Welcome to Life!

Katie and I are both PMSing right now. I thought I'd go ahead and mention that, just in case you wanted to postpone your visit.

Yesterday Robbie allowed me to come rushing up to Georgetown and sweep him away for a random road trip: what fun! There's nothing else quite so therapeutic as just up and leaving. Have you noticed? I think that's why I love road trips so much. Symbolically, everything that bothers me is here at home, or at work, quarantined within about a 5-square-mile area. So it makes me feel a lot better to get in the car, grab a friend, and go to Lampasas. You heard me.

On the other hand, spring seems rather unequivocally to have sprung, and this also is irresistibly therapeutic. How can you be sad about anything when the trees all have tiny, pale green buds? Or when you've spotted a lone bluebonnet in a neighbor's yard? (Bad year for wildflowers this year, I'll tell you that right now.)

It's impossible not to be cheerful, even when last night led into the most difficult morning of the year (at least for those of us who are forced to observe daylight savings time) by keeping me awake, restive, fretful, tossing and turning, and finally allowing me to drop off two hours before six only to send me dreams of being sick, pregnant, bedridden, and attacked by tribble Muppet vampires with very sharp pointy teeth that crunched down into my ribs with much more realism than I thought strictly necessary, then waking me up in a cold sweat fifteen minutes before my alarm went off. And I had to pee.

I should have just called in sick. My boss did. On the other hand, I got a lot done today, and ended up feeling perfectly fine, not at all as if both arms had been ripped off and used to beat me about the head, which is more in line with the way I've been feeling lately. I can't understand these mood swings. I really need professional help - but really, only about two out of every three days, and falling.

And speaking of needing professional help, the Bubbly Bitching Smoking Nonsmoker found and friended me on Facebook (thanks, Robbie!), forcing me to take down the link to my blog in a big hurry. Her latest status update is grousing about how many status updates everyone else is posting, and in fact stopped me from posting a particularly witty remark about how nice it would be if Slappy White would quit knocking all the shit down off my dresser. I may just delete her.

Alas! if we could actually delete people in real life. Well, if only I could, anyway. It's one of those things that only works out if I'm the only one that gets to do it.

So never mind. Here's Robbie and me yesterday - and Lord bless us if we aren't only here on this earth by the grace of B.B.S.N.S. and all the times she never ran us over when we crossed the street in front of her on our way back from Dominican Joe. How can I be bitter?

Rude Inconsiderate Nasty Horrible People

Newsflash: Women can't pee standing up.

Perhaps you were already aware of this fact. If so, I congratulate you; you're significantly beetter-informed than whoever it was that was in the ladies' room stall at work before me this afternoon.

And of course, this unknown woman (I wouldn't call her a lady) didn't actually think she could pee standing up. She was guilty, not of ignorance, but of one of the most heinous crimes a woman can commit against her sister creatures: the hoversquat.

The hoversquat is only excusable if a woman finds herself forced to use a particularly frightening facility: say, a unisex restroom at a truck stop, or a port-a-potty by the waning evening light as the Bob Marley Festival is winding down. There are times you'll find yourself in a restroom in which no reasonable creature could be expected to sit down, and due to the biological constraints I hinted at earlier, you can't just go contribute to the ammonia content of some nice happy tree's nutrient intake.

But the public restroom at work, for God's sake. Not only are these things thoroughly cleaned every day, but they are never used by drunk people at all - which is a hell of a lot more than I can say for the bathroom at my house. And if you're one of those prissy "ooh my hiney is too good to touch the same toilet seat that your peasant scum hiney has touched" bitchez - the same exact women, I'll lay you money, who have French tips on their toenails - fine. They've got those stupid little paper things. Use them.

Doing the hoversquat in a clean restroom displays the ultimate contempt for your fellow women. Of course the worst-case scenario is that the next woman doesn't see what you've done and sits down. Eeeeeeewwwww! Me, I always check, even though maybe once out of 500 times does it turn out I needed to. But if your predecessor has committed the hoversquat, you have to either go to another stall, or do the virtuous, civic-minded thing and clean it up.

What is with some people?! Don't even get me started on that woman I see walking to the bus stop after work every day who crosses on the wrong side of the intersection, so that all the cars that have been sitting there waiting to turn left are obliged to keep waiting through the short green light until she has crossed; when if she would walk just 20 feet out of her way, only the people waiting to turn right, who can do so on red anyway, would have to wait for her. I suspect she works in HR, and I'll bet she uses paper seat covers, and she might even have French tips on her toes. Maybe she even thinks she can pee standing up.

Cleavage

TMI alert!

Like that's going to stop anybody.

I was a bit of an early bloomer. By the time I was ten years old, I was reasonably chesty. By the time I was twelve, I was perhaps unreasonably chesty. Toss in a few breastfed babies and the fact that when I gain weight, that's the first place it goes, and... well, you get the picture.

My sisters both grew up to be A-cups, and they are pissed.

The thing is, female body image being what it is, and general, non-gender-specific human insecurity about the things that make you, um, stand out, I was always pretty self-conscious about this particular portion of my anatomy. It took a long time for me to get comfortable with it. Well - I'm not entirely comfortable, actually. But you know what? Men seem to like them, I've noticed. So I go with it. Tastefully, so to speak.

Today is the first day of my second week on the new job. I'm in a foul mood to begin with. As much as the old job pissed me off at times, I'd been there for two years, and it wasn't the worst job in the world (we all know what that was). I'd made lots of friends, I have some great memories (NO PUNS) and it was a fun, relaxed environment in a lot of ways, as long as you didn't mind the fact that everything you did was completely pointless. So even though this job is (presumably) a better fit for me, a better division to be in, and the work is substantially more rewarding, I'm terribly homesick. Plus I just called an end to - something we won't go into. Plus I am extremely unhappy about Romeo. Plus Bill Gates is running a little behind, so PMS is absolutely kicking my ass right now. Plus I forgot to bring my thermos of coffee this morning. Plus it's cold and wet and gray and depressing out.

And now, for the punchline, my new supervisor calls me into her office this morning to tell me that my cleavage violates office dress policy. How mortifying is that?! I was so upset, I wasn't even tempted to snicker when she used the phrase "nip this in the bud." (She really did!)

She didn't mention it specifically, but she gave me a copy of the written dress code, and apparently toe rings and ankle bracelets and big dangly earrings are out, too. "This sucks!" I wailed to a friend, "they're going to turn me into a dowdy middle-aged woman!"

"Yes," he said.

So I'm going to have to go joylessly shopping for some boring clothes. Could I file for discrimination if I can't wear something that someone else could get away with, just because of the way I'm built?

Goddamn it. This sucks. Anyway, I'm done. At least I should be good on web traffic for a while.

First Impressions

Is it a good idea to write your first blog post about your brand-new job while you're PMSing your balls off?

Let's find out!

Actually, overall my impressions are very favorable. Everyone seems nice. More to the point, everyone seems normal.

And indeed there is a certain glamour to the job. "We'll put your photo on our section's web page," my new boss told me this morning, "so the remote offices you support have a face to put with the name."

"Oookaaay," I said slowly, glancing at my ID badge. "I hope they don't mind squished people with terminal jaundice."

"No no," she said, "the staff photographer will take it."

So here I am, first hour of the first day at the new job, standing outside in the sunshine, leaning casually on a brick pillar, hands clasped, smiling fetchingly while the breeze lifts my hair and a professional photographer shouts "Good, very nice!" at me.

Not long after, an email appointment went out for tomorrow morning, to the whole division. They need to take a new group photo and have been holding off until my arrival.

Okay, in my old office, there is a group photo hanging up in the kitchen area. I'm sure some of the people pictured are now dead, and of those, several don't even work there anymore. The live ones, meanwhile, have aged noticeably, or at least matured - one of my former coworkers, always stylish and dapper, sports a mullet in the group photo.

A slightly more recent photo is taped to the Sheriff's office door (and no, it is not riddled with dart holes) but it still features many people who have been gone for more than a couple of years.

I think it will be fine, once I settle in, once I get familiar with the way things are run, once the homesickness wears off. My cube is nicer and I have a real phone. The people seem really cool. The magnetic letters have met with universal approval.

As for the PMS, well, I'm on my own.

Love Is Good for Anything that Ails You

I know it's a classic song, but this is patently untrue. There are a lot of things that might ail you that love is no good for at all.

Syphilis springs to mind.

Love is good for doubt, uncertainty, worry, and even PMS, but it's not much help for lovesickness. But new shoes work wonders for all of these ailments. So Katie and I, in the name of making a decision about the job offer, went out and bought three pairs of shoes, a really cute top, a couple of pairs of tights, some nail polish, and a bottle each of neon pink and electric blue hair dye.

Those last items were for Katie, although I suppose the start of a new job would be as good an opportunity as any to change up my look a little.

Also good for many of the things that might ail you is a long walk and a long think in the most sensible of the new shoes: down the length of Stacy Park and back up Alta Vista and back down Travis Heights, listening to sad songs on the iPod, the evening breeze rapidly cooling the air, and all the houses lighting up silently one by one under a darkening sky.

Why should I feel so sad? I have no excuse for it. I have new shoes. And I don't have the clap!

No Heckling. Period.

Last week I was browsing through MS Office Online to find a certificate of appreciation for the guest speakers at our conference this week.

They have customizable form letters, too, in case you're not sure what to say. Imagine my wonderment and delight when the first one I opened included a canned paragraph apologizing for the heckling. Does Microsoft have all their bases covered, or what?!*

Speaking of MS, let me pause to clarify, here, for the males among you, that PMS stands for "pre-menstrual syndrome." It's a bout of mild** hormonally-induced moodiness that hits, oh, about a week before a woman's period. So women aren't PMSing when they're actually on the rag. That would really be MSing, or as some women*** euphemistically put it, "Bill Gates is paying a visit."

We've been working on this conference for months. I used to be a corporate meeting planner, so from my perspective it seems like a lot more effort has gone into the planning - considering we aren't working with an outside venue, or caterers, or AV staff, or hotel, or extraneous dinners or entertainment - than is strictly necessary. We have a few classrooms at work reserved; the AV equipment we need is all in there; the attendees are on their own for meals, lodging, and travel; and our section director has bought coffee for everyone. What's to plan?

Of course, as a meeting planner, I was never part of the proceedings, whereas in this case I did have to come up with a presentation on one of our work processes that I'll be giving in front of about 75 people. Luckily, PMS hasn't yet convinced me that I'll suck. Then again, I attended the dry runs of everybody else's presentations, many of which were, well, dry. I tried to make mine interesting. Considering that the whole thing, including my speaker notes which I never meant anyone else to see,**** got burned to the DVD that's getting handed out to all the attendees, I may have been more successful than I intended.

So I'm up on Wednesday morning, if you want to come see me wax rhapsodic about what I do at work. But you better not heckle me, or Bill Gates will kick your ass.

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*If you don't count Vista
**Your mileage may vary
***Me
****"Welcome. I am your shiny new minute order goddess. Fear not, mortals."