On Wednesday I was running late for Pizza-n-Teevee Night at E’s, and didn’t have time to go home first and change out of my cube monkey uniform. I bitch to him about this over the phone before I leave the office, and tell him I may need to borrow a t-shirt and possibly sweatpants.
When I arrive I find a selection of t-shirts piled on the pizza box, keeping the pizza warm and giving the t-shirts a just-from-the-dryer toastiness.
There’s a bin full of Miss Piggy finger puppets, each of them oddly svelte, apparently designed to keep customers from having second thoughts about that venti caramel macchiato. In the middle of the bin there’s a single Rowlf finger puppet, eyes to the ceiling, mouth open in a wordless howl roughly translated as, "Why, God, why?"
Over at Eric's, notes on a Lovecraft Christmas.
Walking down the hall in my apartment building Sunday morning I heard the persistent shriek of more than one unchecked alarm, alarms trying to wake owners who had slept in other beds. The sound included an undertone pulsing along with the beeping: "someone got laid...someone got laid...someone got laid..."
The disaster recovery meeting is spinning out of control. We’re talking about things that are further and further outside the purview of our team, and eventually I can’t help myself:
Do we have a Sinners List?
A Sinners List?
Yeah, so if the Rapture comes we’ll know who will still be around to reboot the servers.
I had another weekend of heavy-duty cleaning, most of it in my cubicle at work - I moved to a new one in July, and have been navigating around boxes ever since.
The boxes are mostly full of old paperwork, reams of which could be recycled if I’d just take the time to sort out the few things I actually need to retain. I had to go into the office Saturday to help test an application whose server just moved to the suburbs, so I decided to stick around afterward and finally go through the files I’ve been dragging from cube to cube for years.
I was deep into 1998 when I found this note written on the back of a torn-off piece of cardstock:
This morning I put on what I think might be a clean shirt. I guess it isn’t because there’s a half eaten fortune cookie in the pocket. I start to throw it away (it’s all soft and icky) but it conjures up some fond recollections so I put it back and carry it around for a while. Then I realize that I spend most of my whole dang day pondering the many wonders of you and/or take-out Chinese anyway, so I finally toss it.
It’s a relic from that fertile ground for love letters, the time after a relationship becomes long-distance but before the distance begins to dissolve the relationship entirely. The note arrived in an envelope full of other bits of paper, each with just a few sentences on it, small stories and things that occurred to him throughout the day. I took my favorite to work, and kept it nearby up until the day I dropped it into whatever file was handy, just to get it out of sight.
Only to have it turn up years later, a half-eaten fortune cookie in a manilla folder.
Last night I wrote the first seventeen words of the new novel (okay, actually, the last seventeen words).
Technically I’m not supposed to start until November 1st, but, you know, these things happen.
Thursday
Someone from the oral surgeon’s office calls at 8:30 to confirm my appointment and make sure I’m not planning on eating or drinking anything before the surgery at 2:30 (I’m not). While I’m on the phone, I ask her about the triazolam (aka Halcion) tablet I’ve been instructed to take an hour before my appointment.
ME: And what’s that for?
HER: It’ll keep you from being anxious before the procedure.
ME: What if I’m not anxious?
HER: It’ll just make you a little dopey.
ME: What if being dopey is the only thing I’m anxious about?
HER: You’re going to be dopey after, you know.
ME: But I don’t really need to be dopey before, right?
HER: Well, some people take it, and you can’t even tell.
And there’s my out. If they can’t tell if I’ve taken it, they won’t be able to tell if I haven’t taken it. I decide to take half, but by 1:30 I’m feeling so loopy from not having eaten that I figure I don’t even need that.
Later, just before the procedure, the surgeon’s assistant asks me if I took the little blue pill before I came in. I tell her the truth. She frowns a bit, but then notices the heart monitor I am hooked up to.
Apparently it’s hard to scold someone for not taking a pill to help her relax when she’s sitting in the chair two minutes before surgery with a heart rate of 62. Instead, she says, "Can I ask you a personal question?"
ME: Sure.
HER: Is that your natural hair color?
ME: Oh, no. Natural has nothing to do with it.
HER: Really? What do you use?
I am explaining my recipe when the oral surgeon comes in, and while he puts in the anesthetic drip he tells me that immediately after the extraction the tissue separating the hole from the sinus cavity will be the "thickness and texture of a corn flake," as in thin and brittle, and I shouldn’t blow my nose for two weeks.
Thirty minutes of general anesthesia and fifteen minutes of recovery later, the assistant gives me my two formerly impacted wisdom teeth, nestled in gauze but whole.
I feel well enough afterward to go with my mother and E to the drug store for the antibiotics I’d been prescribed, and then to the video store. I had gauze in my mouth the whole time, and when I got home the bleeding on the left had stopped entirely, and on the right it stopped after another ten minutes with fresh gauze.
I only blow my nose once that night, hollering, "Shit shit shit!" when I realize what I’m doing. I don't feel air coming out of the hole, though, and no liquid comes out of my nose when I drink, so apparently the corn flake is still intact.
Friday
I eat poached eggs and soup and ice cream and watch the first season of The Osbournes on DVD with my mom. Some of the ice cream is lavender flavor. Most of it is chocolate.
There’s no more bleeding, and very little swelling. At one point I’m sure I’ve torn out a stitch on the left, because I feel what I take to be a bit of loose flesh. It will turn out to be some of the thread from the stitches.
I’m very smug about how easy this wisdom teeth business has turned out to be. I’ve only taken a few of the twenty hydrocodone (aka Vicodin) I was prescribed, and have been getting by with ibuprofen.
Again, I blow my nose only once. This time - possibly under the influence of The Osbournes - I yell, "Fuck!" My mother threatens to hang notes all over the apartment that say, "Don’t blow your nose!! Love, Mom."
Saturday
I wake up at 6:30 a.m. paranoid, sure the wound on the left is infected, because it aches and is much more swollen than the right side, which is itself considerably more swollen than it was yesterday. I’m also feeling feverish and logy. I gather up all the paperwork from the oral surgeon’s office, trying to determine whether this is normal.
I was feeling muy macho up to this point, but the very idea of infection makes me want to spend the day in bed whimpering. I am like the aliens in The War of Worlds - I leave a trail of destruction, oblivious to all attempts to thwart me, but a cold will take me down.
Around 4:00 p.m. I find the bit of paper that assures me all of my symptoms are normal.
I catch myself halfway through blowing my nose. Progress!
Sunday
I’m feeling better, but I can’t stop thinking about that corn flake.
My mom leaves for California, and leaves behind a note in the bathroom that says, "Don’t blow your nose!! Love, Mom."
This is the first day that I don't even try to blow my nose.
Monday
Another stitch must have come out, because the loose bit of thread is at least an inch long now. It’s like a damn cat toy in there.
Tuesday
The thread broke off. I kinda miss it.
I’m still resting up from the wisdom teeth extraction - thanks to everyone who sent kind wishes. The short update:
Everything went smoothly, and my swollen cheeks have given me an eerie nose-to-chin resemblance to Orson Welles.
The young, beardless Orson Welles, though, so it's okay.
I'm off to have my wisdom teeth removed this afternoon.
I'm not sure how it will affect future posts. Better prepare for more banality, just in case.
I was on my way home from work yesterday evening when a guy in a pickup truck hollered at me. I followed my usually policy (ignoring it), but he actually pulled the truck over.
GUY IN TRUCK: Excuse me, can you tell me where to find -
He’s drowned out by a passing bus.
ME: What was that?
GIT: Strip clubs!
ME: What?!
GIT: I’m supposed to meet my friends, they told me there were a bunch around here, like right together.
ME: Well, Déja Vu is a couple of blocks up the street, and Lusty Lady is down on First.
GIT: That’s it?
ME: That’s all I know about. You could try asking one of those guys standing around on the corner.
Now, the GIT didn’t seem like he was getting his jollies from asking a single woman on the street to give him directions to a strip club - I would have given him very different directions if I thought that were the case. I was reasonably sure he was just a loser with poor judgment to match his poor sense of direction. I had spent a few blocks puzzling over this and was waiting at a light when an attractive Japanese woman standing next to me got my attention with a little wave.
AJW, in hesitant and heavily accented English: Excuse me, please, what day is it? Saturday? Sunday?
I smiled and said, "Sunday," realizing just before I answered that she was asking me resolve linguistic rather than temporal confusion. For a split second I thought it must have something to do with the International Date Line.
She thanked me as we crossed the street, and I started to wonder what it was about me tonight that made strangers think I could answer their questions. I was also thinking that, structurally speaking, this walk home would make a better entry with three queries rather than two. And that’s when one of the pair women I was approaching said to her companion, "Let’s ask her."
W1: Excuse me, do you know if there’s an internet café near here?
ME: Well, there was, but it caught fire a couple of years ago.
W2: Our friend told us about a place called the Bistro or something like that...
ME: The Speakeasy?
W1: That’s it!
ME: Yeah, that’s the one that burned down.
I gave them some other options, and then continued on to my building.
There were no further queries.
Sometimes I’m prone to Pooh-like songs (that’s as in silly-old-bear, thank you very much). Today it was a sort of rhyming fugue based on the phrase "Noodle Nose", which is the nickname of a friend of mine whose real name is Monster. She is not especially monstrous, except maybe in a Where the Wild Things Are way, nor does she have a noodle-like nose.
It would probably be more accurate to call her Gnocchi Nose, if all gnocchi were adorable-shaped.
A lot of words rhyme with "nose".