fingers are walking
WE’RE STILL ON THE PAYROLL
Jesus fishstick christ, is thirty goddamn blogging minutes too much to ask? Apparently yes. I blame work for kicking my ass so badly that once I get home all my thirty-minutes-es need to be taken up by crap television (Real Housewives, anyone?), kava kava tea (the soporific bomb), and early bedtime. Who decided that performance reviews should be scheduled the same week that everything goes to press?
SHRIMP, PLATE, PLATE OF SHRIMP
1. I was shortcutting through Nordstrom yesterday and a guy handed me a sample strip of perfume. Normally I swerve away from any sort of proffered pamphlet, fragrance, or free sample but I was feeling reckless so I took one. Three steps later I waved it toward my nose and actually burst out laughing at how bad it smelled. It was something Ed-Hardy-branded, if that makes any difference to you, although there was another name in there too. I am afraid to Google because what if Google has invented smell-browsing and that horrific odor comes wafting out of my hard drive? WHAT IF?
2. Speaking of “what if,” it is a favorite rhetorical device of my seven-year-old that is driving me slightly bonkers. What if we had a million pancakes? What if the pancakes came alive and took over the world? What if this car had a tortoise inside the engine, would it cook and die or would it be happy in the warmth? What if the tortoise pooped in the engine? Would the car still run? (Insert giggles at the mention of you-know-what.) What if? I don’t know, Nora! And here’s a clue, I don’t really care, although I would never say that to your face!
Maybe I can adopt this speech act and use it to my advantage in boring work meetings. That’s it for my presentation, does anyone have any questions? Yes sir, I do. What if the overhead projector EXPLODED in a million pieces? What if I just started randomly screaming right now? What if your doughnut was poisoned? What if the conference room floor was made of HOT LAVA but our laptops could turn into surfboards and we all surfed around on the HOT LAVA singing Devo songs? WHAT IF!
MODERN AND NOT-SO-MODERN CONVENIENCES OF WHICH I AM VERY FOND
1. The GPS thingy for the car. We have a “Tom-Tom” (why is it called that?) and it has completely revolutionized my attitude toward driving and the car. I am terrified of getting lost and that only intensified after my ten-year break from driving. When I started again I would clutch my MapQuest printouts in one sweaty hand, and freak out after the inevitable missed turn. Now I am so cavalier you can call me John Suckling. Give me the address, I punch it up, and do what the nice computer lady tells me. And if I screw up, she just keeps on figuring it out. Awesome.
2. Word processing. I learned to type in grade school, on my mom’s electric typewriter, so even though I am not that old I do have a little experience with white-out and ribbons and typing xxxxxx over mistakes. Thank fuck that’s over. MS Word, you can be a pain in the crack but I will still love you forever.
3. Vision correction. What would they have done with nearly-blind me in the pre-spectacles days? I doubt I could even see well enough to do farm or household chores. If family refused to take care of me, I would probably have been dumped in a corner with no pants on and just been whored out to passers-by. Speaking of whoring…
4. Hormonal birth control.* Viva la pill! Sometimes I think I am the only woman on the internet who loves this method, but I guess satisfied customers don’t tend to post about their birth control.
*Because of the pill, poor Nora recently figured out that her parents have sex, although not in any Freudian “primal scene” sense. She knows I take a pill because I don’t want to “grow a baby.” The other day she got kind of puzzled and said, “If you don’t want any more babies, then you don’t need to mate with daddy…so why do you need the pill?” (How much do I love it that she used the term “mate”? My little Jane Goodall.) I corrected her and said that her father and I do indeed “mate.” She asked me why and I awkwardly explained that it’s, uh, fun. But it’s for grown-ups and nothing you need to really worry about right now. Yeeps. I am great at biology (Nora is pretty familiar with menstruation, anatomical terms, etc), but when it comes to explaining the more sexual aspects of sex I can get a bit flustered.
5. TiVo! I’d rather have no television at all than do without TiVo. I don’t know how you “television in real time” people cope, I really don’t.
LUCKY SEVEN
Nora had an off-the-hook birthday weekend, with family giving her presents, kids leaping about at an indoor-gym place, and teachers passing out brownies in her honor. Her big cool present was a Nintendo DS. Her favorite games just happen to be the three she owns—Personal Trainer: Math (NERD ALERT!), some sort of dinosaur-fighting thing, and Mario Kart. Despite not having touched a single game controller since the days of Atari, I somehow know a lot about Mario Kart. And because little kids tend to not understand “changing the subject,” a lot of our conversations go like this:
Me: [something entirely unrelated to Mario Kart]
Nora: [something something Luigi Peach Shell Cup]
Me: Hold up, is this about freaking Mario Kart?
Nora: Yes.
On her birthday itself we went to her favorite sushi restaurant, the one with the “spooky bathroom.” I don’t think it’s all that spooky, but Nora does, and insists that I go with her. While she was peeing we were having a mild argument about the spookiness of the bathroom, and right on cue there was an odd noise from the plumbing or the furnace or god-knows-what.
Nora: What was that?
Me [teasingly]: Who knows. Probably a demon.
Nora [serious wide-eyed look as she pulls up her pants]: Please don’t tell me what that is right now.
MORE FREAKING PEOPLE OUT BY ACCIDENT
At the gym I had just gotten all my stuff in a locker when I realized the lock was broken. “Shit,” I mildly opined, and started to haul everything out to dump it in a new locker. The old lady next to me audibly gasped and said, “Oh!” While looking at me like I had just impaled eight baby ducklings on a sword like at those Brazilian steakhouses. Really? I get that reaction for “shit”? I felt sort of bad that I had shocked an old person so badly but think of all the things I could have said! Just think!
—mimi smartypants cleans up her act.