throw it off the bridge
Cold cold cold.
I keep getting fooled. These Chicago days lately have been blue and sunny but also very, very cold, and as I think I may have mentioned my moods are all over the place, so half the time I sit in my office seething with bleak agitation (bleak makes me think of laundry, and agitation definitely makes me think of laundry, so when I try to visualize this particular mood it comes up as a tiny washing machine—think iconic Sonic Youth album art—inside my brain and a gray sloshing sudsy mess of bad mood slapping back and forth inside it). The other half (ha! you thought I forgot!) of the time I look out the window and think YAY! SPRING! and I want to run all over the city thrift shopping (I am getting a serious longing in my nostrils for the smell of dusty stereo components and used clothing) and, of course, drinking beer. Preferably in some little dive bar that has a screen door, frosty mugs, a really old video game like Centipede or, even more heart-stoppingly cool, Journey (just a few short years ago there was a pizza place on Montrose that had this game, and it cracked me up to no end, especially after six or eight Old Styles), and maybe some really old creaky dog that you have to step over to get to the bar.
These fantasies are fruitless, though, because despite the blue and the sunniness it is still all kinds of cold here. But that's Chicago, and we're tough, so there it is.
THINGS THAT MAKE ME SORT OF ANGRY
1. The label on boxes of strike-anywhere matches and some fragile packages that say “DO NOT DROP.” I certainly will try not to but, you know, shit happens. As if you were deliberately planning to just throw the thing on the ground.
2. The fact that every single time I have drinks or lunch with this one friend of mine he manages to bring up how I have a “nice body” (what does that mean? yes, I suppose it nicely circulates my blood and nicely digests my food, and is a nice package to keep my insides in), but that no one would ever know it because I always wear such “baggy clothes.” (1) But you somehow have Baggy-Clothes X-Ray Vision and you can ascertain the niceness of my body nonetheless? (2) Our relationship is strictly Platonic, in fact it's beyond Platonic is that there is probably less sexual attraction between us than there is between me and certain members of Congress, so what is the point of bringing this up? (3) DO YOU KNOW ME AT ALL? I mean, I am not averse to compliments, but that is no kind of thing to say to me. Really, you should know better. Sheesh.
3. The fact that there is one and only one song I really don't like on just about every CD I own, it seems, and it is a lot of trouble to program a whole CD to just skip one song. It would be much cooler if there was an “exclude” feature where you could tell the stereo NOT to play a certain track. It would be even cooler if you could tell it to NEVER play that track. It's one thing if I am computering and I can just not copy that track or at least not put it in a playlist, but I am not a hundred-percent-online girl you know, and sometimes I need to sit in my big purple living-room chair with the Huge Glass Of Wine and a blanket on my lap like an old person and that necessitates use of the stereo, at least in our old-skool not-wired-for-sound house. Somebody get Sony on the line.
4. My head hurts.
5. Tic-Tacs are way too noisy as they rattle around in your bag. Note to self: Get quieter mints. Add that to the fact that there is a hole in my coat pocket and some change slipped down there, and I am just a clicking rattling jingling girl zooming around the city. Clicking. Rattling. And jingling.
GREAT MOMENTS IN MY EDITORIAL LIFE
From various articles I worked on today:
1. The phrase “meal initiation” in an article on obesity. Captain! Initiating salad! Commencing with ice cream! Engage bread basket!
2. “Bullfrog ghrelin,” which to me sounds like a fake Pynchon character name. Paging Mr. Bullfrog Ghrelin.
3. “Arrow indicates anal opening.” (Ouch!)
4. “Sphincter replacement.” (Every 10,000 miles.)
I hate today. Is it over yet?
—mimi smartypants has the password to your shell account.