My style of dressing:
What’s on sale at Goodwill?
Do I have to iron it?
Can I find matching heels?
Check today’s high temperature…
…Wear the same thing I wore one week ago.
Hope no one notices.
My style of singing:
Start soft, hold high notes, explore second voice, tap tempo, interweave lyrics slightly off beat, fall out of key, apologize.
My style of carrying keys:
Insert key ring through finger and jingle as I walk.
My style of walking:
Drag feet as close to the ground as possible. Kick pebbles.
My style of running:
30 feet uphill then hyperventilate.
My style of drinking water:
I always miss my mouth for some reason.
My style of driving:
Window half down, left hand steerer, right hand on the emergency break, listening to NPR.
My style of reasoning:
Well I could do it so why can’t they?
My style of befriending:
“Here kitty kitty kitty. Oh you’re such a fat kitty, aren’t you? Mrreow? Mrreow?”
My style of petting:
Ear scratch followed by a back stroke, followed by a tummy rub, sealed with a chin scratch.
My style of saving money:
I’ll have to come back to this one.
My style of eating:
Remove braces, remove what I’m allergic to, nomnomnom, choke on something, nom…nom…nom…, drink, brush teeth, insert braces.
My style of cooking:
Fry everything in oil with spices, then add sauce, boil, add more sauce, melt cheese, add more spices.
My real style of cooking:
“Mom, do you have leftovers?”
My style of parenting:
“Kid, I appreciate your fondness, but I’m really not your mother.”
My style of birth control:
Showering profusely.
My style of intercourse:
Rejection, crying, writing a song about ponies and daffodils.
My style of cleaning:
Natural store-bought liquids and recycled paper towels, sweep to my heart’s content, avoid mopping and vacuuming when possible.
My style of working:
Work a little, blog a little. Leave a stack for when my manager is here.
My style of receiving calls:
Act like you’re the center of my universe while I draw on a post-it.
My style of blogging:
Somewhat anonymous, somewhat sporadic, mostly non-linear, pretty much inconsequential.
My style of saving money:
Be generous and life will be generous to you.
I haven’t written anything in a few days so I have to warm up.
“Do Re Mi Fa…”
Does other bloggers’ autocorrect also delete entire phrases from posts they’re working on or is that just on my phone?
It’s like it’s telling me: stop being silly and get to work.
But I’m telecommuting half this week… Or at least I was supposed to be.
What’s actually happened and which no one could have foreseen so of course no one is to blame is that I’ve spent the week lying around playing with my cats, leaving my work project for the weekend, which will culminate in an exciting action-packed Sunday all-nighter, since my deadline is Monday morning.
I love work deadlines.
They’re so much more fun than 9-5.
My manager sent me an email earlier this week saying I gots to finish the project cause she can’t afford to keep paying my assistant.
Which sucks cause my assistant is my friend.
Or was my friend.
Before I started telling her what to do.
Well you can be a supervisor or you can be a friend but you can’t be both at the same time.
Today I’m going to show her the email so she doesn’t think I wanted her to leave.
In any case, I did have that interview at the art store, which may or may not have gone well.
We’ll see.
Oh yeah! We’re supposed to close escrow today but let’s see what other pleasant surprises the underwriter or broker have in store for us…
I’ve also invested time into testing out alternate endings on personality quizzes.
Another hard day draws to an end.
The typical night fog clouds up the stars.
Murky sky.
What have we done to the night sky.
I ended that with a period because it’s rhetorical.
Or it ought to be
You, the reader, ought to be meditating on your carbon footprint.
I’m trying to imply concepts but we each have to do our part.
Not that I personally have much of a part.
If I do, then I’ve forgotten my lines.
The neighbor has turned off their porch light making the sky less bright but still murky.
I sit in the car and stare at people walking their little dogs between the mobile homes.
When we had to move here in February, I practically threw tantrums on the floor every night.
I have a 1 hour commute to work Mon-Friday.
I never have time or energy to cook or do laundry.
Then I thought… I hardly ever did that before anyway.
Once I settled into the new routine it became less hard.
I gave up on trying to get to work on time.
I am not a morning person.
Never have been, never will be.
Lucky for me, neither is my boss.
I stopped trying to change myself to fit so many conventional norms.
I stopped talking back to narrow-minded idiots.
What difference does it make.
(Note the period?)
My car is cold.
The day wasn’t hard because of the commute.
My assistant I recently wrote about made a rude remark and it makes me sad.
She said, “You can’t just please yourself all the time.”
Her tone and words imply pleasing myself is all I ever do.
I want her fired.
She’s known me for years so it really hurt.
We’re not close friends but then again I’m not close friends with anyone.
Speaking of close friends, a little while ago, my husband and I were speaking with our loan broker, who happens to be the beautiful wife of my ex-best-guy friend.
He was my best-guy-friend until he broke the golden rule of guy-girl friendship.
After being close friends with each other for half our lives, he made disrespectful comments to me late last year.
He tried to get me to do something for his employer by hitting on me.
I don’t know him anymore.
My husband sought out his wife to see if we qualify for a house loan- which of course we shouldn’t- but being the creative persuasive woman that she is, she has helped us find a lender at a decent rate.
“Yes, yes,” you are thinking, “Blahblahblah but why are you in the car?”
Now you must know as well as I do that everything in this world has a catch.
The catch to this “let’s buy a house” project is that it’s really a duplex and I will have to live next to my in-laws forever, or the rest of my life, whichever ends first.
I’d be fooling myself if I told myself my husband wants to buy a house for us as a couple cause that is the normal way of couples who love each other.
Idk maybe I’m just cynical.
He wants to buy a house for his parents to retire.
I said “Ok but not your brother.”
His mom said, “Yes your brother.”
He said, “Oh well.”
Today is a hard day because he doesn’t hold my feelings or opinions in any regard.
I mean, he doesn’t even read anything I ever write.
I’m not writing this behind his back.
I’d be relieved if he read it.
But it hurts that he doesn’t really care.
Well he did bring me a quesadilla out to the car a few minutes ago but sometimes that’s just not enough.
My biggest problem is I can’t remember things.
Like I know he made me really sad the other day and I deleted his messages, but today I have no recollection of what happened.
I don’t understand- do I forget cause I love him?
Is that forgiving?
Am I really just pleasing myself all the time?
I miss my friend- the broker’s husband.
He’d let me rant on about this for hours.
His broker wife probably knows too many things about me.
She must know about my writing habits and my imaginary stalkers and how I was in love with someone else a while back.
It is awkward that she is helping us.
Or maybe…
Inadvertently, she’s not.
For just a few seconds, I caught a glimpse of the moon.
Ok, I can understand a teenager not passing their drive test.
Driving is in fact a very complicated task and not for everyone.
But what about not being able to use public transit?
Do 16-18 year olds really need to be given a ride everywhere they go?
When I was 18 I already had an A.A. Degree and was planning my wedding.
Not that I’m an example to follow…
But still, I’ll never be one of those parents who chauffeurs their almost young adult everywhere, or pays for fancy shmancy trips with their friends, or buys them clothes and food and stuff.
In true Mexican custom, my parents made me and my brother work for everything.
We had to serve and wash our own dishes, buy our own presents…
My brother’s taken the opposite approach to his kids.
The white upper middle class approach.
The “you’ll be lucky if your kids know how to dial long distance from a landline” approach.
-Something I had to teach my current new coworker.
But she’s not a teenager.
She’s just incompetent.
Just kidding.
I was overwhelmed with a project at work and my manager, (who has since asked me to refer to her as “our CFO”- not my manager, even though I’m technically not even an employee of that company) has hired me an assistant, who happens to be a church friend of mine.
This is the same assistant who filled my position when I almost moved to Europe that one time last year and met Leo.
Leo is this guy who saved my life in a park in Rome but he didn’t take advantage of me like some might argue he should have.
I don’t know his last name or profession.
All I know is he lives in London and has friends in Florence.
And he has in-depth appreciation of fine art.
I imagine it would have been better to have loved and lost.
Anyway, I eventually came back to my job because.
Some people at church thought maybe my friend was going to keep my job, myself included, but no, my boss and the CFO are way past the point of no return with me.
Which is too bad because it’s not exactly my field.
I don’t share their passion for root canals.
I don’t know why I came back to my job really, why couldn’t Leo just take advantage of me?!?
Thus ends an informative post about teenage incompetence.
Have you ever had a decent bachelor friend who is also the pickiest guy on earth?
Enter Brad.*
Brad and I used to work together at one of the car dealerships where I did stock photography.
He’s very upbeat and financially responsible, never married, not even engaged, lots of mostly short-term girlfriends, great sense of humor, and had recently quit smoking.
Brad was turning 50 and was thinking it might be time to settle down.
Guys were always picking on me at that job, where picking is synonymous with hitting on me.
Brad would come in like a pelican shoos away seagulls.
He practically obligated all the other guys to respect me on his watch.
So you’re thinking, Brad sounds like a fairly decent guy, right?
We exchanged guitar picks on one occasion; I gave him my business card and he started texting me.
I was naive enough back then to think he was just being his positive flirty self, but in time it became clear this man is very bed-driven.
And by bed-driven I don’t mean driven to sleep.
It was obvious our “friendship” made my husband uncomfortable.
‘All the more reason for me to continue it,’ I thought.
One day he broke off his lunch with me because this ‘woman from out of town was coming to visit’ and he’d rather spend the weekend with someone he had a chance with.
I got very offended.
It had been very hard for me to convince my husband to let us have lunch in the first place.
I was really putting my marriage on a ledge to be his friend and here he was being this insensitive asshole (well he was) indifferent to my efforts.
I didn’t care that Brad was having lunch with another woman, (which according to his public Facebook page, was actually a guy friend from out of town).
It was his choice of words that really hurt me.
Consequently, I also chose a series of words that would hurt him, and what he intended as a gag ended up being a sore point in our relationship- the Crossroad of Dissent.
Later on, at my current job, I had an annoying single female coworker (Gail*) whom I thought would make a great match for him.
I told them about each other and he asked for Gail’s picture.
I sent him a link to her Facebook profile.
“I don’t like blondes,” he said.
Days later- “What did he say about us having a blind date?” Gail asked me.
“You know, he’s really hard to get a hold of,” I replied.
Brad and I became friends again but not like before.
I was looking for a new job and seeing as how my other ex-coworkers have an undeniable linear pattern of sending my messages to spam, I needed him as a reference.
I decided to stay on his good side, sans the flirting.
Then my current coworker’s (Liz’s*) husband passed away.
A month later she started wondering what kind of guy she could date.
Yeah. You read right. A MONTH.
That’s how long it’s gonna take for your wife to start seeing other men if you kick the can.
So put a clause in your will.
Brad had told me he likes Latina brunettes with thin bodies, and here I knew one, who in turn likes well off white men who work out.
Logical match, right?
Liz texted me a nice picture of herself to forward to him.
My hot coworker Liz, new on the widow scene.
“I’m just not feeling it,” texted Brad to me.
“I want a woman like you.”
:0
“But Liz and I have tons in common!” I pleaded on her behalf, “She’s even sweeter than I am!”
“When have you ever been sweet?”
“Yeah you’re right. I was hoping you wouldn’t catch that.”
I tactfully texted Liz that Brad was seemingly already in love with another woman.
That was a few months ago.
I have since blocked Brad’s number.
Liz stopped talking to me because I technically took her job, though I would argue she conceded it to me.
Last week she apologized for “being a bitch,” -her words, not mine- and things are starting to go back to normal.
(With the exception that I’ll never trust another coworker again.)
Liz and I are both being sent away on a business trip for a few days to a city where Brad happens to have a lake house.
This morning, in a very perky voice, she asked me, “Hey! Doesn’t your friend live over there where we’re going?”
Me: “Oh you mean Brad? I blocked his number.”
Liz: “Too bad your husband’s going with you, otherwise you could meet up with him.”
Me: “That’s why I’m glad my husband is going. I was afraid I’d run into Brad and he’d start hitting on me. The guy just can’t take No for an answer.”
Liz: “I thought you said he was seeing someone.”
Me: “…He’s just an idiot. That’s why I blocked his number.”
(Facepalm.)
Yes, yes, dear, avid reader!
I’m also an idiot, for trying to set up anyone with anyone else.
I wish I knew a Shakespeare who could make a comedy out of my relationship mishaps.
This is the last time I ever try to play Cupid.
My next blog post will be, “Things That Are Better Left to Chance.”
*Names have been changed to protect the innocent. In this case, me.
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