pseudostoops

Things I have seen on the ground in our building’s parking garage which distress me:

• Milk, spilled, with accompanying shards of glass
• Rodent, dead
• Condom (SERIOUSLY?)
• Piles of vomit, now desicated and frozen and generally disgusting (2)

Look, management company.  I do not ask for much.  I do not care about Christmas décor in the lobby, or the frequency with which you shampoo the hallway carpets, or the speed with which you deliver package notices.  But for the love of all that is holy, could someone PLEASE clean up the vomit in the parking garage? Please? It’s foul.

The week ahead:

• Book club
• Charity event
• Dinner with a friend
• Speaking at a nonprofit
• Preparing 6 cases for work trip next week
• Flying to new Orleans for half marathon then straight to California for work trip

I have nervous tummy just looking at that list.  Send help.

Yesterday I had planned to tell you all about our fabulous mini-break to Nashville, complete with restaurant and honky tonk recommendations.

Things did not go according to plan.

As we were on the plane home (one of those small regional get types, the claustraphobic kind where it’s too small to stand fully upright) I was felled by the first stomach flu I believe I’ve ever had as an adult.  Holy GOD I am ill-equipped to deal with constant nausea and its effects.  I can take the searing pain of a sinus headache or the incessant burn of a sore throat for days, but after just a few hours of feeling on the verge of puking I was ready to call it quits.

I’ll spare you the details, but I do want to share the one positive discovery I made during the following two days of abject misery:  Coke, regular Coke, is a miracle drug.

We are not regular consumers of regular Coke around here.  We sometimes have diet in the house, but I generally view the regular stuff as too tempting and too full of unnecessary sugar, and since I do the food shopping- it’s generally not here.  As I was whining about my certain imminent death to one of my friends, she said “make John go to the store and get you a Coke.”

So I did, and let me tell you: when even water is making your stomach feel like death, a few sips of regular Coke is like magic elixer.  It stays down.  It makes you feel revived.  It causes you to reconsider all those unfriendly things you’ve said about high fructose corn syrup and unnatural caramel coloring over the years.  It is, in short, miraculous.

(According to a doctor friend, if you’re so sick that you can’t keep fluids down at all, you should dissolve a little salt into a room-temperature Coke and drink it slowly to help your body regain its water and salt balance.  I believe him, but that sounds gross, and I wasn’t on the verge of hospitalization for dehydration or anything, so I skipped the salt part.  I tell you this in the interest of thoroughness.)

I’m not back to 100% yet but I’m feeling better, and a big project at work went dramatically wrong yesterday, so I’m going in today.  I think I should make it the whole day.  Who knows, by the end of it I may even be ready to tell you about what we ate and drank in Nashville without feeling like I need to hurl.

I feel neither love nor loathing for Valentine’s Day.  I feel a deep and profound affection, however, for three-day weekends.  Since Valentine’s Day often falls on or around the President’s Day weekend, I often find myself with cooler-than-usual plans for Valentine’s Day.  This year, for example, John and I plan to spend Valentine’s Day eating barbecue and drinking bourbon and PBR  at the best dive we can find in Nashville.  (Doesn’t that sound perfect?  No need for reservations, no going to some fancy restaurant that’s phoning it in PLUS overcharging because V-Day is the easiest day of the year to get butts in the seats even if the food sucks.)

I t seems we often end up with sort of non-traditional Valentine’s plans.  Last year on V-Day we had some friends over for dinner.  A few years ago we bought several kinds of fancy cheese and conducted a cheese tasting on our couch, in our pajamas.  Nine years ago, I performed in the Vagina Monologues.  Yes, I tend to avoid the “dress up for a fancy restaurant” kinds of dates.  (On Valentine’s Day only- any other day when you want to take me to Alinea?  Sold!)

But one traditional Valentine’s thing that I am happy to embrace?  This:

This, my friends, is a two pound box of Sees candy.  I won it from the Clever Girls, and I am simply delighted.  John and I, being former California residents, LOVE Sees, and it makes me sad that we don’t have it in the Midwest.  So this is amazing:

I’ve already told John that if he eats the butterscotch squares, he’s dead to me.  I mean, I love him and all, but there are limits.

It seems in my life that there are two kinds of weekends.  Type 1 is filled with vast stretches of nothingness, no plans, plenty of opportunity for lazing and laundry and cooking dishes that require hours of stove time, like osso bucco.  (You know, if osso bucco didn’t gross me out.)  Type 2 is the polar opposite, filled with social engagements and parties and plans, dashing from thing to thing, and waking up on Monday only to realize that you have no (a) clean underpants; (b) clean dishes, and (c) groceries.  Stale graham crackers for breakfast it is!

This weekend fell decidedly, deliciously in the Type 2 column, and as I sit here munching on a leftover third of a burrito from lunch (see “no groceries,” supra), I can’t really believe what-all I crammed into the hours between 5pm on Friday and 6:30 frickin am this morning.  (Why yes I DID go to work at 6:30 am! How did you guess?  And no, I’m not in the least bitter about it, thanks for asking!)  There was happy hour and brunch with friends and a coffee date and another brunch with friends and a superbowl party featuring homemade wings and gumbo and soft pretzels, plus a cutie 3 month old baby.  Not too shabby.

But the highlight, unsurprisingly, was the lovely day and night I spent with a truly, astonishingly fun group of women who’d come in from ALL OVER THE WORLD (what, we had a canadian, that makes us international) to hang out.  Being a total moron I forgot my camera, and being a totally exhausted space case I’m forgetting all the nice things I wanted to say about them but suffice it to say that hanging out with these women was the kind of experience I used to daydream about when I was a teenager- a smart, racaously funny group of women who can talk about things both silly and serious for hours and hours while drinking wine and enjoying cheese fondue.  A little cliche and predictable for a girls weekend, you say, with the wine and the fondue?  DO NOT CARE.  WAS BLISS.

Making friends as an adult is hard, yo, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have found these ladies.

Then, after an evening where I mixed beer, whiskey, baileys (ew), wine, tequila (not my idea) and more beer, I somehow woke up with a headache.  I cannot fathom why.

The normal secretary in our office has been on vacation all week, and we’ve had a substitute secretary, a very nice lady named Marge, who is ENTIRELY THE OPPOSITE of our normal secretary who owns a tricked out Harley and wears both a leather vest and leather pants to work on semi-regular basis (not joking).

On Wednesday, Marge started crying, rather noisily, at her desk.  My coworker and I went out to investigate (we are not made of stone) and found her mopping at her eyes with paper towels (we are not made of stone, but we are not made of money, either, and we were out of Kleenex.  At Marge’s suggestion, I went down to procurement and got some raggedy one-ply tissues, which were a minor improvement over the paper towels, plus now I know they have tissues in procurement.  Never have to buy office tissues again, bitches!)

It turns out that Marge’s father is very sick.  He’s probably dying.  Poor Marge and her sister are trying to set up hospice care so he can get out of the hospital and come home.  We heard about this in some detail on Wednesday when the crying jag happened.  Then again on Wednesday afternoon as we came back from lunch.  Then again on Wednesday evening as Marge was leaving for the day.

Thursday he was worse.  Marge is a mess.  She cried several times at work.  She left early to go home and help her sister finalize plans for bringing their dad home.  As she was leaving, she said they weren’t sure he was going to make it through the night.

I feel terrible for Marge.  This is a very difficult thing she’s going through.  But I also…how do I put this delicately…. I don’t really KNOW Marge.  I cannot think of much I can say that would be comforting.  You know who I do know?  My boss.  You know what I know about him?  He is not the sort to really take a shine to his employees spending an hour over the course of the work day nodding sympathetically and listening to the woes of a substitute secretary.  Yesterday, I heard Marge talking to him for at least fifteen minutes about her dad.  You don’t know my boss, but trust me when I say that a fifteen minute conversation about ANYTHING would make him twitchy- he’s a fast-moving guy- and I could hear him getting more and more impatient as the conversation ran on and on.

Today is Marge’s last day with us, probably.  Our regular secretary is scheduled to come back on Monday.  But I wonder: how best to handle it when a near-stranger tells you a LOT about a very difficult family situation? At work? Where your boss would like you to be, you know, working?  I do not want to abandon Marge- she seems like a lovely lady and she’s clearly struggling- but I’m just not sure what to say.  What is the proper way to give support (and potentially condolences) to a near-stranger who has a demonstrated ability to talk at some length and in tremendous detail about a very difficult family situation?  Can I continue to nod sympathetically and say “mmm,” and “oh, that’s hard,” or is there something more specific, perhaps, that I should offer?  Potentially something that will get me back to my desk in under 30 minutes?  Or should I just say eff it to my work and give her as much time as she needs to talk it out?  Truly, give me a script here, people.  I’m at a loss.

Day Train: Readers

Night Train: Chatters

Day Train: iPods to block out the other throngs of commuters

Night Train: iPods for singing along to

Day Train: Coffee in a commuter mug or a Dunkin cup

Night Train: Old Granddad or a tall can of Miller Lite in a paper bag

Day Train: “Tickets please”

Night Train: “Where you going, sweetheart?”

Day Train: Universal agreement to all just look straight ahead, engaging with no one

Night Train: Apparently everyone else considers this to be some sort of weird people SOCIAL HOUR oh my god.

In conclusion: Do not forget your iPod on a late night train.  Also: wear a hood, a hat, and practice your fake sleeping.  You’re going to need it.

Age 8: My family and two others rent a house on a Caribbean island for spring break.  The house has a hosekeeper, who mostly cleans, but one day she makes a pan of shortbread and tells us kids that we can eat it.  It is mildly sweet and crumbly and amazing, nothing like the chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal scotchies my mom makes.  For the rest of the day I keep making excuses to sneak back into the kitchen for another piece.

Age 11: At a sleepover at a friend’s house, her mom serves us stuffed peppers for dinner.  “They’re my favorite!” she gushes.  As I cut into mine, one side of the pepper splits open and watery tomato sauce and gray ground beef squirt out.  I take one bite and spit it into my napkin.  I tell my friend’s mom I don’t eat meat, and for a month afterwards I don’t, trying to make my lie true by sticking to it.  I don’t eat another stuffed pepper for nineteen years.

Age 16: My boyfriend’s mother is a fabulous cook.  She makes an Italian feast- Bolognese and lasagna and eggplant parmigiana.  At this point I don’t eat meat for real, so I take a heaping portion of eggplant.  It tastes like heaven with the fried and the sauce and the cheese, but an hour later my mouth and throat itch and my tongue feels heavy.  It takes me years of suffering through earnest eggplant-heavy vegetarian entrees for me to realize I have a nightshade sensitivity.

Age 17: The letter arrives in a small envelope, so I’m sure I’ve been rejected.  But when I open it, it says “congratulations on your admission!”  My dad, ecstatic that I’ve chosen his alma mater, breaks open a dusty bottle of champagne, pours a glass for all of us, even my 15 year old sister.  A picture from that night still sits on his desk, me holding a crystal champagne glass from my parents’ wedding, hair in a sloppy ponytail, wearing jeans and a college tshirt from a different college.

Age 18: After a scholastic bowl meet (shut up), my friends go to Panda Express to pick up dinner.   The restaurant’s about to close, so they give my friends whole trays of food they were going to throw out, charging $10 for enough to feed dozens.   My mom’s allergic to MSG so I’ve never had Chinese food, and I mow through half a pan of lo mein noodles, unable to get enough of the new flavor.

Age 20: Once a term, our house hosts “special dinner,” where the house chef cooks nicer food, with a theme.  There is also booze.  After a contentious vote, the house has decided on sushi, so the chef makes dozens of rolls, including many for the house’s few vegetarians, carrot and cucumber and avocado and sweet potato.  I eat a few bites, but the vinegar-y rice tastes odd to me, and I don’t like the warm sake, and I complain bitterly about what a waste of a special dinner it was.  A year later, when I try sushi again and fall in love with it, I kick myself for not gorging that night.

Age 25: Twice a week, after teaching all day, I go to a science classroom in a nearby middle school and suffer through teaching certification classes from 6-10 pm with 20 other new teachers.  We get a 30 minute break for dinner, too short to go anywhere far, but someone discovers Lee’s sandwiches in the adjacent Vietnamese mini mall.  The sandwich with tofu is entirely foreign and entirely delicious, salty and sweet and hot, and for the rest of the year every Monday and Wednesday for dinner I have a $2 sandwich and a strawberry smoothie made with sweetened condensed milk and boba.  I feel profound loss when I move away two years later and for months am unable to find decent banh mi or bubble tea in Chicago.

This weekend: For a friend’s birthday, we go to dim sum. Her husband has researched online all the crazy dishes he wants, and orders for the table.  Dishes start arriving quickly, one after another, and no longer vegetarian, I take some of everything.  Including the pig’s ear.  It was chewy.