Waitress? A Round of Shots and a Large Amount of Cotton Batting, Please

The man at the next table has something to say.

And he’s been saying it loudly and in clear, decisive tones for a good 20 minutes now.

Judging from the looks on the faces around him, it may have been something they were expecting.

Ears assaulted, my eyes wander over the top of my margarita again and again to this table of 12. After-work Happy Hour? Club meeting? Family reunion? They are all wearing Hawaiian shirts, nautically themed shirts, and in the case of one woman, Capris-style shorts patterned with tropical birds…

Red-faced and in lecture mode, the man in question is keen to express his political beliefs.

His table-mates have gone silent and grim.

Giving up, I pull my book out of my purse, begin writing.

“What you people don’t understand…“

“What no one knows is…”

The woman to his left ducks her head, closes her eyes as he continues. He slaughters the names of the politicians he is talking about, twists them contemptuously.

He scolds the people at the table for their lack of political savvy.

“What you don’t seem to realize…”

The woman to his right turns away from him. She is Midwestern-ly polite about it, but the body language is clear: I don’t hear you.

The man across from him attempts to break in. “Hold on there a minute, Jim,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any reason to –“

Jim cuts him off. “See, this is where you just don’t understand.” He chuckles indulgently. “You’re being lied to by the people who are controlling what you hear.”

The woman on his right rises, leaves the table.

The woman on his left beckons to the waitress: check, please.

The red-faced man doesn’t notice.

I finish the last of my margarita.

Man, I think. Some people just don’t know how to party.

Everybody’s Somebody’s Monkey

Let me just step out onto a limb here and say that one thing I think we can all agree on is that what this country needs is a good Chore Monkey.

Tired of scraping your own dishes? Don’t think you should be the one to run to the gas station for cigarettes, even if you’re the one planning to smoke them? Are you thinking that even a monkey would do a better job of painting your toenails than you just did?

See? This is what I’m talking about.

The Chore Monkey.

Sure, sure, I can hear you now. Chore Monkey? Isn’t that why I had kids?

Well, sure it is! But I challenge you to put a four-year-old boy and a four-year-old chimp in a race to the corner store and you tell me which one makes it back first. My money’s on the chimp.

And let’s not even get started with how Child Protective Services views a Chore Baby. Sure, you put a monkey in a pair of painter’s pants and a cap and hang him outside the second floor to clean your windows and it’s cute; but you dress up your toddler like that and let him clean the windows and suddenly there are vehicles equipped with flashing lights and sirens in front of your house.

No, no. Let’s stick with a Chore Monkey. I can make up that weird little room under the stairs, clear a shelf in my fridge – he can even borrow the car as long as he puts gas in it.

And lest you think me unfeeling, I’m offering four weeks’ paid vacation a year. And sick days. And a 401(k) retirement plan.

Wait a minute. I’ve just gotten a very uncomfortable feeling here.

Is it possible that I’m somebody’s monkey?

People, Plumbing, and the American Dream

The downstairs, next-door renter called.

“Water’s exploding everywhere!” his voice mail said, a slurred mixture of hysteria and ecstasy. “It’s coming out of the kitchen light fixture and – and – hic! – it’s all over the floor so, um, call me back and, um… Yeah. OK. It’s not an emergency or anything.”

Click.

Hmm. Water exploding and coming out of light fixtures.

But it’s not an emergency.

The last time we had water-based dealings with the downstairs, next-door unit was four years ago.

The renters at that time had gone to Hawaii for a week, leaving us in charge of their cat, Pickles, an introverted animal we never actually saw but whose existence was confirmed with a number of framed photographs.

It was on one of our twice-daily forays to feed Mystery Cat when we came upon a scene rarely encountered outside of rated-R movies, a scene heavy with foreboding…

Seeping out from under the closed bathroom door was water, water of a shade that could only spell looming disaster.

Conflicting emotions forced me into a forward-moving/backward-stepping mambo until my landlord-ly duty propelled me onward, where the plumbing bill that was surely in my future went up in increments of $100 as I turned the doorknob.

Awaiting was the bathroom floor, a lovely parquet, all a’slime. The toilet mocked me from across the room, filled to its porcelain brim with a most appalling sludge.

Remind me to tell you of one of the bravest things I’ve had to do, to date. It involves a pair of elbow-high rubber gloves, a ladle, a five-gallon bucket, and only partially successful suppression of the gag reflex.

But now? What now? Was this or was this not an emergency?

Willie changed from flannel lounging pants to jeans, pulling on his boots and dashing next door.

I got on the phone with the woman upstairs, next-door.

“Karishma! This is Pearl. Will you check your bathroom, please? Are you flooding?”

Karishma assured me she was on her way home, less than five minutes from home, and would get back to me immediately.

Looking outside, I watched as Willie knocked on Dave’s front door. Leaning out the window into the winter air, I hollered, cupping my hands for better hollerin’ effect: “Karishma’s on her way home!”

My phone rang. “Pearl, this is Karishma. I spoke with Lonnie, and she said that she had overflowed the bathtub, but by less than a gallon, she assures me!”

Four minutes later, she pulled up to the front of the house. Putting it into park and leaving her purse in the car, she dashed to the front door. Willie, who was still waiting for Dave, followed her in her flight up the stairs and confirmed moments later that the amount of water on the floor was easily absorbed by three large towels.

Dave never did answer the door, although he did call us two days later to apologize for having reported that water was “exploding” everywhere, that it had, in fact, been more of a drip than an explosion.

That was four months ago, and we’ve heard nothing since.

Economy aside, tell me truthfully now: Do you think it’s too late to invest in something a little more practical, cheaper to handle?

I’m thinking fishing bait or hookers, something with a future…

A Veritable Well of Untapped Potential

Hey! Welcome to the start of a new work week.

Didn’t think it would come to this, did you?

No, I didn’t either.

You wouldn’t know it to look at me now, but I was a straight-A student. No, really! Spelling? No problem. Math? Yep. Science, philosophy, music? You bet.

And so what? Spellcheck has relieved us of the need to spell it correctly in the first place. Calculators are on everything from phones to, well, calculators. Science comes in handy during Trivial Pursuit and while watching Cash Cab, philosophy makes me a thoughtful and open-minded drunk, and my music knowledge – well, again with the Trivial Pursuit.

I made a mistake in not going directly from high school to college.

And I made a mistake in learning to type.

This is probably going to blow your mind, so you may want to brace yourself against a large bit of furniture, but I type like the freakin’ wind.

Cool, huh?

No. Not really. Because once it’s been discovered that you’re good at something, suddenly, no matter where you are, if there's a need for a typist, no one else in the room can do it.

“Could you just do the typing? I type with two fingers. It’ll go so much faster if you do it.”

A number of years ago we had a college student, an intern, at work. Nice guy, probably 22 or so. He was young and unblemished and wore earnest business casual sweaters with khaki pants. We called him “Intern Boy” in our discussions of him over the lunch hour.

I wouldn’t say he and I were friends. But we were colleagues; and at work, that’s enough, don’t you think?

He stopped by my desk one day.

“Hey,” he said.

I looked up from the report I was furiously typing. Could I get a 25-page report typed and proofread in an hour? My boss had seemed to think so.

He placed a pile of papers on my desk. “I’m going to need these faxed by the end of the day.”

I frowned slightly. “You are, huh?”

“Um,” he said. Was I one of those saucy, quirky secretaries he had seen on prime time TV? He wasn’t sure.

I cocked my head slightly and continued to look at him.

“I don’t know how to fax,” he said.

“It’s easy,” I said. “You see that machine over there? You put the papers, face-down, in the feed. Then you punch the fax number in on the keypad and press the big green button.”

He didn’t move.

Perhaps he hadn’t noticed that the fax machine tutorial was over.

"So voila,” I concluded. “Fish and chips.”

He smiled flirtatiously. “Oh, come on. I’ll just mess it up if I do it,” he said coyly. “I’m sure you do it better than I ever could.”

I thought about the As, the gold stars. I thought about the Pythagorean Theorem, my interest in Russian literature, about how great I had been on those Word Find puzzles in elementary school.

I sighed. Whatever he had been studying the last four years, there had not been time spent on office equipment – or office etiquette.

“I support four of the people on this floor,” I said. “I’m sorry, but you’re not one of them. You’re going to have to learn to operate the fax machine for yourself.”

And I went back to typing.

Poor Intern Boy. He walked over to the fax machine, and I lost track of what he was doing. I hoped he had taken that as simply and as directly as I had phrased it.

There was a large frosted cookie on my desk the next morning.

“Thanks for the Advice,” it said.

Good ol’ Intern Boy.

I’ll Bet My Life Would be Cooler If It Were Narrated

The streets are treacherous, my friend, and have taken it upon themselves to break the bones of both of the women next door (one ankle and one wrist apiece).

And here I am, laden with a yoga bag and my “bus” purse (large enough to hold my lunch but not big enough for a pony).

The narrator speaks in hushed tones:
“Armed carefully with her cash card, a lipstick, 10 pounds of various things she feels she must carry with her and her belaying rope, she picks her way carefully down the icy sidewalks, choosing the placement of her feet as carefully as the sherpas and mountain men who had gone on before her. Let’s follow as she negotiates these treacherous city streets.”

The name is Pearl.

Pearl Norgay.

The thought that someone like Morgan Freeman – or perhaps David Attenborough – is in a small studio somewhere, sipping tea and commenting on my life, helps me get through these “Hey! Is that the SUN shining?” days.

We do what we can to keep our strength up.

But what I would propose to you, my world-wide-like friends, is that in the same way winter is not for the faint of heart, it is also not for asthmatics, people who enjoy sensation in all their limbs – including the locally-endangered toes – or this strange breed of male insisting that shorts are year-‘round attire.

Yes. I recently saw a man, outside, wearing shorts.

Now, I am not a violent woman. And yet when the temperature is 3 degrees outside Fahrenheit (that's 16 below Celsius), the vision of this, my clueless neighbor, climbing out of his car to walk into the grocery store wearing a pair of shorts, a hoodie, and sandals, produces violent thoughts in me.

Something in me wants to punch him.

And before you think perhaps he had been to the gym and was just popping in for a quick Gatorade, I put to you while it was technically possible for this to be true, I would wager that it was not.

But what does my inner narrator say about it?

“Stepping lightly from the ladder that takes him from the driver’s seat to the tarmac, he scans the parking lot. Surely someone has seen him, remarked upon the impressive girth of his vehicle. Chuckling softly, he notes that, again, he has done well in his purchase of the largest mode of civilian transportation available. He steps away from the car, pressing the remote to lock it – BEEP BEEP – and observes with satisfaction the people who turn. They have, without doubt, noticed his casual dress, his expensive vehicle and have been made aware of his manly bearing. He enters the grocery store in pursuit of the elusive mesquite barbecued chicken – and this time – this time! – expenses be damned, he would buy potato chips as well.”

Everywhere, the people in my life are heading to warmer climes. Their narrators have tired of looking for synonyms for “cold”, “snow”, and “seasonal depression” and have given them leave to, well, leave. Just look at them! On their way to Vegas, just back from Hawaii, looking forward to trips to Puerto Rico, they have lost touch with the subtle insanity of winter.

But not me. I’m not going anywhere. I’m riding this SOB out.

And I’m gonna kick this season old-style.

Shhh. You hear that? Morgan is speaking again...

“Pearl carefully eyes the city bus, calculating which of her fellow riders is most apt to smell funny…”

Sure. You Buy One, And Then Fifteen Years Later Ya Gotta Buy Another One

Hey, you don’t have to hit me over the head with it.

Much.

It’s been going on for a couple weeks now: my back, arms, and legs are stiff when I awake, and the other night I dreamt I was going over Niagara in a wooden barrel.

All of this has led me to an expensive conclusion.

My mattress has expired.

It’s odd; but one minute something is perfectly comfortable, and the next minutes it’s a large, lumpy noun without your best interest at heart.

And then, it must be replaced.

I’ve been resisting mattress shopping, though. I’ve only done it once before, roughly 15 years ago, and didn’t care for it. All mattresses prior to that came free with helping someone move, free with a relationship, that sort of thing. I don’t like buying things like mattresses. It’s an expensive, bulky, and likely-to-happen-again-in,-roughly,-15-years kind of shopping.

Not a fun kind of shopping.

But I have to, don’t I? I have to do that kind of shopping. The days of cast-offs and he-left-his-mattress mattresses are over.

Sometimes, you just have to buy a new mattress.

Look at me. All mature over here.

Still, without prompting I’m willing to bet I won’t be going any time soon. The only time I think about it is just moments before I’m ready to go to bed, and by then, of course, it’s too late to go shopping.

You won’t catch me at an all-night mattress sale.

So I’m going to need some prompting. I’ve left a note for myself, and I put it where I tend to spend a lot of my time: on the refrigerator.

“Your mattress has expired,” it says.

Let’s see if that’s a big enough hit in the head.