The Nose Doesn't Want to Know

Smearing expensive goo on your face on a nightly basis is, I suppose, just a natural part of growing older. What I can't understand is why the manufacturer thought this goo should have a smell of any kind. Sure, my moisturizer is only "lightly" scented. But any scent is kind of overwhelming when you apply it to your face, which, last time I checked, is where your nose is.

It's not nearly as overwhelming as my first roommate in college, about whom I was reminiscing to some coworkers today. "I scheduled it so my first class every day was at noon, downstairs, in a classroom on the first floor of my dorm," I was telling them. Wasn't that clever? So it was unfortunate that my randomly assigned roommate turned out to be a pathologically perky morning person with a major aerosol addiction.

After her 6 a.m. shower came clouds of baby-powder-scented aerosol deodorant, faux-Giorgio perfume in a spray can, and - because this was 1986 - at least two cubic liters of Aquanet. Forget about sleeping - I couldn't breathe. The windows in Jester didn't open, but it's probably just as well. After a few weeks I might have been tempted to jump. Thank God nobody ever lit a match.

But the weirdest thing - oh, my God, I said, as I remembered this detail - was that as she got dressed, she'd dump a sizable mound of baby powder into her panties. I guess she didn't quite feel fresh without it. And one of my coworkers asked, "Didn't she leave a little trail everywhere she went?"

"Or little poofs in the air behind her," suggested another, "like fairy dust!"

Do you know, I used to worry a lot about fitting in at my current job. But I think I've succeeded in bringing them down to my level at last.

I stopped by to visit another coworker this afternoon. I used to talk to her all the time when she worked in the gift shop off the lobby, and I'd drop in whenever I passed by. Since she moved to cubicle-land, I never see her. So I came by to talk and admire her new digs. After we'd been chatting for a while, her phone rang, and I busied myself in admiring the many group photos she has on her wall. One surprised me. Standing directly behind her in the shot was someone from my old work section - an old-school state employee of the first order, who, very shortly after Robbie and I started working there, confronted us in the hallway, demanded to know the date of a particular volcanic eruption, and, when we gazed in helpless bewilderment at one another, exclaimed "And you call yourselves geographers?!" and walked off.

What could he be doing in a group photo with my gift-shop-tending coworker? It seemed unlikely that they would move in the same circles. Or on the same planet. "What's this photo from?" I asked her as soon as she was off the phone.

"Oh, that's the Hispanic Activities Council," she said.

I looked again. Sure enough, everyone in the picture, besides the geography aficionado, was Hispanic. "I used to know that guy," I told her, and related the volcano story.

She laughed. "He's kind of strange," she said, "but he always comes to all the meetings. He never talks though."

"Why," I began, and paused, not knowing if this would be an indelicate question. One tries to be politically sensitive. "Why is he on the Hispanic Activities Council?" I asked.

"I have no idea," she said. "I think he just likes Mexican food."

The cubicles in my old division are less than half the size of the ones we have now, so I can testify with some degree of authority that many of my former coworkers were very fond of Mexican food indeed. The sad thing is, our work campus is being demolished in a year or two to put up condos, and the developer (as a deal to get my agency out of its 10,000-year proprietary lease on the prime real estate where it sits) is building us a new high-rise towards the rear of the property. This edifice will house all the workers who currently occupy three buildings sprawled out over a 10- or 12-acre spread, so space will be limited, cubicle size will be standardized, and we won't have the nice big offices we have now, that's for sure. "It's gonna suck," sighed my coworker, "you'll be smelling everybody's lunch, one way or another."

I just hope they don't put my work group on the same floor with my old section. Time to pick up a pallet of baby powder at the wholesale warehouse, or maybe just smear lots of moisturizer under my nose.

Contraceptives: Is There Anything They Can't Do?

Katie's been watching a modern, well-scrubbed teenaged version of Thunderbirds on the Disney Channel. I sat and watched a bit of it with her. Ben Kingsley is in it, I'm sorry to say. He's the bad guy, and has trapped all our teenaged heroes and a few accompanying adults in a freezer vault using his evil red-eyed mind pulses. I had to leave the room.

Katie followed me a few minutes later. "Oh my God, Mom!" she said. "That was disturbing! That was so wrong!"

"What happened?" I asked her.

"The lady in the freezer vault just pulled out her, what's that birth control thing that's made of wire? They used it to pick the lock!" she said.

"Her IUD?!" I asked. "Is her gynecologist trapped in there with them?"

"No!" exclaimed Katie. "She just started reaching up under her clothes, and everybody turned around, and she pulled out this wire! She said she didn't really need it anyway."

I didn't know what to say. "But you can't, you can't do that," I protested. "It doesn't just come out."

Katie insisted. "She really did! I swear!"

I still couldn't believe it. "On the Disney channel?!"

"Watch it yourself," Katie told me, and rewound it.

Don't you love DVR? Remember when you used to have to videotape things? Remember trying to edit out the commercials? We had a Betamax, with a remote control whose cord snaked across the room. I'm not sure they shouldn't have stuck with that design. You couldn't lose it, and you didn't have to remember to buy batteries all the time. For all the technological advances of the last 30 years, you know, batteries are still batteries. Why hasn't anyone done something about this?

We watched the scene. The manservant informs Lady Penelope that he could pick the lock if only he had a wire of some kind; and a slow look of understanding, then resolve comes into her eyes. Her hand moves to her waist, and she begins to reach under her clothes, and everybody gets embarrassed and turns around. There is a closeup of fumbling underneath pink fabric, and after a few moments, she emerges with...

With the underwire from a bra, Katie. For God's sake!

Still fairly risqué for the Disney Channel, but note it was directed by Commander Riker.

Gross Analogy for the Day

Ex-boyfriends/husbands are like dirty underwear. They were fine when you had them on, but once you take them off, they need to stay in the hamper. You wouldn't put them back on again later. Eewwww!

Only I don't like that analogy, because you can't just wash and reuse your discarded lovers. The analogy would work better if it were standard practice to donate your used underwear to Goodwill and buy new ones every day. But nobody can afford to do that, especially not if you have expensive tastes; you'd be single-handedly keeping Victoria's Secret in business, and Goodwill wouldn't be able to get anybody to work in the receiving bay.

Actually I was at Goodwill earlier today, as a side note, shopping for boring tops. There was a thong bodysuit hanging on one rack among the shirts. I wonder who would buy that? Obviously I have no problem with used clothing, but that's been up somebody's butt.

Tampons are a better analogy. Exes are like tampons, which you do not under any circumstances reuse, unless you're a really good person and use sea sponges (I drew the line at cloth diapering). But tampons, while quite useful, are not really all that much fun; and the men in your life ideally should be, at least for a little while. So I don't like that analogy much either.

Perhaps they are like your dead pets, which you loved dearly, but can't very well keep around after they are dead. Then again there are those people who have Fluffy stuffed and mounted so they can keep him on the cushion in the corner forever. I think that's kind of weird, but hey, who am I to judge?

So just what, exactly, are exes like?

Men: can't live with them, can't flush them down the toilet.

Especially if you have a septic system.

Two Stories

The company I used to work for in Austin is gradually shutting down. They've transferred a bunch of people to another state and laid a lot more off. But they're not closing down altogether, and my former manager, through the departure of several others at his level, has gained a great deal more power, prestige, and influence.

This is his story.

Twelve years or so ago, my supervisor left the company to work for an independent consultant, so her boss, the division director, set out to hire a replacement. She posted the position, screened applications, and conducted interviews. When she had narrowed her choices down to four or five people - all internal candidates - she called a staff meeting to get everyone's input as to which one would be the best fit for our group. One of us - a good friend of mine - was traveling that week, so he was piped in by speakerphone. The rest of us sat around the conference table and discussed the applicants as our director reviewed their qualifications, projecting each one's badge photo on the screen at the end of the room.

None of us really knew any of the candidates, but when the director got to a particular one, my friend on the speakerphone piped up. "Oh, I've worked with him before!" he said. "He's very good, knows his stuff, and he's a really nice guy. I think he'd be great for the job!"

"What do the rest of you think?" asked the director, but we all shrugged. We knew his name and his face - it was a small enough company, no one would have been completely unfamiliar - but we didn't know anything about him. Still, if our coworker could recommend him so strongly, we certainly had no objection. So he was hired.

Several months later, my friend and I were at lunch. "Do you know," he told me, "that day when we had that meeting and decided to hire Bob? Well, I thought she was talking about somebody else."

This is my friend's story.

We were working a conference out of town, and at the end of a long day, we hung out on his hotel room balcony drinking Coronas and talking. After it got dark we went inside and watched Austin Powers on TV. My friend leaned back on one bed, and I lay on my stomach on the other. And after a while, Coronas being Coronas, you know, he got up to use the restroom.

And left the door open.

"Oh dear," I remember thinking at the time, "this can't be good," though at least the bathroom was around the corner, and not in direct line of sight. Still, when he came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, it turned out I was right. Though I don't mean to complain, because it could have been much worse. He did have on underwear.

"Well!" I said brightly, "just look at the time." Or something like that. The next time I saw him back at the office, a week or so later, he apologized, and said he hoped he hadn't made me uncomfortable, and I said oh no, really, no big deal, don't worry about it. And that was that. But our friendship was never really quite the same, and fizzled out pretty shortly thereafter.

I think the moral of both of these stories is that life is random, unpredictable, and weird, so always be sure you have on clean underwear.

The Inbox of Doom

They just don't make spam like they used to.

I mean, for the time being. But have you noticed that lately all the subject lines are telling you you've won something? Like a gift card for a department store, or an airline ticket, or a free laptop, or a $500 shopping spree at Nordstrom's, which based on what I've seen of that particular store would get you maybe one skirt, and not a very attractive one either.

A few months ago the subject lines all appeared to have been culled at random, and sometimes they were pretty intriguing. Five or six of them lined up in your inbox might form sort of a poem. But if you opened one, they were just something stupid and prosaic, like stock prices.

Months before that, all the subject lines related to the inadequacy of your penis. I thought that was a little harsh.

But speaking of inadequate penises,* what got me thinking of all this is that I got an eVite invitation yesterday from the 11-day wonder, the guy who accepted a job in my department, made a couple of attempts to sell us all Amway, and quit. He got my email address because he asked for my phone number, and I appear to be congenitally incapable of saying "no." I even felt guilty the first time I deleted an email from him, unanswered.

It's unflattering to have been singled out as a likely target, like trying on a pair of jeans in front of the mirror and suddenly catching yourself from a particularly unfavorable angle. Sure, I didn't even open the eVite - I think he could have seen, if I had - but the implications still sting. I hope there's a special circle in hell for the people who make their way in this world by taking advantage of the better impulses of others: not stupidity or gullibility, but gentleness, and kindness, and the reluctance to hurt anybody's feelings or create ill-will. Because when you use those impulses against someone, s/he knows it; it makes that person feel stupid for being that way; it's a step towards making the world a colder and unfriendlier place.

So it's a good thing I've just won a $1000 gift card to Victoria's Secret. Exciting underwear make everything better!

---------------------
*Just a guess

A Glimpse Within

I bet I have more magnetic fridge letters in my cubicle than any other employee where I work.

Maybe more than any employee in any workplace.

Perhaps I've set a new world's record!

Perhaps you would like to see what my subconscious is thinking of at work?

Perhaps I'm going to tell you anyway.

GQ duck ROX UR bRA

UFOs R HERE
SO GNAW A BULB

BETHY IS A LOVEY GIRL

NO WHAMMYS

SLAP GODZILLA
RUN AWAY

WhEE
TRM IS FUN!

NOT

BE
NICE
OK

HELP
DO SOMEthIng
I am flowery

What?

How To Meow So Your Kitten Will Listen (and Listen So Your Kitten Won't Devour You in Your Sleep)

You know, I may not be a genius or a great beauty. I also may not know the first thing about how to properly bring up a kitten. But if you leave me the key to your apartment and ask me to check in on your cat a few times while you're out of town, by God, you can at least be sure I won't rifle through your underwear drawer. And that's saying something!

...Right?

I'm over at Robbie's looking in on Bullock, and I have to say I'm really impressed. He left me a list of things to do when watching her. "If she's messed up the rugs or the plants, she gets a 'BAD KITTY' and no treat," he told me. "If she's gotten into the stereo wires, it's 'VERY BAD KITTY' and she goes in time out for five minutes. If everything's in order and she hasn't done anything bad, you can say 'GOOD KITTY' to her in a baby voice and she gets a scooby snack."

I haven't seen Bullock in about four weeks, because my car's been out of commission and I haven't come up here to hang out. But I have to say his method seems to be working, because the place is still tidy, the rugs and blinds and furniture are all intact, and, while she clearly would love to shred me (in a friendly way, of course), you can really tell she's exercising restraint.

I gave her a scooby snack.

Either his kitten-rearing techniques are working really well, or he's just swapped her out for another cat, which doesn't seem entirely impossible. This kitten does not look quite like the one I remember. She's half again as big, for one. And this one's fur is all black and sleek and shiny. The other one's was kind of fuzzy and silly-looking. This one is (relatively) demure and well-behaved. The other one was a small, cuddly demon from the pits of eternal Hell.

But I'd better get back to her, because she's evidently excited to have a visitor and is making chirping noises and getting into stuff. And I'll be damned if Robbie's place is going to get all torn up on my watch!

I have to wonder, though. Boxers or briefs?