if you are experiencing a life-threatening emergency, press 1

i'd like to see a shrink, but before i do, i must subject myself to all manner of alarming recordings and menus. so much time and paper shuffling and button pressing all of the sake of...mental clarity. phew. i'm sure glad something in this world adds up. i was in such despair over our wilting, anemic health industry (sick industry? as in really, really sick? make that macabre industry.) that i pulled a luke and didn't put the no-splashy thing in the food processor before i turned it on to give my smoothie its smooth nature. up, up, up went the almond milk and pieces of frozen banana. smoothie rejoice! smoothie rapture! smoothie can fly!

hmm, there may be a lesson here. no, the lesson is not put lids on things before you electrically activate them. the lesson is clearly a far swishier deepak chopra–style allegory: the no-splashy thing is the insurance company, and they are trying to put a lid on my frozen bananas and almond milk and spirutein soy protein powder. i am the food processor (ha! processor! see? see?), and i have been told by society that i must constantly smoothify, make everything smooth, but maybe some things need to be upchucked so they can fly free, free! that is clearly what it all means.

confidential to dorothy: delete some email, bitch! my emails kept bouncing back, so i gave up and wrote to your yahoo account.

joys of copyediting II

in a passage about hitchcock, the writers in the education department kept putting quotation marks around the words surprise and suspense and scary. i marked to take all of them out with the note, "no need for SCARE quotes, har har" and promptly thought of randy ingram, who would have made the same note with extraordinary amounts of glee. i think puns are even funnier to me because i know that man and the overwhelming sense of satisfaction and amusement they bring to his life. and there's that slightly sneaky look he gets on his face so you know that what's coming is an especial favorite--the lovingly recycled pun.

googlesluttin'

today has been so slow and quiet that i've been googling boys i made out with in high school and boys my friends made out with in high school, and a surprising percentage of them are gay, in new york, and very sad about the passing of a man who was, i take it, one of their favorite theatRE profs at fsu (the google-flagged [fagged?] site that gave me the most plentiful and most recent info about them was a guestbook in memory of this prof, which two of them, both of whom were cursorily invovled in my and my friend's life yet unknown to one another circa 8th grade [except they may know each other by now, huh, and wouldn't it be indecorous of me to suggest that they may have even smooched?], signed just a few days apart). another one, i learned from the online obituary section of some local CA paper, had an aunt who died in march in san diego. it's so strange to suddenly acquire personal, if mostly peripheral, knowledge of someone i knew ten years ago--the kind of information i imagine was relayed to them seriously--perhaps even tearfully--up a flight of stairs or over the phone by someone very close to them and completely unknown to me. another two fellows were google-proof, with absolutely no leads that led to them, which i find both preposterous and slightly alarming in these times, like not having a finger print.

last weekend i crashed my own 5-year high school reunion. we were all supposed to pay ahead, but i snuck in through the back of the golf course tent while the bartender wasn't looking. man, i had forgotten what kind of people i went to school with. the girls were in strapless dresses of only slightly varying silhouettes, and the guys were in white pants and blue oxford shirts. the guys (chuckling and slapping one another on the back, naturally) all made a few line drives before slamming back their bud lights. some people had increased their smooth factor x10 (every sentence i said to these people was met with gutteral, chest-thumping iterations of 'nice, nice, glad that's workin' out for ya,' punctuated by sudden jerks of the chin); one girl increased her waistline x10 (but overall class weight remained constant, because she was balanced out by one guy who got suddenly, inexplicably very skinny); and awkwardly worded pseudo-latinate plaques were awarded (lots of WHEREAS clauses, no verbs unless they were couched in WHEREAS clauses) to retiring teachers.

i reconnected with one or two people who were important to me, though, and that was the purpose of going. also i gave this one guy a really hard time for selling out and working for a bank and owning a condo at 23, even as he was driving me to the train station in his shiny beamer.

verdict: crash 10-year reunion, where alcohol is free.

oh no

i knew that my boss was a regular reader of NRO, because i see the blue logo with its three broadcasting waves on her screen whenever i go in her office; i just didn't realize that NRO stands for national review online. shit! i always imagined her as at least liberal in principle, if not in practice. she has such a lovely personality and a fine mind, tho i guess she is rather fixed in her ideas. but isn't everyone? and doesn't the world look down on looseness of ideas as a sort of mental incontinence that should be eliminated before it soils our overly sanitized ideologies? perhaps that is wasteful reasoning. the only thing i am certain of is that the fecal matter puns should end with this paragraph.

maybe she only reads all those new yorkers i bring her for the art news and the reviews. maybe all those lefty talk of the town columns are lost on her, or just skipped entirely. or maybe she wants to keep up with the opposition (tho that seems ridiculous, since it's an opposition that sells red t-shirts depicting reagan's head drawn in the style of che guevara's, above the words 'viva la reagan revolucion.' wtf? who is the target market for that? those grim-faced 'christian punk' kids i read about in the ny times style section?).

i feel like a hamster whose wheel has been overturned, or like a vintage-clothing junkie who, thanks to the catalog that shows up in her mailbox, realizes her entire wardrobe likely came from urban outfitters. is it true? could my boss really be a conservative disguised in sparkly pink shoes, rhinestone earrings, and a 60s mod spring coat?