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November 28 - Wednesday at the trough We went to Souper Salad today. I picked it because it's near my glasses place and it's cheap. It's not a good place to go when I'm tired from a long day of work, though. Especially not when all the starving buffaloes are there, mowing me down to get to the bucket of butter dusted with bacon-colored bits. Some woman, after rushing me at the potatoes, the bread, and the ice cream, backed into me and stepped on my foot. "Oh, excuse me," she quickly muttered. I was getting ice cream for my kid -- not for myself. I was fat and she was fat. I asked my kid what kind of toppings he wanted. She told her kid, "Not so much! Not so much!" This was after she had told the same slender female child, at the potato bar, "You can have cheese, or you can have butter, but not both." I may be fat, and I may let my kids eat fat, but at least I don't back into people like a big fucking backhoe and step on their feet. Or, at the very least, if I DID, I would apologize profusely for it. The woman had glasses rather like the new ones that I am wearing as I type this. She didn't look cool or anything, though. SLUG ATTACK On Thanksgiving evening Randy and I walked out onto my cousin Helen's porch and my cousin Helen said, "Man. There's more slugs than usual out here." My heart stopped. My feet froze. Glancing down for the few milliseconds that I dared, I saw a whole slug -- stalks and all -- and half of another slug from the corner of my scared-frickless eye. A long, quiet scream escaped my mouth. My right hand became a claw around Randy's elbow and I squealed and squealed as we quickly shuffled off the porch. I couldn't properly step for fear of doing so on one of the gray, faceless bastards. "What are those things on their heads, anyway?" a friend asked upon hearing the grisly tale. "Antennas?" (Or maybe he said "antennae". Don't remember.) "I think they're stalks," I said. Bleh. Stalks. Squishy stalks on eyeless, faceless faces... on bodies made to skid under your shoes and bring the eyes on your own face down, down, down to the ground where the Stalked One and his kindred can CRAWL IN YOUR HAIR. God save us all! In the car, Randy told me, "It's not like they can run after you." "Obviously you've never seen a slug jump," I said. "No shit?" he asked. "You've seen them jump?" "No," I admitted. "I've never seen it, either." We joked about the slug agonizingly dragging itself in the direction I'd driven away to, saying, "Hold on! Wait up! Gimme a chance -- just two or three days! C'mon!" I'm not sure I can ever buy a house in Houston if it's going to be near slugs. Zonky, my brother, says there are slugs all over any grass in town, any night of the week. Although I love Zonky, I choose to believe that, in this case, he is a danged dirty liar. He's a bloody lying ape. Now that I have new glasses, will I be unable to avoid seeing the truth about the slugs? air puff When I went to the eye doctor, the witty banter flowed and everything was okay until he put me in the chair with all the torture-chamber head-holding devices. I don't mind men putting me in torture-chamber restraints, for the most part, but I do mind the puff of air they shoot into your eyes to test for glaucoma. My fists clenched and my toes curled as I asked Dr. Bruce, "Are you gonna blow air in my eyes?" "No," he said. "Whew," I said, visibly relaxing. Then I thought a moment and tensed again. "Are you just saying no so I'll relax and my eye will be wide open for you to blow the air in it?" "That would only work on the first eye, wouldn't it?" he asked. I laughed nervously. He said they didn't do the eye puffs anymore. They did eye drops, instead. I whined a little as he leaned back my chair. Man, I hate for people to put stuff in my eyes or my ears. (Well... most stuff. Hee hee hee.) (Okay, I'll quit that.) But eye drops are way better than air puffs, so I let him do it. Later, when my eyes felt like they were about to lay eggs, I complained about the weird sensation only until Dr. Bruce said, "But is it as bad as the air puffs?" I was strongly tempted to throw my arms around him and cry on his shoulder in relief. I refrained, though. I let my eyes water involuntarily for a while, instead. Dr. Bruce gave me Kleenex, but didn't ask me to have coffee with him sometime or anything like that. But it's okay. My heart is his forever because I didn't get the eye puffs. My friend Mike* asked me if I'd rather have rabies shots or air puffs. I scoffed. "Rabies shots! Hel-lo!" He informed me that rabies treatment involves twenty big shots to the stomach. "And?" I said. "Man, thank GOD I didn't get the air puffs." Then I checked to see if there was a slug riding my hip but, luckily, there wasn't. *(Normally I put a link to his site with his name, but forget him, dang it. It's not like he talks about me on his site every week.) last I checked, magazines were still stupid The last couple of times I was put in a situation where I had to read magazines while waiting for someone to do something I was paying them to do, I found out that the magazines still insult my intelligence, even when I haven't read them for years. I read this dumb freaking article -- I think it was in Mode but I hate to accuse them without being certain -- about the Beauty Editor or Asaninity Editor or whoever purchasing false nipples to wear under her shirt. Then she and her assistant went out in public to check people's reactions. This woman talked about business men smirking and making personal comments on the elevator as if it were something we should all aspire to experience. She suggested that women should run out and buy their own pairs of fake nipples so that they can have "fun" -- presumably in the form of gawking passersby. It's bad enough that I can't walk into a cold office building wearing an everyday bra without worrying. "Why do you care about that?" my friend Letty* asks me. "Because people notice," I say. I don't want to be ashamed of my body parts -- I don't think I am, in fact. But I prefer for men to look at my breasts as covertly as possible. My office building's unpredictible climate was very, very brisk today. I almost couldn't blame the one man who broke the silent covenant and looked at my sweater point-blank after saying good afternoon. And although I do blame the starers -- the ones who are rude -- I can't imagine myself putting pieces of rubber on my real breasts and then giggling like the horny old hen in the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons when men on the street are rude to me. *I would link to Letty's website if she had one. In some other "women's" magazine, I read this wicked retarded (sorry, but sometimes that phrase is so apt in its own wicked retardedness) advice column in which some chick worried about the repercussions of upstaging her boss with her clothing. It was like:
If it were my advice column, I would have found out where the woman worked so I could go take a sweet, easy job from one of the Hilton-sister wannabes and get paid to screw off online for the rest of my life. The real columnist, though, had a paraphrase of this sage advice:
Although I admit that I do notice little differences in the clothing of the various salary tiers at my office, and although my new glasses are DKNY, I couldn't help but wonder on what freaking planet the hapless bitches who read that magazine were living. I could just see it (not): Our group's Team Leader (who happens to be female) walks in wearing her black leather jacket and bitchin' shoes, the make of which I do not know and never think to ask. "Sheila," she'd say to the second person on our totem pole, whose name isn't really Sheila but who is a woman, too. "Sheila, what's going on with the MegaCorp project? Did you make an exhorbitant fee selling them on our $100 million pedigreed prenatal option?"* Although Sheila would be wearing a really nice suit in a pale autumnal tint with expensive coordinating shoes of her own, there is no way that she would ever answer the Team Leader with, "Tee, hee! No, but I did spend an exhorbitant amount on these adorable pumps during the second hour of my lunch yesterday!" And there is no way our Team Leader would then say, "Well, that's all right, then... but... wait! Are those DONNA KARAN PUMPS? My loafers are only DKNY! That's it! You're fired!" The sad part is that, most likely, in neither the real universe or the parallel women's magazine universe would I be able to walk in wearing my bright Lame Giant top and microfiber-but-still-polyester skirt and be able to make as much money as either of them. But I firmly want to believe that it's my lack of schooling, not my lack of labels, that keeps me under the 3-way, flourescent-lighted glass ceiling. (If I've spent too much money on shoes this year, it's because I like to hedge my bets.) Still -- most women aren't that damned stupid. I like to believe that, like me, they only buy the magazines because they want to figure out, once and for all, (and while they're sitting on the can, killing two birds with one stone,) what color shoes one wears with navy this season. Only sixteen-year-olds and ten percent of former sorority sisters really believe the bullshit they're pedalling in women's magazines, right? Right? *At my old job, at the Anonymous Non-Profit Organization, we raised money to crochet sweaters for orphaned puppies. At my new long-term temp Corporate American job, we serve as brokers between the wedding planners and the people who buy their dogs weddings. anyway That's it, taters. It's bed time now. Oh, shoot! I almost forgot... I got new glasses!
I was telling my work buddy D*n about my new glasses and we decided that I would have to rent old movies and study the hair and makeup schemes in the scenes where the librarian takes off her glasses, lets down her hair, and conquers the heart (or something) of the leading man. I know it's true because by the time I got my new glasses and made it home to my bedroom mirrors, most of my eyeliner had worn off and I just looked like a nerd. But I look like a cool nerd -- one who is about to turn 30 and no longer cares about being pretty, but who still instinctively buys glasses so nerdy they're cool (without looking at the designer label until after ascertaining that her insurance covers them) and I like my glasses and I'm glad. Okay, that's it for real now. I have to go to bed so I won't have to eat 3 mini candy bars and drink an addictive gas-station cappucino in order to stay awake at work tomorrow. Talk at y'all later. Be good. Have fun. Go easy on yourselves. Good night. |
