khakis with a cuff in the crease
PLAYLIST FOR KICKING ASS
I had a fantastic day at work for once. It has been a while. At a critical point in a project things basically went my way, and people started to roll with my flow, and some little things that have always bugged me were resolved to my complete satisfaction. Yes! Fist pump! High five! Touchdown dance!
Not to sound superstitious, engage in iPod rhapsodomancy, or anything like that, but here is the El commute playlist that got me in a good frame of mind to do office battle. Maybe it will do good things for you too.
- Forsythia by Veruca Salt [Because everybody wants to hear the words “spider monkey” on the way to work.]
- Cali Iz Active by Tha Dogg Pound [Mellow but threatening at the same time. To get you into velvet-glove-iron-fist mode.]
- Still D.R.E. by Dr Dre [Because you’ve still got it.]
- Black Swan by Thom Yorke [What better workday anthem than one with a chorus of “This is fucked up”?]
- Romance by Wild Flag [It has hand claps.]
- Get Over It by OK Go [I would like to go back in time to college-radio DJ days and take this song with me. I have someone very specific to whom it should be dedicated.]
- Ante Up by M.O.P. [You will get all fired up to go rob people at gunpoint, I swear. Your workday will be a comparative cakewalk.]
- Barnaby, Hardly Working by Yo La Tengo [To calm down after the mental murder spree.]
TALKING ALL LOUD
Overheard on the train:
“I told her go on, get out of here now. No one wants to see your pregnant ass around here.”
“Oh yes, flatulence is TOTALLY a symptom.”
“There’s a quiz on Wednesday? Oh shit! Fuck! Oh my god!” [note: this was on a Friday. Calm down stresspuppy!]
Overheard elsewhere:
A very intense Marital Conversation in an Ethiopian restaurant. I haven’t been happy for a long time, I don’t know if we want the same things anymore, blah blah. I was trying to eat, talk to LT, and listen to those people at the same time, because holy shit that’s interesting, but then I felt guilty and uncomfortable about trying to listen, so I was at constant war with myself all during the misir wot. Ethiopian is an interesting break-up cuisine, no? You are eating from the same plate but planning to live separate lives, oh the poignancy.
MORE TRAIN STUPID
I was stuck on an insanely crowded one, and there was pretty much nowhere to stand without touching someone else. This is not abnormal but most people have some kind of internal filter and instinctively move their bodies so as to minimize the horror—my knee on your bookbag instead of your leg, you hold on to the door frame and not the pole so we don’t bump hands, etc. Except in my case there was a woman in the doorway who was basically resting her boob* on my arm. I would try to shift but she just took the shift as meaning extra room for her boob, so it would go right back on my arm. I hope she was not enjoying it, I sure wasn’t. Get your boob off my arm. That sort of thing is not allowed until I have had a lot of wine and deemed you cute, and even then I need to be the aggressor, so get your boob off my arm.
*Nora would have corrected this to “breast.” She is very big on the proper words and the scientific literature, and surprised LT a bit by knowing the word “semen,” which came up during some pig-raping** episode of Dirty Jobs that they were watching together.
**Mike Rowe was doing the pig-raping,*** but not with his own smugly handsome equipment—it was an everyday act of animal husbandry perpetrated by Big Agriculture.
***I probably could have skipped the loaded word “rape,” but please permit me my moment of feminist meat politics. Plus it’s No-Delete Thursday!
IT WAS ALL MY FAULT
A recently acquired Facebook “friend” is someone I barely remember from grade school, and he can stay visible on my friend list up until the point he starts to post about Jesus or politics or any other shit I don’t care about. I do remember one specific thing about him, but it would be mean to bring it up.
I was one of those kids who read more than she talked, and every once in a while this resulted in strange mental blind spots and holes in my logic. I had read some book where a character chanted this rhyme:
Milk, milk lemonade
Around the corner
Fudge is made!
I had never heard anyone say this in real life, and it made no sense to me without the accompanying hand gestures. It was one of those things that I wondered about every so often, but not to the degree that I wanted to ask someone to explain. Oh if only there had been internet then! My fifth-grade kingdom for Wikipedia or Urban Dictionary!
Anyway, then this new kid came to our school, more schooled and playground-streetwise than the rest of us, and he busted out that rhyme and pointed to the appropriate places during a kickball game. Suddenly it all made sense—but still, kind of not. And before I could think through the possible social consequences, to either of us, I blurted out, “But you don’t lactate!”
I should have been roundly mocked for even using the word “lactate” in a schoolyard context, but instead everyone started laughing at HIM and he got the nickname “Milkboy” for the rest of the year. But he does not identify himself as such on his Facebook page, so perhaps all is forgotten if not forgiven.
—mimi smartypants hit you with a flower, she does it every hour.