Friday, June 26, 2009

umm, self? what are you doing?

I peeled the paper off of a muffin, and at least a tenth of the muffin stuck to the paper. So I did what any rational person would do, and pushed the paper inside-out and started eating the stuck-on muffin bits off of it.

When I was about half-way done, it occurred to me that I probably looked really terribly attractive all hunched over this paper, eating the absolutely essential 1/10th of a muffin off of it. Luckily it's a Friday and it's summer, so there's nobody in the office to see me. I didn't even finish eating the stuck-on muffin bits, so unattractive was the mental image I had of myself.

So I have to ask, am I alone in finding myself in these situations? Half-way done doing something that suddenly seems totally gross or weird or ridiculous (e.g. stapling rolled-up tissues)? Do other people, like, think before they act, thereby avoiding these situations?

c'mon c'mon c'mon!

Things I did while copying 50 bajillion pages of phone bills, double sided:

  • Prepped other documents for copying (multi-tasking! And it only took me like 4 months to figure out this was a good idea!)
  • Paced.
  • Prepared, cooled by blowing on, and drank a cup of hot cocoa.
  • Cursed.
  • Expressed faux-remorse that other people couldn't use the copier.
  • Wrote a list of things I did while waiting for the copier.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

even when i lose, i win

So, last night I made myself a bowl of soup. I was trying to get myself settled on the couch, and I lifted the bowl above my head so that I could slide a pillow onto my lap. And all of a sudden, hey, why am I being scalded?

The soup got everywhere. My arm, my shirt, my pants, the pillow. Except, miraculously, the couch.

To which I say "I win," because everything else I can toss in the wash.

Friday, June 19, 2009

my incessant trash-picking

You would never guess it from my apartment, but I'm kind of a neat-freak, at least at work. I love having my desk perfectly cleared. I keep the papers I need to work with organized in manilla folders in my inbox. My boss commented today on how nice and neat my desk was, and it occurred to me that she might think I don't have enough to do, because whose desk looks like that?

When I'm done with a paper, it goes in the trash, and I mean right now. So a lot of times I find I need something that I just threw away, and I have to dig for it. This happened to me like five times one morning, and it finally occurred to me to be a little self-conscious about it. I mean, I'm just picking papers out of a container full of papers most of the time, but if every time you turn around you see someone digging in the trash, what do you think of that person?

Also, I can't deny that in a moment of desperation I may have dug in the trash can for the tissue I had already used to death and thrown out because there was just nothing else and what was I supposed to do? Drown? Stop judging me.

Okay, a few moments of desperation. Okay, like, at least a dozen moments of desperation.

the sign of chocolate cake

Every time I get dessert at the cafeteria at work, my total comes to $6.66. I refuse to believe that means anything...

smart thought of the day

I made a mistake on the bill I was coding and whited it out. And then this thought went through my mind:

"What do you call a typo when you're writing, not typing? They must have had a word for that."

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

the art of the sarcastic yay

I typed "yay" into my cell phone.

I was going to follow it up with an ellipsis, to indicate that my "yay" was sarcastic.

I pushed "1" and my cell phone gave me an exclamation point. Because when I say "yay," just like when I saw "awesome," I usually finish the sentence up with an exclamation point.

I pressed "1" again, and my phone gave me "!." (And I asked, as I so often ask my cell phone, "Why would I be trying to say that?") One more time, and my sentence now ended "yay!.."

I had to delete this conflicting punctuation and fight my phone every step of the way. No, I don't want an exclamation point, I want a period. And no, I don't want a period followed by a comma (because seriously, why on earth would I ever want that?), I want a period followed by a period. And then another one.

I'm obviously not sarcastic enough in my text messages, if my phone isn't trained by now.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

so pleased with myself

Chicken caesar salad: $4.99


French onion soup (no crouton/cheese): $1.79


Putting the croutons from the salad into the soup: Priceless!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

these pens, they are not so great

When I was in high school, I had to have my wisdom teeth removed. The procedure itself totally sucked. When I got back to my mom's car, I totally freaked the fuck out. I honestly believed I had been awake during it. (Now I realize that I was probably dreaming, bad-tripping, whatever, as the things I thought I heard made absolutely no sense in that context).

So my mom, being totally awesome, bought me a kitten. What better when you're feeling down, right?

Except the Vicodin they gave me made me depressed. And, like, kittens cost money. I apparently had a little trouble bonding with the kitten, and totally started crying about not loving the kitten enough. Not that I disliked the kitten, just that I didn't love her enough to warrant the money that my mom had spent. That's not even the craziest thing I've felt guilty about in my life, folks.

I tell you all that to tell you this: I'm not in love with the green pens, so much. Turns out they're still boring stick pens, even in green. And the green isn't very bright. Surprise surprise, considering each pen cost less than $.13.

But I've made progress, you see! I don't feel bad at all for not loving the green pens enough.

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

you know you're in trouble when

Every now and then my boss will come in to my cubicle with a couple of pages of hand-written notes, and give me a look.

It's the "I'm so sorry for what I'm about to do to you" look. And she should be.

I think I should get an honorary Mensa membership for the beautiful Word docs I make of the insanity.

roll your eyes with me

I walked into the break room and someone asked me "Do you know who brought the cake in?"

Seriously, people. Eat the freaking cake.

Also, I seem to have broken the pen I've been using since my favorite pen died. The barrel is cracked, and so the bottom half of the pen is doing that annoying dislodging thing, where suddenly only a little bit of the tip is exposed.

First on my to-do list this afternoon: toss my second-favorite pen into the graveyard that is my wastebasket and see how pen #3 works out. (It's the wide-barrelled one that was annoying me yesterday, so this oughta be good).

And before I could even finish typing this entry, someone actually said to me, "I was in the break room, asking Maryann who brought the cake in..."

Monday, June 08, 2009

something to look forward to this fall

I'm a GLEEk!

i am so persecuted today

I was coding some bills, and because I had nothing more exciting to think about, I became annoyed with the pen I was using. It had a big barrel, a little tiny point, and made my letters look weird.

So I reached into my pen holder, took out my favorite pen, and took the cap off. Except the cap was still on. But I just... oh.

My favorite pen is dead. It was a Sharpie pen, and it was the first gift that I ever received, as official office supply bitch, from Office Depot. Sitting on my desk, it looks like I let a dog play with it. It was fun to chew on and wrote well. I loved it, it's gone, and I'm officially in mourning.

In fact, I'm so upset that I'm in mourning retroactively. I've decided that the demise of my beloved pen explains the funk I've been in all morning. Also the remarkable lack of any activity that might be characterized as "work."

Sunday, June 07, 2009

reading lolita in quakertown

What's making me uncomfortable about reading Lolita? Aside from, you know, sympathizing with and rooting for a pedophile?

Not being able to go a single freaking page without having to get my ass off the couch and type some word into dictionary.com.

Here's the latest:

cog⋅no⋅men




[kog-noh-muhn] Show IPA
–noun, plural -no⋅mens, -nom⋅i⋅na

[-nom-uh-nuh] Show IPA .
1.a surname.
2.any name, esp. a nickname.
3.the third and commonly the last name of a citizen of ancient Rome, indicating the person's house or family, as “Caesar” in “Gaius Julius Caesar.” Compare agnomen (def. 1).


Remember that one for next time, kids.

a death in the family

The first book I read from my list was A Death in the Family. The author, James Agee, didn't get to finish writing it because he died. So, the editors were left with a pretty much completed story, and then these sections that didn't fit anywhere chronologically.

So they split them in half, put them in italics, and stuck them at the end of the first two sections. Why not just leave them out? Because they're beautiful.

My new favorite quote comes from one of these italicized sections. It's about parents.

"When I am astonished or bewildered, it is they who make the weak ground firm beneath my soul."

Edward Cullen is beautiful and shiny, but not that beautiful.

my reading list

Okay, so I got addicted to Twilight. Like, couldn't stop thinking about it, ignoring everything else around me to read just one more page and then just one more, and then I finished. Michael actually remarked to me that I was taking quite a long time to finish. I read the last two dozen pages over a couple of days. It was hard to let go.

In a moment of panic that the series that had become my raison d'être was ending, I had promised myself that I could just start again from the beginning. But when I finished the last book, as much as it hurt, I decided to let go.

I went online and looked up lists like Time's 100 Greatest Novels of All Time, looked the titles up on Wikipedia, and compiled a reading list for myself. A list of 80 novels that I read for a class but didn't appreciate (like Animal House, which fifth-grade me had no idea was about Communism), or had just never read before.

I had an epiphany in college, when they stopped having us read about Plato and started having us read Plato. It can be hard and confusing and boring, sure, but if you pull out a dictionary and re-read some sentences, the classics aren't impossible.

I had a second epiphany in my Russian literature class. The classics aren't classics because they're impenetrable and War and Peace long, but because they're great stories.

So I've been reading some great stories. The books I've read so far have been depressing and rewarding. In addition to sharing some laughs at my own idiocy and my status as low man on the corporate totem pole, I'll share thoughts on what I'm reading.

Friday, June 05, 2009

yeah, today's like that

I just sighed, put my head back, and whispered, "What a schmuck."

I was referring to myself.

smile! you're on candid camera

Sometimes I wish I had a camera in my cubicle, so that I could show people the extremely ridiculous things I do sometimes, especially when I'm dealing with my phone.

Once, the CFO's line was ringing. I was messing with a pile of papers on my desk and knocked the phone off its hook, effectively answering it. So I, very smoothly, hung it back up, because I was totally unprepared for that shit.

Today I attempted to hang my phone up and the result was the opposite of smooth. You know how when you're holding a fish, sometimes it wriggles out of your hands? And you try to catch it, and you kind of get your hands around it, and then it wriggles out again? And, like, lands in the pond? I did that with my phone. Which was totally not wriggling.

When I accepted that I had just totally lost control of the situation, I let it fall to my desk. When I was sure it was done moving, I picked it up and set it carefully on its hook. Then I just kind of shook my head and sighed.

If only I had that camera, I could have a million hits on Youtube by now.

wow. just wow.

I just looked into the trash can at my desk and thought to myself

"You know, those chips are only touching other chips and the container they came in. And they look pretty good."

Yeah, those cupcakes were pretty clean, by my standards.

and then office depot threw the kitchen sink at me

There's an odd quirk that I've found in the search function on the Office Depot site.

Usually, the more words you add to a search, the fewer returns you get.

For example, when I type "HP" into the search, I get 904 results. When I type in "HP 88", I get 104 more-specific results.

If you type in something just completely non-sensical, you get no results. I put in "jk," and Office Depot returned nothing.

However, if you give Office Depot a special blend of stuff it recognizes ("HP 88"), and something totally non-sensical ("jk"), it will say "I don't know what the fuck you want - here's everything but the kitchen sink."

My search for "HP 88 jk" returned 1,178 results - more results than I got for just "HP." To which I say, "WTF, Office Depot?"

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

and now, back to our regularly scheduled dumbassery

My BFF finally decided to grace us with her presence again, after an unprecedented absence of two weeks. I said something that ended with the word "you," and then she said something that ended with the word "you," and then the following gem came out of my mouth:

"Hey, that rhymes!"

Then, after five seconds:

"...'Cause it's the same word..."

And now I can't even remember what the two sentences we said were. I swear, being with Jen lowers my IQ a couple of standard deviations.

a rose, by any other name, would be a lazy bitch

I got married on December 31st, 2008. Here's the timeline of me changing my name:

December 31st: Introduced by the DJ as Mrs. [husband's name] [new last name]

January 1st: Changed my name on Facebook in the hotel's business center (FACT: My frenemies from high school can still find me by typing in my old name. Huzzah!)

January 5th: Got a new gmail address (firstinitialmiddleinitialnewlastname@gmail.com) and forwarded the mail from my old gmail address (firstinitialmiddleinitialoldlastname@gmail.com).

January 6th: Changed my signature in Outlook at work.

February 19th: Left work early to book it to the DMV (I didn't speed Mom, promise). My grandfather's wife, when booking the tickets for our trip to California, had asked which name she should put on my ticket. I answered, confidently, "My new name. My license will definitely have my new name by then." Cue epic fail. Only the photo center was open, so I brought my marriage license with me to California (asking my husband about 100 times during the trip "do you have the license?"). For the record, the folks at LAX care way more than the folks at PHL do.


And that concludes our timeline. Oh, did you notice a problem? Like, how I still introduce myself by my old name? Still sign my old name? Have changed nothing official, unless by official you mean Google rather than the government? How my old name still is my name?

Yeah, I should really get on that... except, what's that shiny thing over there?