into” intentionally. Like someone who has “come into” money, it was unexpected and has changed my life.

At the end of this summer, I owned two proper belts: one was brown, the other black. I had a couple of those decorative, came-with-a-tunic-shirt type things, but those could really only be worn with the blouse from whence they came. I can’t pull off the belted-shirt look, though Lord knows I try.
But then I got a job with a “business casual” dress code, which meant purchasing “business casual” attire. By no means have I re-wardrobed myself, but I did use this as an excuse to do a little upgrading. But. Here’s the thing. Every. single. thing I’ve bought since comes with a damn belt. Pants. Dresses. Shirts. Belts. Belts. Belts. And sometimes, not just one! A three-pack of belts? Sure! Why the hell not?
I’ll tell you why not: my closet looks like a goddamned belt store.
In August, life was simple. To work, I wore my black belt. To everywhere else, I wore my brown one. Now, when I dress myself in the morning, I end up rifling through some great hanging curtain of leather and leather-ish materials in order to find something to keep my belt loops in work.

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If I ever invite you to my home for dinner, here’s a fun game you can play during the car ride over. It’s called Soup or Pasta? and, depending on the number of folks in your carpool and their collective knowledge of statistics, there’s always a winner.

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One of my new supervisors has awesome hair.

Like, shampoo-commercial hair. And I can tell that she’s just naturally blessed with it because it’s just…good. Like she comes into work and it’s just down, or pulled into a ponytail – not painstakingly clipped back at exacting angles and tamed by precise spritzes of sort-of-nice-but-sort-of-acrid hair product. I’m certain she just washes it, combs it, and lets it dry.

I’ve already said too much; you think me some sort of hair-obsessed crazy person who spends measurable amounts of time gazing at this woman’s head. I swear to you: I do not. It’s like how some women notice other women’s shoes, or handbags, or wedding bands… I just notice hair.

But this is kind of unfortunate, because hair is not something that can often be complimented offhandedly, like someone’s cute heels or colorful purse. And double-unfortunate is that she’s kind of like my boss.

Me: Jane,* you have such pretty hair.

Jane: Oh, haha. Thanks

Me: Like, it’s just so…nice.

awkward pause

Me: Oh, haha. That sounded so weird. Like [creepy voice] “oh, I really like your hair.” Haha. I just meant, I wanted to compliment you on it.

uncomfortable pause

Me: Well, I mean. I didn’t know how to say that without sounding all creepy. I guess it could be worse. I could have come up to you and been all like [Slingblade voice] “Yer hair sure do smell purty.” Because that would be weeeeeeird!

Jane looks around to see if anyone else is hearing this

Me: Oh, haha. I mean, like, I’m sorry. I just wanted to… You just… It just…looks so…soft…Like, I want to touch it…

Jane backs away slowly and we only interact if absolutely necessary and never make eye contact again.

Me: Hmmm. I do not think that went well.
*Of course her name’s not Jane. Did you really need the asterisk? Sigh.

“Your Biggest Thanksgiving Problems–Solved!”
The following are (apparently) Thanksgiving “problems”
(according to a Dash magazine piece published last week)
with my unsolicited advice.

You’re expecting 12 guests but have only eight good china place settings
The way I see it, you have a couple options here:
1) Decide which of your family members deserve the good stuff and send the rest home, or
2) Get over it. Everyone eats off the Dixie plates.

The gravy boat creates a drippy mess on your tablecloth.
I don’t understand why this is happening. Is there a hole in the boat? Then cover it with duct tape and move on. Otherwise, your family is just a bunch of slobs and this can’t be helped.

You can’t afford a big floral centerpiece.
I don’t have any advice for this one. I’m just genuinely sorry that your friends and family suck so hard that your lack of a big floral centerpiece has become such a cause for concern. Actually, I do have some advice: Start drinking. Now (see next).

You need a cheery drink to serve before the meal.
A few fingers of Glenlivet’ll perk the room right up, but be sure to pace yourself. We’re going for “perky” not “spinny.”

The potluck table is strewn with mystery casseroles.
Were these dishes dropped off by the Casserole Fairy? No? Well then ask the person who brought it what the hell they brought.

Last year the gravy was full of lumps.
Maybe you should make some new gravy. It’s probably lumpy BECAUSE IT’S A YEAR OLD.

Friends and family say they want to help, but no one knows what to do.
B-double E-double R-U-N

You need to keep the youngsters occupied while you cook.
Baby, run up to the Citgo and get Gramma a pack of smokes. Tell Jeff that Gloria sent you. He owes me one.

You’re running low on wine.
That’s not even funny. Don’t joke about that.

Everyone loves cranberry sauce, but making your own seems so complicated.
No. It’s not.

Trussing and basting take forever.
Use real words. I cannot answer your question if I do not know what you are asking.

You don’t have any napkin rings – or they look bulky and outdated.
Never mind. Forget it. THANKSGIVING IS FUCKING RUINED.

I have a new job, and with that new job comes insurance benefits. This means a) I no longer care about those poor fools with no health coverage* and b) I will never be ill or require health care again. Until I leave** this job and my benefits expire, of course. On that very day I’ll probably be attacked by some disease-infested orangutan in the parking lot of my apartment complex.

In the meantime I’ve been online exploring this whole “health care” thing. The provider of my insurance has a surprisingly handy website on which one can search for doctors to treat their horrific maladies. And I say “horrific” because as I searched for lady-part doctors, I was able to manipulate the search criteria to find this:

That number seems a bit…off.

*Completely kidding here.
**Read: fired.

It is not Spring, and yet: you are overwhelmed by a sort of Cleaning Demon – the kind that stirs you up into a frenzy, but instead of spinning around and speaking in tongues, you decide ALL OF YOUR KITCHEN CABINETS MUST BE CLEANED OUT AND REARRANGED AND REORGANIZED RIGHT THIS VERY MINUTE and here you are, sitting in the middle of your kitchen floor, weeping into a half-empty box of Krispy crackers, cussing and screaming and contemplating paying cash money to someone else to fix this fucking mess. Seriously, how did this happen? What the hell? How the fuck did I get myself into this?

How did the fuck you get yourself into this?*

You’ve got dreams, kid. Plans and dreams and hopes and desires for one of those hyper-organized, super-sleek-n-clean spaces you see in the blogs and on the magazines. And you can do it, you know you can! You just need to start from scratch. And to start from scratch, you must first trash your home.

Oh, you don’t actually think in those particular terms. But you’re daydreaming about the Big Picture here, and in order to accomplish this [horrifically far-fetched] goal, you must completely undo everything you’ve ever done to organize (and otherwise make livable) your apartment. It’s pathological Outside The Box thinking, except you’re so swept up in your Big Ideas you can’t even see that the box was perfectly fine in the first place, dipshit, why are you making so much extra work for yourself?

So maybe you start with the kitchen. You, who spend two hours a day on Pinterest, are convinced that the food and dish storage system you’ve used for the previous ten years no longer works. With absolute clarity, you come to realize you’ve been wrong this entire time, and you cannot fucking believe you kept your cereal on top of the fridge and your dishtowels in a drawer. By now, the Cleaning Demon is more like an amoeba invading your brain and eating holes in the places where rational thought used to be. And it makes ABSOLUTE PERFECT SENSE to take EVERY DISH AND KITCHEN ACCESSORY YOU OWN out of its original place and pile it up on the counter, gypsy-caravan-style. This makes the re-organizing process easier, you allow yourself to think.

Your Big Ideas keep flooding in, most likely though the amoeba-chewed holes in your gray matter, and now you’ve got just the most awesome idea ever for storing cereal bowls and cereal in the same cabinet, with a cute little scrapbook paper-covered box to hold spoons.

But you should probably go make that spoon box while you’re thinking about it. Give the Mod Podge time to dry while you’re sorting and alphabetizing your canned goods, you know.

So after foam-brushing your cares away you return to the kitchen, but notice the initial energy with which you approached this project is beginning to wane. No worries- let’s move onto the refrigerator for now; I can come back to the cabinets after I sanitize all the shelves and organize my produce into color-coded bins.

But you need to borrow your mother’s labelmaker in order to complete this stage in the process, so off you go to your parents’ house. And it would be rude to not stay and visit, right? Plus the game is on, and Dad just bought some beers he can’t wait for you to try.

By the time you get back to your apartment, you’ve forgotten about your “project”. And you enter the kitchen, turn on the light, and a feeling of dread like you’ve not experienced before overwhelms you. You turn off the light, leave the kitchen, and go watch some television.

But you cannot concentrate on this game of Family Feud. Your kitchen calls to you, a voice echoing thorough your hole-y brain: you’re not finished…you’re not finished… And you sigh, and turn off Steve Harvey mid-innuendo, and trudge back into the war zone.

You survey the destruction. You do not remember emptying out all of the cabinets…and why did you unfold all of the dish towels? Did they really need to be refolded? And who the fuck alphabetizes their canned goods, anyway? Oh, and the spoons are too long for this stupid spoon box, what the hell? WHY DID I NOT MEASURE THIS FIRST? And WHOSE IDEA WAS ANY OF THIS? you demand, realizing too late you’re speaking aloud. To no one.

The craft beer has made you hungry, but you can’t locate the mac n’ cheese for which you so desperately long. It doesn’t matter, anyway; you can’t remember where you put the measuring cups. Or your saucepans. Or your stove.

Defeated and deflated, you sink to the floor, amid empty boxes that were once perfectly-fine receptacles for your cereal bars and croutons – before you decided they needed to be re-placed into matching decorative containers. You are overwhelmed, and angry, and sad, and so very hungry. You eat half a sleeve of saltines, choking on carbohydrates and your own tears.

It didn’t have to end this way, friend. You could have left well enough alone. Do you remember your carefree days? When spoons fit in silverware trays and the toaster was just fine sitting out there on the counter like that? You can never go back there, dear reader, but you can serve as a warning to others:

The next time you are overwhelmed by a desire to clean, distract yourself with some Family Feud.

Survey says: you can thank me later.

*Syntax be damned; I just wanted to keep the “fuck” in that sentence. Also, I just typed that sentence. Boom.

I realize that with everything I am about to type here, I’m basically saying GO AHEAD AND HACK ME, MOTHA-EFFAHS but I also realize that I’m just giving a voice to the masses-upon-masses of other Joe Schmoes who do the same. damn. thing.

So here goes.

I have, essentially, three passwords. For everything. In my entire life.

Do you have any idea how many things need passwords? No, do not try and count them, because the answer is ALL OF THE THINGS. ALL OF THE THINGS NEED PASSWORDS.

EVERY. SINGLE. THING.

In my new job, I have NO LESS THAN five login/password combinations. Basically, every single program out of which I do work has its own combination. And I say “combination” because, as I mentioned earlier, I just mix-and-match the same three generic passwords over and over again.

Sounds simple, eh? No. You are wrong. I tried to make it easy on myself, but now it’s turned into some terrifying game of Memory.

Because if I type the wrong login/password combination more than – Oh, I don’t know? – two times, I get locked out of the system. This hasn’t happened to me yet, but I’m told this is a Very Bad Thing.

In fact, I can’t think the phrase “locked out of the system” without hearing that jail-cell-doors-sliding-shut-and-locking sound effect in my mind. You know what I’m talking about. You’re hearing it too.

So I wrote down all of the login/password combinations on a sheet of paper with the heading “IF YOU WANT TO FUCK OVER THE NEW GIRL, HERE IS HOW: “

No, not really. I wrote them out in Julie Code, which means it makes sense to me now but I give myself one more week before I can’t understand my gibberish and esoteric abbreviations.

Which, apparently, is okay, because we must reset out passwords regularly. I heard it was every six months or so, which I’m sure is exactly the amount of time it will take me before I don’t have to sit and organize my thoughts before I log in.

Yay, computers!

Okay, so I was apparently worked up into a hurricane-ous tizzy with that last post. I think that I am probably the just-right amount of nervous, balanced with a healthy dose of very-excite! (Borat voice*). I mean, I have an entire week of not-doing-my-job-just-getting-trained-how-to-do-it to go through yet. And already I’m worried about the inconsequential stuff. Welcome to the inside of my head.

I also forget that the hiring process itself was pretty intense. Several weeks of interviews and assessments later, here I am. We were told the very first day that we were chosen for good reasons, and I am afflicted with a sort of transient amnesia when it comes to that fact. If they thought I couldn’t hack it, they would not have thought twice about saying “Sorry, not interested.” (And I am not that good of a bullshitter – if I had tried to pass myself off as better than I was…they would have seen right through me during the million-and-one interviews). Also, happening upon this job opportunity was so incredibly random and out of left field that I can’t help but think (warning: sappiness ahead) that this is where I am meant to be. At least for now, of course.

Do you ever think about that? Where you’re meant to be? With my last job (well, technically my current job, as I still have a few more days of two-job overlap), I went through long periods of time where I thought I was somehow wasting my time / life / formal education doing NOT the thing I assumed I should be doing (never mind the fact that I didn’t know what that thing was then, either). But (warning: nostalgia ahead) when I think back on the last three years I realize that – HOLY SMOKES – I have learned a hell of a lot and met a hell of a lot of awesome people.

Life has a funny way of figuring itself out like that. It’s just hard to remember, because sometimes that mental Post-it Note gets covered up by a lot of other extraneous junk.

*Say what you will about that movie, but I’m a sucker for fake ridiculous accents.

One of the worst things about starting a new job is figuring out how things work. And by “things” I mean “everything.” Your ID card. The time clock. The lunch breaks. The cafeteria. The coffee machine. The supervisor. The coworkers.

Competing with my need to want to just already know how it all works, damn it! is my desire to blend in and not be the Glaringly New Girl: the one who can’t get her ID card to open the door, who can’t figure out the time clock, who awkwardly sits alone at lunch, who enters the cafeteria line from the wrong side, who won’t drink coffee when she knows she’ll be finishing the pot because she can’t figure out how to make more, who bothers her supervisor with a million questions, and who laughs way too loudly at her coworker’s jokes except the coworker wasn’t actually making a joke. Weirdo.

And on top of that is the whole learning-a-whole-new-job thing, so to say that I have been (and will continue to be for at least a few weeks) a gigantic festering ball of anxiety is an understatement. I honestly feel like I might explode with nervousness at any given moment.

But then I’ll be that Glaringly New Girl who exploded all over the office and Jesus, was that a bitch to clean up! 

Oh, girl. I need a Xanax the size of a fucking hockey puck.

Before I could “officially” be offered my new job, I had to be screened for drugs. I’ve never had to have this done before, and I was told they would be taking a hair sample. I also assumed that I would be peeing in a cup, because – I don’t know? Isn’t that what you do? Nervous that I wouldn’t be able to provide a sample on-demand, I purposely drank a bottle of water in addition to my morning coffee…and then held it until I got to the testing facility.

But…

I got lost on the way there. According to Google Maps, the facility was located in a McDonald’s in a neighboring town. I am not making this up. So I call up the place, and turns out it’s on the campus of a hospital I’ve never been to before. And by “campus” I mean my undergraduate campus is probably smaller. And the buildings weren’t numbered, and blah blah blah.

Still really had to pee.

Once I found the building, I couldn’t find the suite INSIDE the building. I LITERALLY walked in a complete circle through the entire first floor. Like, I was heading down a hallway thinking “Ok, it should be the next door on the right,” when I get to a door and it takes me back outside. Where I started.

I finally ask for directions from probably the nicest old woman on the Earth, and turns out I passed the office not ONCE, but TWICE.

This was a walk-in type of thing, and when I arrived, there were three other people in the waiting room ahead of me. And so I wait.

For about a half hour.

My name is called, and I go into an exam room where a nurse cuts out three BIG CHUNKS of hair from different places on my head. She then very deliberately puts them in the sample pouch, explaining what she’s doing the entire time: “Now I’m going to place the seal that you initialed on the envelope…blah blah blah.” I know this is for legal purposes, but I can’t really hear her, on account of the whole about-to-wet-myself thing.

Then she tells me “Okay, you’re good to go!” Wait, what? “That’s all you need?” “Yup.” “No other… samples?” “Hmmm?” “Never mind.”
I look at my watch. I am now almost 45 minutes late for work. Well, shit.

So I arrive at work, almost literally running at this point. My boss thinks I am racing in because of my lateness. I know otherwise.

I realize that I have my belt unbuckled and my pants almost unbuttoned BEFORE I enter the stall. But I do not care. Desperate times call for desperate measures. My boss is lucky I wasn’t doing this as I walked through the door.

Lesson learned: never assume you’ll have to pee in a cup.