Aug 19 2004
me: an update
Work
It’s funny how with each job I have, I basically end up experiencing another field of work that I don’t want to do. So far, my professional life has consisted of me realizing that I hate being a reporter, I make a terribly disorganized yet charmingly exasperating secretary, and youth service would be great if it involved working with kids more and going to ridiculously boring meetings less.
So there’s that.
Speaking of meetings, I had one yesterday in a town that’s about a 30-minute drive away from my office, and due to my apparent inability to read a clock, I left for it an hour early and ended up having to sit in my car, smoking cigarettes and staring at people in the parking lot. This just reinforces the fact that I am the ruling ruler of all things that rule.
Salivary Horror
To continue on with the job talk for a minute, today we had a going away party at work. A co-worker of mine brought a cheesecake, and she started cutting it, which is pretty normal. But after she’d sliced the thing in half, she ran her thumb over the knife to get the excess off of it, then licked her thumb and proceeded to stick the knife back in the cheesecake. This was fine, until she did it again. I could see her lipstick on her thumb, the very same thumb that she touched the knife with right before she stuck that knife back into a food item intended for human consumption. She did this repeatedly, until the cheesecake was cut into several pieces, and quite frankly, I found this practice to be rather horrifying.
Why didn’t she just lick the entire cheesecake? Seriously.
So every time someone would take a piece, I found myself reduced to hysterical laughter. Because, well, it was funny. And gross. And funny. And they were eating her spit, oh god, that’s disgusting.
I’m not sure if I’ve talked about this here before, but I have issues with spit. Actually, I think I’m just freaked out by germs. I’m better about it than I used to be, although I still wash my hands an inordinate number of times each day, and I’d probably allow myself to die of thirst before I drank out of someone else’s glass. But I’m not crazy or anything, I mean, I don’t have problems with kissing. Of course, I never said I stood by my convictions.
Ubiquitous Frustration
When I was younger, I had a crush on frustration and I’d flirt outrageously with it every time I had the chance. By now, I’m having a full-blown affair with it. So it’s nice that it sticks around, because I’m not sure if I could take it if the love of my life walked out on me.
Yeah.
I guess I’ll just tell you that these days I sit around listening to Radiohead and Elliott Smith and wishing that the words would stop defying me long enough for me to write this and have it come out true. It’s difficult to be determined not to care about someone while also wishing I mattered enough to that same someone to elicit a “hey, fuck off for the following reasons.” You’d think I’d learn to quit shooting myself in the foot before I ran out of toes, but apparently I deeply want to be a gimp.
On that note…
Things aren’t too bad. In fact, some cool things have happened lately. My brother got married a couple of weeks ago, and I had my first phone conversation ever in the entire history of my life with him last weekend with my dad serving as a translator. This probably sounds incredibly weird, but it’s pretty normal for my family, which is something I don’t really feel like explaining right now. Except I will, by saying that my dad is an immigrant, and he has a son and a daughter who live in the Middle East. I’ve never met my half-siblings, and before last Saturday, my only contact with them was through stories people would tell or the occasional photograph someone would give me. Anyway, it was incredible to be able to have a weird, stilted conversation with my brother. So incredible in fact that I started crying because I couldn’t believe I was actually hearing my brother’s voice! And then I had to pretend that I wasn’t crying, because crying is for pansies.
Yep.
In Closing
Goodnight.
