3.02.04: Blah to the Blah to the Blah Blah Blah ‹ Blog

I watched Titanic when I got back home from the hospital, and cried. I knew then that my IQ had been damaged.
Stephen King

Blah to the Blah to the Blah Blah Blah

March 2, 2004

I have no excuse for this impromptu hiatus. Every day I’d sit down to write a post, but everything I wrote seemed boring and trivial, not worth the writing or the reading. And then, finally, I thought Hey! Everything I ever wrote was boring and trivial, and people still read it! I have a responsibility to be boring and trivial for my readers! And so now I am sitting here writing this boring and trivial essay. Fear my randominity, yo.

Kevin Kline is half-Jewish. For some reason, this makes me happy.
My gerbil thinks she’s a commando. (And I have recently begun thinking of the gerbil as a she, because when she sleeps on her back with her little legs all splayed I can’t see any little dinger in her hoochie-spot. Oh god, it hurt to type those phrases... maybe this folksy thing has gone too far. To the guillotine with the folksiness!) She’ll tunnel way under her bedding, and then suddenly she’ll poke up out of the bedding, swiveling like a periscope and wearing a little camouflage hat of cardboard shavings. Tony and I have decided she has a superhero complex, and thus we have taken to calling her The Shadow. Whenever she does her periscope imitation now, one of us points dramatically and intones, “The Shadow!”
The other day, I was reading a list of Minnesotans who are also involved in my career (I still can’t tell you yet), and would you believe that one of them lives right in my neighborhood, right on my street? That boggles my mind. I wonder if she’s nice; then we could get together and talk shop. But I don’t want to seem like a threat to her business. I’m not a threat to anything, except chocolate muffins.
(While I was reading this list, my eye fell on a familiar address. “Hey,” I said to my mom, “that’s our apartment complex! Whoa… that’s my building!” And then I simply pointed at the screen and gurgled frantically, because the person apparently lived in my apartment, which is really really weird. Choking with confusion and excitement, I finally looked at the name. You guessed it—it was my own listing. I am so totally unqualified to be my own boss.)
The Coke machine outside my window is still broken. Those of you who read this journal regularly will be familiar with the great and ongoing Saga of the Coke Machine. Those of you who do not read this journal regularly will have no idea what I’m talking about and will get bored and go away. But back to the story. So the Coke machine is still smegged up; sometimes it decides to withold sodas from its customers, even though the customer has put in their money and is waiting for their drink. When this happens, the thing to do is to pull out the extra change you so wisely brought with you and pay for another Coke. Then the machine will roll its eyes at you and grudgingly let you have both your drinks. This technique has never failed for me, because I am a genius when it comes to operating heavy machinery. The other tenants of this complex, however, have not grasped the subtle psychological techniques of this operation, and they generally resort to kicking, punching, and multi-lingual swearing. This is very entertaining for me, because this all takes place right outside my living room window; I can curl up in my easy chair with a nice warm cup of cocoa and watch people jump up and down and flail at the machine. If I were nice, I would open the window and tell these people what to do, but I am not nice. Their misery is my entertainment.
The new Dr. Phil family is frightening. I swear that mother is a sociopath. She makes me look like the future Mother of the Year. Scary.
It has occurred to me that there I may never again walk past the dead duck on the way to my job. How sad. I will miss you, mallard mine…
It is dull and grey and cold outside, and I’m loving every second of this weather. At night it rains, and it seems alien to see plain water coming down from the sky, instead of the usual February snowflakes and hailstones. I creep out of bed at night and go to the living room window to watch the rain. God, but I love liquid precipitation.

And now a couple of lists…

Things I Will Miss About Work

my groovy co-workers
the nice customers
the retarded customers who are always so nice and friendly
watching pharmacy customers’ dogs get all excited when they get to the drive-through window because they know I have doggie biscuits for them
slow weekend nights
Sunday football games on the display TV by the front counter
reading all the tabloids while working the front counter
the 20% employee discount
the doughnuts the manager sometimes brings on Sundays
the photo machine (we have a bond)
following potential shoplifters
busting shoplifters
having people ask me about my name (“That’s very unusual. Is it short for something?”)
having people comment on my nails
cute children who tell me their name and their favorite color and what they ate for breakfast today, all in one breath
seeing the store mouse waddle ponderously across the aisle I’m working in (it’s a very large rodent)
the friendly Coke vendors
the friendly mail/photo delivery people
the hilarious day cashier, who gives me treats and raves about my curly hair and shares her funky views with me and every now and then forgets she left the intercom on and says “shit” over the ’com, so that the entire store can hear it
seeing my name on the schedule (it may be the only time I ever see my name in print)

Things I Will NOT Miss About Work

vaccuuming the entire store with the stinky vaccuum cleaner
looking at the mousetraps in the back room
trying to find the dead mouse which apparently is decomposing under a shelf somewhere in the Cosmetics aisle
worrying that someone’s going to pull a gun on me at the cash register
my shabby red work smock
my scratched-up name tag
crabby customers
bargain-hunters who a) try to haggle with me at the counter, and b) bitch about two cents. TWO CENTS. I kid you not.
having to look at snapshots of the fish/deer/bear/poor person bagged by a hunter or fisher
customers who look at me blankly when I tell them I celebrate Chanukkah
customers who ask me if I’ve “let Jesus into my heart” and then launch into their conversion spiel, complete with “Jesus Loves Me” pamphlets and an invitation to their church
missing “Meet The Press” every Sunday
bitchy pharmacy customers
customers who threaten to report me to my manager because a) the checkout line’s too long, b) we don’t have their favorite brand of dental floss, or c) I’m being “rude.” No, YOU’RE being rude, monkey-breath. And go ahead and report me to my manager; it’ll give us something to laugh over later.
the timeclock that’s set too high on the wall, which means I have to stand on tiptoe to make sure I’m stamping the right time-slot on my timecard
parents who let their kids run screaming around the store
having to climb wobbly ladders
having to smile and agree that the hideous wooden moose statue a customer is raving over is “very cute, indeed”
having to keep an eye on the shifty-eyed kids in baggy coats who come into the store and immediately head for the electronics/cosmetics department. Nothing personal, kids, but if anyone comes in with a baggy coat in the middle of summer, I have to keep an eye on them.
not being allowed to pierce anything but my ears (stupid dress code)
not being allowed to dye my hair an “unnatural” color (I want blue, dammit!)
realizing that no one at work knew what a haiku was (except maybe for the younger folks)
cleaning the bathrooms and breakrooms
not having any paper towels in the ladies’ room
having to tell people I can’t let them into the back room to use the restroom—no, really I can’t—they have a restroom next door—no—would you just go away now, please?
walking up to work in freezing cold weather through two-foot-deep snow that has ice beneath it
having to tell the irate customers waiting outside the door that we don’t open for fifteen more minutes. Go sit in your cars, morons.

Reasons To Die

Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
Howard Dean dropping out of the presidential race. I will miss his upper lip.
Nose hair (mine and yours)
The fact that I hit myself in the face with a door, and now I will have to go get my glasses fixed, and if the person fixing them asks how they got bent I’ll have to tell them that I hit myself in the face with a door. Then I will have to endure a) pity for my awkwardness, or b) the raised eyebrows and questioning eyes that mean You’re just saying that to cover for the fact that your husband beats you, right? Honey, let me call the cops for you…
Having to test my site in four freakin’ browsers, and then actually sitting around and comparing the browsers like a dyed-in-the-wool geek. I actually dreamed about tabbed browsing last night. How sad is that?
The names “Alexis,” “Morgan,” “Cameron,” and any variations on “Britney”
My painful stupidity. If you don’t think I’m too stupid to live after reading about the way I bent my glasses, let me tell you how I was reading the lyrics to “Jenny” and singing along, and when I got to the chorus (“867-5309 x 4”), instead of reading the “(x 4)” as an instruction to sing Jenny’s phone number four times, I continued to sing without thinking and sang “867-5309 extension fourrrrr!” And if that isn’t a reason to die, I don’t know what is.
Plaid
Power Rangers
The loss of Bennifer (it was just so fun to say!)