Inblognito

Ass Issues, Redux

It was a slow day at the old salt mine. I was surprised by it; last week was such a harried rush to get everything ship-shape and Bristol fashion before the whole place rolled up like a damn doodle-bug in honor of Thanksgiving that I just figured today would be bedlam. You know, everyone trying to play "catch up" after the two days of office-closure at the end of last week. I expected a complete madhouse.

Therefore, I drove to work anticipating a tough day, and mentally I girded (girt?) up my loins for agita from all quarters. When I got to the office, though, it was like gearing up to smash down a locked door, only to have it swing open from the inside at the last possible moment. I found the place like a mausoleum. Tons of people still off from the holiday, those that were present and accounted for trudging silently through the halls like a bunch of zombies, eyes downcast, everyone still at least partially enveloped in the traditional American post-holiday tryptothan coma. The walking wounded, in a way. Gobble gobble. Or, today, braaaains.

In consequence of my delightfully quiet day at the office, I had the opportunity to read a good bit of news during work hours, a rare treat. Did you hear about that poor little fifteen-year-old girl in Canada who expired when her boyfriend kissed her? She had a peanut allergy, he'd eaten a peanut-butter sandwich sometime before. They played, one assumes, a little open-mouthed tonsil-hockey, and she actually died before the doctors could save her. Horrible, horrible fate.

As bad as I feel for the girl - and her family, may God bless them and keep them - I think I feel worse for her boyfriend. Can you imagine? Probably the first time the kid ever got to first base. I mean, picture it. The lights are low, he's got a little mood-music working...He's finally laying some sweet, sweet love on his babycakes, getting all horned up, maybe edging his preparations to steal second, or something, and blammo. He kills the chick. Dead. Kills her like a roach, with the tiny little chummy oil-slicks of peanut butter and bread left in his mouth after his snack. Shit! Instant issues, just add water spit. That is some serious future therapy money right there, is what that is. I hope he has a good investment counselor. And a good shrink. He'll need both, poor little guy.

I also saw something else, totally unrelated, that I found very, very interesting. While I was browsing the Gawker sites - some of the very few "blog-ish" web entities allowed by my organization's rather, erm, unique URL blocking system - I came across this little number at Sploid. Go read it, and come back. I'll wait.

You back? Good. Can you believe that shit? We have to make bigger needles now, because asses - mostly womens' asses - are, on average, so incredibly fucking humongozoid these days that intramuscular injections with standard length needles no longer reliably hit the mark! They end up lodged in the adipose instead...the layer after layer after layer of adipose that makes up the modern ass, in what I thought was an alarmingly high number of cases.

I feel like I should have something incisive and thoughtful to say about "the so-called 'Obesity Epidemic'" and how the media has manipulated us into thinking that bone-thin Heroin Chic is to be desired, etc, etc. But I don't have a word, not even a bon mot to laugh over. We're getting fatter, is all. You can rant and rage about the media all day long - and some days, I'll even join you - but this ain't their fault, or their creation. When the sawbones community starts, by necessity, ordering from veterinary supply, something very real is happening.

The MichaelMoorization of America. Gaaah!

And that's some sick shit. Either we've just unwittingly tracked an incredibly short-term mammalian ass-evolution, or we're a bunch of slavering hogs. Pick one. Either way is fine with me; at least someone has finally explained, nay, proven to my satisfaction, that I'm not just making this stuff up when I say I can't find a fucking pair of pants that fit anymore.

Whoops

I broke my end of the internet. That's where I've been these past few days, fixing my end. As it were. Being a webjunkie in these troubled times can be hard work, what with all the wee nasty pesties that float around the internet. You know, worms, viruses, malware, spyware, assholes, adware, and trolls and the like. Although I am a PC user (well, perhaps because I am a PC user) I tend to be one paranoid little cybermonkey. A thousand fixes and products and workarounds - all turned up at full blast - act as my computer's condom, protecting me during my interface with all the freakish shit the online world has to offer.

All this given, it is still possible for one to be too overzealous in one's pursuit of systemic purity. I firewalled my own ass out of a browser connection, is what I did. The dumbest little thing, the stupidest most mundane little check-box you have ever seen, all up in the firewall (which had auto-upgraded while I slept, damn the thing, you know I turned that shit off)...and meanwhile, I'm poring over network settings and making shredded piles of ones and zeroes over in the registry...

Oh, well. Here I am. Alive. Well. Balanced, in a physical equilibrium kind of way. Fat and sassy on a Thanksgiving night, fairly stuffed to bursting with the various and sundry components of the proverbial cornucopia.

And, hey. Happy Thanksgiving.

WWQD?

There's a chick at work who kinda squicks my shit. She's nice and everything, but she just creeps me out. Sets off some internal "-ometer" that I don't even have a proper name for. Freakometer? Psychoometer? Nutjobometer" Call it what you will, but she makes it shriek, people.

I met her out back of the building, in the "nature preserve". She smokes. I smoke. Herded like the lepers that we are, there is a "smoking area" in the "nature preserve", in which we unregenerate butt-lovers occasionally congregate. As a result, we smoker-lepers inevitably become at least minimally acquainted with all the other smoker-lepers in the building or office park or colony or whatever. It's unavoidable, a water-cooler effect, but with stinky carcinogens instead of The Elixir of Life. If you smoke, you understand, if you don't, then God bless your sainted ass. I don't smoke often, but I see the squick chick out there every time I pass through the lobby - running office-y errands, meeting clients, going to the café, whatever - through the big glass doors, down there leaning against a tree in her rumpled Lerner Shops, puffing away.

So, I know right away that the squicky chick is a slacker, a bad worker. She can't be getting much done, as much as she sits out there smoking her cigarettes, big long 120's that take a fucking quarter-hour to extinguish. Factor in the data, too, that this lady has many, many animals at home. Don't misunderstand me - I am an animal lover of the first order. I have pets coming out of my sleek and sassy ass around here. But - and this is a big deal - I doubt that any of my co-workers know that I have animals at home just by sniffing me. Look, people: do not exit your house for your professional job smelling of catbox. Neither should you walk around all day with tufts - I said TUFTS, like, with dandruffy skin-clumps still attached - of animal hair all over your clothing. Before I even spoke to this woman, I knew that there was this whole "crazy cat lady" thing going on. I could smell it, literally. And see it.

I'm just sayin'.

So, one day, I'm sitting there smoking, she walks over and lights one, it's all hi, how are you, I am fine, how are you, I am fine, yadda yadda. Next day, it's hi, how are you, fine, how are you and then she starts going off, I mean seriously going off our of nowhere about all this confidential internal shit in her department and how bad everyone sucks and how she's applying for disability because she wants to get the fuck out of there and how her husband got disability and yadda yadda yadda. The kind of shit she should totally not be telling me, in both professional and personal senses. And she goes on, and on, and on...I'm talking, ten, fifteen minutes. In the middle of the day! I snuff out my cigarette in the grate of the "Smoker's Station", rather ostentatiously, making a big deal of it, and begin to back away. I'm moving up the stairs, attempting apologies - the long fucking goodbye - as she lights another one off the stub of her current smoke, and just keeps on talking.

Well, by this time Your Faithful Narrator was chewing her bloody foot off to get out of there...I don't have that kind of time, people, and I'm too well-bred to just tell her to fuck off and leave me alone. For me, the smoke break is "take a few puffs and run", not...not, "lie on the couch and tell me about your mother." So I cut her off - as nicely as possible - telling her that I had to get back to work, and, um good luck with all that, and I speed back to the elevator. Well, maybe she's just having a really bad day, think I. No biggie.

Oh, alas, but I soon came to see that every day is a bad day for squicky girl. The next time I go out to smoke, it's all about her intimate marital problems, and as the weeks have gone by we've spiraled out and out and on and into her credit card debt and her weight issues and her thyroid and her thwarted ambitions of ballet. And every day, I say virtually nothing; I just smile, and nod, and puff twice or thrice, and back away. It's becoming an uncomfortable ritual.

I feel like a heel about it, about being so insensitive to this person who obviously needs an outlet, but damn. Let's be reasonable. First and foremost, she squicks me out, and I don't want to be her best friend. Second, I find the nature of her personal revelations to be highly inappropriate for the level of intimacy we enjoy, which is virtually nil...and that squicks me out. I am in to personal space, both physically and psychically. Third, I don't have the time. I am busy, busy, busy when I am at work; I can't allow myself to be drawn into her back-fence conversational dramas every time I want to smoke a fucking cigarette (which is usually right after lunch).

Fourth, she squicks me out. Yes, I know I said it twice, but, people, there are major camel toe issues going on here, 'nuff said. And, look, she had half a cat-turd stuck to the toe of her boot today. All day. The top of the toe of her boot, front and center. And it was...moist. Fragrant.

So - if all this makes me a seem like a heartless cunt, so be it, but I can't have this going on. I must take action to nip this in the bud. Awful? Maybe. But personally, I call it "informed decisionmaking".

Anyway...the object lesson here?

I need to quit smoking.

...and your little dog, too.

Was that an Earthquake?

I am not writing much this week because I have vertigo, a great big huge racking case of labyrinthitis-slash-positional vertigo. Every time I move my head, the earth shakes - and not in that good way. The dizziness by itself is bad enough, but the meds they give me for this hereditary curse pretty much amount to instant brain-death. I down one, and half an hour later my ass is gone - also not in that good way. My days this week, thus far, look like this:

1) Get out of bed, and head for the bathroom.
2) Hit the wall.
3) Shower, very carefully. A shampoo? Danger, Will Robinson. Yesterday I literally fell out of the shower enclosure during a particularly vigorous exfoliation.
4) Dress, primp; sometimes Mister MacFarland will consent to hand-hold me through this process. Otherwise, I'm pulling my clothes on from a seated position.
5) Drive to work. Murder on our roads!
6) Work for nine hours, as motionlessly as possible. I haven't fallen out of my chair in public. Yet.
7) Drive to my youngest child's afterschool program; liberate him. Creep home, very, very carefully. Precious cargo and all that.
8) Cook dinner, and usually I ask the little one to follow me around, just in case.
9) Bathe child, read bedtime story, tuck in, no head motion allowed. Last night I fell out of my kid's bed during Burt Dow: Deep Water Man. Oh, the shame.
10) Down my meds.
11) Asleep in thirty minutes or less.
12) Sleep for ten hours.
13) Get out of bed, and head for the bathroom.
14) Hit the wall.

You get my drift. Regular blogging will recommence when I'm feeling more...stable.

A Sick Sort of Joy

My eighteen year-old boy just got home from a night out with his buddies. Nice kids, really; they come and go from our house as if it were some sort of teen center, and that's okay by me. I don't like my chirren hanging out with Unknowns; it's not that I'm a bitch about it, but hey, it's my job to be protective.

I'd saved the eighteener a plate of food from dinner; fried chicken, collard greens, blackeyed peas, macaroni and cheese, and homemade buttermilk biscuits, topped off with sweet Orange Blossom tea. He thanked me as I handed it to him, but I detected just a note - just a note - of the stinkeye in his gaze. That sort of thing doesn't pass unmentioned in my house, even when you're eighteen and most especially when I'm serving you a plateload of love.

"What crawled up your ass and died, boy?" I asked him.

"Nothing," he replied, giving me that strange look again.

"Bullshit," said I. "What's the matter?"

He burst out, "Chris said...well, Chris said that you were a MILF. And it pissed me off. I almost kicked his butt."

Believe me when I tell you that I threw back my head and roared, laughing so hard I almost spilled the boy's tea. Eighteener didn't find it amusing in the slightest. "What??" he kept asking, giving me that look. "What???"

"Son, when you're my age, you'll understand. You tell Chris I said thanks. And don't kick his ass. He can't help being blessed with impeccable taste."

Yes, there is an extra little bit of swagger in the Queenie behind tonight. Can you blame me? I feel like Stacy's Mom. Awesome!

Low

I be illin', my peoples. Not feeling well a bit. Oh, I'm not sick, per se...I just feel as if Thor brought down his oh so mighty hammer upon every last one of my little grey cells, smashing all higher intellectual functions to smithereens.

Last week was an extremely stressful one, both at work and at home. Time was, I'd have alleviated that stress with a little self-medication. I mean, in 1990, I'd have snorted a bucket of cocaine and washed it down with ten gallons of Jack and Diet Coke. In '95, I'd have taken a handful of valium, with a pinot grigo chaser. In 2000, I'd have smoked enough weed to numb the shakes, perhaps throwing in a little sport-fucking to keep it real, yo. Now? All of these delighful avenues are denied to me. Well, not "denied", exactly, since I'm the one doing the denying, since I've become my own "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Except now, at long last, I'm paying attention to him. The man behind the curtain, that is. He was happy to be untied, un-ballgagged, let out of his broom closet. And stress? I just gotta learn to deal.

So, I'm dealing. And I'm learning that unmedicated stress makes me tired as all get out. Holy hell - how do you people deal with this shit all by yourselves? I want to sleep all the time. Around the clock. My limbs feel like barbells, lead weights. My head is all stuffed with cotton-wool. My eyes are scratchy. In fact, I finally understand that old song... "my head hurts, my feet stink, and I don't love Jesus".

I must say, I have a newfound respect for the sober folk. Now that I am one, and all.

Whorelando

I can neither confirm nor deny that I will be in Orlando, Florida next weekend. Two hip-and-happenin' single girlfriends of mine have some "gentleman callers" who live down that way, and the gay divorcées desire to get they freak on, in a big way. Naturally, their first thought was, "Queenie! We need Queenie to come with us!" Um...I'm flattered to be asked, and would chew my foot off to escape the cage that my home has become, even if only for a weekend...but why? They don't need a chaperone, or a chauffeur. I'm as frigid as your icebox, so I won't be a troll-assist, or a wingman, taking one for the team. I have cash, but am not loaded with it, so the draw can't be my bankroll. Moreover, I am just about as bubbly and effervescent as Eeyore these days. So I don't get it, at all. As usual, I find myself at a loss.

I envision myself ensconced at the bar of the Gaylord Palms, in some soft and plushy chair, watching football. Alone. And heaving sighs, and feeling sorry for myself. The puzzler? I'll probably go anyway. You do the math on that one; sometimes I am incomprehensible to myself.

Any readers in Orlando? Can I buy you a beer?

Bus

If you were to randomly pass my office door on any given weekday (which you wouldn't, since I work in a locked-down facility complete with magnetic keys and handscan machines and burly uniform-clad African-American lesbians with guns), you would perchance to hear myself, or one of my co-workers, making a noise that you'd more likely expect to hear coming from a kindergarten classroom than a cube farm full to brimming with mature legal minds. Honk-honk! Beep-beep! Honk! Beep! Honk! Often, these noises are closely followed by a mad sort of giggling, and occasionally even something sounding suspiciously like a Bronx Cheer. No, we have not lost our collective marbles. We are simply signaling the imminent arrival or departure of The Bus.

There are two of my co-workers, in specific, for whom we make these asinine yet oh-so-gratifying onomatopoeic sounds, and you all know him, and her. In fact, I'll wager my last dollar that every single one of you reading this either has a Bus, or has had a Bus in your life at some point or other. And, no, this has nothing to do with dear Leslie, but everything to do with a no-talent cocksucking assclown who is convinced that making you look bad will cover his or her own inadequacies.

Derivation of the term? "...so she put the wrong covers on her TPS reports, and then tried to shove me under the bus by telling Robert that I didn't send her the e-mail. Can you believe that shit?"

We have this one co-worker, a rung or two up the org chart from where your faithful narrator currently rests, who is so notorious for this type of behavior that nearly everything she says and does is suspect. It's pitiful, really; somehow, under a previous regime, she clawed her way into a directorship, and now finds herself totally and completely out of her depth. She wanders the halls, a stricken, deer-in-the-headlights look in her eye at all times, wondering how you turn on that thing on her desk (a computer) and why nobody sent her the memo that it is not, in fact, still 1983. Oblivious to the target on her back, she seems structurally incapable of making a statement without shoving someone else under the bus. "Oh...did you mean for ME to do the research on that? I clearly remember John telling me that Fifi was supposed to handle that case." And then The Bus fixes her gimlet gaze on Fifi, expecting John to jump on her like scabies. Which he never does, of course, because he's not an idiot, and he hears a faint horn-honk, himself....and she just succeeds in making herself look like more of an outclassed loser, and getting in trouble for hearing things that never happened. Poor, poor Bus; I could almost feel sorry for her, had she not tried to pull that shit on me, once upon a time.

There's another guy I could mention, another Bus, just as transparent as the lady I mentioned above, but sneakier. Master of the dump-and-run, he'll throw a pile of work he's had four months to take care of on the desk of an underling at four-thirty of the post-meridian on a Friday, and run away to soothe himself at home, jerking off to his image in the mirror. Or so I suspect. Then, when that wearied and miserable underling shows up at eight a.m. on Monday, missing scraps of information that only the Dump-and-Runner could have provided, he'll tear strips out of said underling in front of his boss, hoping to excuse his own laxity. Of course, just like in the case above, it never works - because El Jefe knows full well that this guy has had four months to do the work and that he dumped it on Fifi at four-thirty of the post-meridian on a Friday - it just succeeds in engendering ill-feeling with Fifi and ensuring him an ass-chewing of his very own, behind closed doors. In fact, this Bus's days are numbered... I even have a personnel file in my cabinet right now, with the exact figure specified.

Honk, honk.

On the job, in the stream of life, you will find these people, these pitiful losers, frantically chumming the waters around you in the hope that they can swim away to safety before the sharks notice they're gone, expecting to lull the vicious monsters with the nibbling of Fleshy Treats composed of your genitalia. A true Bus has no conscience, either, so it doesn't bother them, the screams of the dying, as they paddle their (usually) flaccid asses to relative but short-lived safety. Sadly, the true Bus also has little native awareness of the fact that they are huge and glaring eyesores that the rest of us cannot fail to notice...and so they repeat their actions, over and over again, until they are shitcanned for good.

Speed the day, O Lord, speed the fucking day.