to pluck or not to pluck

It's the age-old question: what does a girl do with her gray hairs?

Now, I'm a plucker. I see 'em when they're about two inches long -- although, how they get that long without my noticing is beyond me -- and I like to grab them and yank them out by the root, throw them on the ground, stomp on them until they're dead, scream at them for ruining my life, and then walk away, as if nothing had ever happened.

This is all well and good (and garners me very few sidelong glances from my coworkers), as I only have about four or five gray hairs at any given time. In fact, I've convinced myself that that's all I ever have; they just keep growing back in the same spot. (Whether this is true or not... la la la, I can't hear you!)

Recently, however, I've taken a break from the plucking and chucking and grinding-into-mucking, and I've let them grow in.

The result? I'm now totally convinced that I have a thousand gray hairs, because every time I see one I've seen before, I think it's new. The stress of this is causing more gray hairs, and I'm now forced to go back to plucking, just to maintain some semblance of order in my life.

I'm telling you: it's very hard to be me.

you need to read this like a fish needs streamers and a big horn for its bike

I'd like to start today's post with a HUGE celebration: today is the first Secretaries' Day in nine years that I haven't had to suffer the indignity of being a secretary.*

I can't tell you how good this feels. It's better than the smell of thaw. Better than hot, melty chocolate cake. Better than sex. Better than that giddy feeling you get when the guy who's been making you laugh all night leans in to kiss you.Yeah, sure, ok, I didn't get any flowers or gifts today, or get taken to lunch by my bosses (which has, on past occasions, been more of a chore than a delight), but I did get a chair with my firm's name on it.

Oh, and I got my pride back.

*I have nothing against secretaries. I think they do very important, valuable work. I just don't ever want to be one again. A huge side-benefit of not acting anymore is never having to answer someone else's phone.

Devolving right along...

1) I've discovered another tanning salon in my neighborhood -- this one's called Sunspot Tanning. Seriously, guys? Why not just go for Freckle Central or Blotchy 'R' You?

2) The depressing thing about eating Grape Nuts is that if you restrict yourself to the actual serving size, your breakfast is over in mere nanoseconds.

3) My friends with the four cats are out of town for a couple of days, so I've been swinging by their place to feed the brood. One of the cats has a rampant peeing issue (i.e., she pees on EVERYTHING) and when I got there last night, she had topped her best. The instructions for taking care of the cats? Yeah, she'd peed on them.

4) I had a meeting today with a woman who, when I spoke to her on the phone, I was convinced was a pleasantly dumpy woman from the midwest. Walking through the door into her office, however, I discovered she was a Perfect Person. Instead of being threatened by her perfectly tanned skin and tiny designer jeans, I actively decided to interact with her as if she were a frumpy gal from Ohio. I'm pretty sure it worked, and even if it didn't, I felt a hell of a lot better about it.

5) Last night I was discussing some techniques for networking, especially if you're shy. One woman suggested that when you go into a room, just pretend you're someone else. At the end of the meeting, one of my friends turned to me and said, "Would you mind if I pretend to be you?"

Anytime, chica. Anytime.

6) Old news, but still true, as I wade through the leftovers: I think that all the Jews really needed to do was invite the Egyptians over for Passover dinner, and then sneak out really early the next morning, while all the Egyptians were clutching their bellies and their heads, sleeping off their Maneshewitz hangovers.

7) What did one boob say to the other?"We'd better stop saggining like this before someone thinks we're nuts!"

don’t switch the blade on the guy in shades (oh no!)

Dear Corey Hart, two-hit wonder of the 80s,

Remember when you wrote that song, "Sunglasses at Night" and we all went around wearing sunglasses at night? Yeah, so do I. Just so you know, I really loved that song. (But I have an excuse -- I was seven.)

At work today, we had a little debate that I thought you might want to know about. We argued over what the lyrics for your hit song were. Terrence thought they were "I wear my sunglasses at night so I can, so I can, watch you eat and breathe, and blah blah blah." I thought they were "I wear my sunglasses at night so I can, so I can, watch you even breathe your story told." Fernando had no opinion, as he was two at the time your song was a hit.

Corey, what exactly does this mean?

I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
Watch you weave
Then breathe your story lines

And you know, while we're here, what the hell does any of this mean?

While she's deceiving me
It cuts my security
Has she got control of me
I turn to her and say
Don't switch the blade
On the guy in shades, oh-no
Don't masquerade
With the guy in shades, oh-no
I can't believe it
'Cause you got it made
With the guy in shades, oh-no

I totally see how you're warning me. Don't switch the blade on the guy in shades because HE CAN'T SEE. It's nighttime! It's dark! And of course, if you go switching blades in the dark, well, anything could happen.

Riddle me this, though, Corey, if he's so blind that I'm not supposed to masquerade or switch the blade on him, how exactly do you think I've got it made with him??

And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
Forget my name while you collect your claim
And I wear my sunglasses at night
So I can, so I can
See the light that's right before my eyes

Um, what?

I thought you said the man in shades was blind enough not to masquerade. And now you're telling me he can see the light that's right before his eyes? But he doesn't remember his name. So basically there's some guy out there who can't see, can't remember, can't be blade-switched (whatever the hell that actually means) and yet, you expect me to think it's all good.

After this analysis, I think I understand what you mean by "Never Surrender." And it may not be a terrible thing that you've become a songwriter for Celine Dion.

Still love you, though!
xoxo
k8

p.s. you may want to rethink this video, though. It's so eighties!

20 things that rock

1. my fuscia velour pants
2. the support of my friends when I'm trying something challenging and frightening
3. spicy tuna rolls that kick my ass and make my nose run
4. q-tips that come out of my ear really dirty
5. silver polishing cloths (for extra-super-shiny necklaces!)
6. licking the lid of the can of condensed milk and then dancing around the kitchen wired like a time bomb
7. cute boys with excellent smiles
8. opportunities for me to practice being loving
9. buses that run on schedule
10. brunch dates
11. really good tweezers
12. people who know the difference between jealous and envious, or less and fewer
13. vanilla soft serve with rainbow sprinkles
14. the fact that my sister wasn't part of the NASCAR-like accident that happened right behind her on the highway
15. Sidney Bristow
16. my new theory about emotional metadata that's too dorky to share with the public, but too cool to keep entirely to myself
17. air popped popcorn
18. Mônica Salmaso and Paulo Bellinati's Afro-Samba album
19. the view from the top of Rockefeller Center
20. clean sheets snugly fit to the bedoh and
21. the word "confabulate"

conversational metadata (or how to sound so dorky you’ll never get a date)

First things first: what the hell is metadata, right?

Metadata is the stuff that sort of hangs out with a document, but isn't actually part of what you see on the screen or the page. It's things like the document name, the name of the author or last person who worked on it, or the date it was last revised. Metadata is also stuff in the document, like hidden text, comments or track changes -- features that require extra coding, extra effort to get rid of, and, in the worst cases, lead to corruption.

I work at a law firm (as a computer trainer, which, if it isn't apparent yet, will only become more clear as I blather on about this), and we conscientiously strip our documents of metadata -- no client needs to know that Bigwig Attorney copied this document from another one on the system and just renamed it for this client... and then billed six hours for that. I've recently been revising the instructional information on how to do this, so metadata's been, well, front of mind.

Anyway, I was out with a friend last night who is about ten years younger than I am, and a total delight. I love her like a sister. And she moved to LA, so I miss her like hell. But as we were having one of several conversations, I had all these thoughts running through my head, like, "I'm not at all fun like her other friends" and "I hope she doesn't hate me for not being able to stay out all night drinking" and "god, I'm old."These thoughts were not a part of our conversation, but they were lingering around the fringes of it, just waiting to corrupt it. I required extra energy to get rid of them, and, like identifying information, they kept trying to remind me of who I was. (Not necessarily who I am NOW, but like Bigwig Attorney's metadata, they wanted to reveal who the last author was.)

Metadata can sometimes be helpful, especially if you're trying to figure out where a document originated. But conversational metadata is only useful in reflection, to see how far you've come, and to realize that you're not old, you're just not 22.

you didn’t ask for it, and it’s not a toyota, but you got it!

Remember the Swiss Chard Incident? Well, I chopped up the rest of the faux rhubarb and sauteed it with some eggplant, mushrooms and garlic tonight and it was deee-licious!

(on a scale of one to ten in the Who Cares Department, this rates about a negative fourteen and a half.)

When I go on a date with someone, it's easy to tell when he's a YES! or a NO! (or as a friend of mine says a "JesusGodNoooooooooo!") However, it's that middle ground that gets tricky. One thing I've been working to remember is that just because someone is not a NO! (or a JesusGodNoooooooooooo) doesn't necessarily make him a YES! (It doesn't necessarily exclude him either, but I'm trying to deliver the nutshell version of this theory.)

(on a scale of one to ten in the Slightly Cryptic But Mostly Vague Department, this gets about a six.)

Speaking of dating, I think it is only polite to tell someone I've actually met face to face that, if it so happens to be the case, I'm not interested in him. Not returning calls or emails (or simply "disappearing") is not my style, and I'd like the same consideration in return.

(on a scale of one to ten in the Passive Aggressive Department, this rates a solid ten -- assuming said offenders are actually reading -- and on a scale of one to ten in the Hey, I'd Like To Date Kate But Don't Know How She'll Feel About Me Not Letting Her Know I'm Not Interested Department, well, I'm not even going to rate that one.)

(The Russian judge, however, gives it an eight. Bad dismount.)

more miscellany than you can fit into a barrel of monkeys

My boss is going to Norway in May, and as such, she's been practicing her Norwegian. This, of course, means that I get to pick up a phrase or two in a great nordic tongue. This morning, after a meeting, my boss walked away and I said, "Tahk for yelpin" which apparently is kind of close to "takk for hjalp," which, in Norwegian means (take a guess) "Thanks for helping."

My favorite Norwegian word so far? "Lunch." Go ahead, guess what it means.
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Similarly, I think that people from Iowa should be called "Iowegian."
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When you brush your teeth, do you start in the same quadrant of your mouth every time? Yeah, me, too. I start on the lower left. I noticed this, though, and decided to make a conscious effort to start on the upper right. Toothpaste drool came pouring down my face and I was so discombobulated I almost fell down. Try it. It was like trying to stick my elbow in my ear (while walking, whistling and chewing gum at the same time).
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Fernando has recently taken to calling me "Gata" or "Gatita" or, this morning, "Gata Pequena." I'm not sure why, but I dig it.
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I went to the psychic again while I was in Boston, and something really creepy happened. She was laying out my cards and said a lot of stuff about "men in my life" (which I thought was a bit of a stretch, since I'm not really seeing anybody at the moment, thus making it hard to classify people as "men in my life") but two thirds of the way through the reading, she told me I was going to meet a man in uniform. Nothing special there, except that it's EXACTLY WHAT THE OTHER PSYCHIC TOLD ME LAST TIME! Creepy. She told me I'd meet him by August, and when I told her I had heard of him before, and that the other psychic told me to stay away from him, she flipped another card -- the devil card -- and said, "Oh yeah, stay away from him."
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And an advertisement:
A friend of mine is in a life-coach training program and is looking for clients. Her rates are good (and by "good" I mean "wikkid super cheap"), her skills are terrific and I would highly recommend her. If you're interested in exploring life coaching, drop me an email and I'll give her your info.

stuffernutters

Stuffernutters: (n.) Half "stuff and nonsense" and half "fluffernutters." Used by geniuses (who don’t believe in the word "genii") to convey that a blog post will be about nothing at all.

I. So remember when I wrote about the tanning salon in my hood called Alaskan Tanning? (see dispatches from the peanut gallery for clarification) I walked past it again last night and noticed a big shwarma sign downstairs from it. You know, rotating meat product on a stick?That tickled my fancy."Frank, we got another overdone one. Send it downstairs again??"

B. Unrelatedly, I periodically get a stray, long peach fuzz cheek hair on my face, and I got one yesterday. Now, there’s longer-than-average peach fuzz hair, and there’s absurdly EPIC peach-fuzz hair. What I want to know is how mine went from normal to epic overnight. It was, and I’m not exaggerating, the length of one knuckle! Enquiring minds want to know.(Well, at least one does.)

(iii) I work as a trainer and part of my job is training new hires on the computer system. I worked with a woman on Monday (who had excellent computer skills, if not somewhat iffy people skills) and she just up and quit today! No explanation, no complaints, just resigned and took off. Which would have been fine, if she hadn’t taken my handy-dandy-(and-super-pain-in-the-ass-to-make) computer manual with her!

grumble grumble grumble.

4.0 I had lunch today with one half of a very unhappy couple. I don’t ever want to live that way. Just talking to her made me tense. Please, Universe, send me someone whole.

a culinary mistaken identity

I bake a lot. (If we haven’t established this already, it’s probably worth mentioning it again. I. Bake. A. Lot.)

Saturday morning I sat down with my cookbooks and plotted the best way to make some stuff I had never attempted before. I selected an orange and rhubarb coffee cake (not knowing the first thing about rhubarb), banana cupcakes with peanut butter frosting (because I knew my friend would like them), and peanut cookies (because a tub of peanut butter is a dangerous thing to leave me alone with). I headed out to the grocery store with my list, and procured everything I needed. As I headed to the produce section, I followed the sign to rhubarb, and saw a picture of a red-stemmed leafy vegetable, so I picked it up, put it in my cart, bought it and went home.
Now, I don’t know rhubarb’s ass from its elbow. How do you clean it? Cook it? Trim it? I consulted a number of resources online about what to do with the leaves (theirs didn’t seem to have any, but mine did, so I just cut them off and chucked them -- they smelled really bitter anyway). I chopped up the red, veiny stalks, tossed them in with the rest of the ingredients, baked it and gave the cake a try when it was done. Delicious!

The cupcakes, too, were terrific, and the peanut butter cookies (with rice krispies in them) were a great hit.

Then today, while on a stroll down a major street in my neighborhood, I passed an organic food market, that had rhubarb in it (that matched the pictures I had seen online). They also had the vegetable I had chopped up and put into my cake, which was decidedly NOT rhubarb.

So tomorrow at work, I will be serving Orange and Swiss Chard Coffee Cake.

(I’m thinking of calling it Torte a L’orange et Chard. Hey, if it’s Fronch, who are they to question it?)

In my defense:
Rhubarb:

Swiss chard:

dispatches from the peanut gallery

1. My dental floss calls itself "hi-tech" floss. I think it should prove that to me and reprogram my DVR, just on principle.


2. My spaghetti squash’s sticker claims that spaghetti squash is "the fun squash!" I’d agree. (It’s waaaaay more fun than dumb old butternut.)


3. Why do catalogs insist on selling bathing suits that make the models look dumpy? A woman who is five foot twenty seven inches and 108 soaking wet looks like my grandma in that suit... I think I’ll buy it!


4. My floors are cold and occasionally coated in yuck, so the last thing I take off before I go to bed is my socks. As such, I started to accumulate quite a mountain of socks next to my bed. I almost took a picture of it, but decided instead to sweep the mountain into the laundry, which I’ve now renamed Mohammed.


5. I’ve been running a lot lately, and have discovered a charming thing about myself: when I run, I give myself a double thumbs up! When I try to tuck my thumbs in and run like a normal person, I get all discombobulated and trip over my own feet. So... who likes to run??? THIS GIRL!


6. The milk they provide us for our coffee at work is "Growth Hormone Free.*" I was kind of alarmed by that asterisk, so I scanned the jug of milk until I found the two-and-a-half point font that read "no statistical difference from cows treated with growth hormone." Excuse me, but when did we start teaching cows statistics??


7. I totally clocked a little girl in Grand Central the other day. I was on my way to the turnstile and this woman was standing there with what I thought was a duffel bag, so when she swung it in my way, I didn’t dodge it with great effort. Except it wasn’t a duffel bag, it was a three year old girl, who promptly went sprawling onto the floor of Grand Central. And then set to howling. I asked the mom if she was ok, but the mom wouldn’t even look at me (or at the kid, either). Luckily, the sister figure (whoever she was) told me the girl was fine, and I went on my way.


The lesson? Clearly, don’t dress your daughters like duffel bags!


8. There’s a tanning salon in my neighborhood called "Alaskan Tanning." Maybe it’s just me, but can that possibly conjure up something other than the image of a goggle tan?9. There’s a hospital near that tanning salon that has one of those automatic revolving doors as its front entrance. But instead of being a regular revolving door (cut into equal quarters, and pushed by the people using it), this one’s a little off kilter, rotates automatically and ceaselessly, and in the smaller sections, there are plants. Plants that do nothing but go around and around and around in circles all day long. (For their sake, I hope they’re plastic.)

And we now return to your regularly scheduled nonsense.

ooh! news!

Ha ha! Suckered you back here again!!

But now that I’ve got you, I have some things to discuss with you.

Like...

1) The indescribability of modern dance.
Saturday night I went with my friend Avery to an evening of dance (a "dance show"?) by a Brazilian troupe, Grupo Corpo, which was just amazing to watch and surprisingly hard to discuss. I mean, I’m at a disadvantage. I can talk to you until the cows come home about theatre or Microsoft Word (and please god, if I do that, send the cows home quickly!) but dance? Waaaaay out of my league.

Me: I loved that part, where they were all cockroaches on the upper wall!

Ave: You mean, when they were slow-motion gazelles?

Me: That was so cool, how they were doing the backstroke out of the water!

Ave: Yeah, that death flop was pretty awesome.

Me: That part at the end? I totally loved that!

Ave: The part where they were having violent sex?

Me: Oh, is that what they were doing? I thought they were just fighting for the cool spot on the bed. (because we all know how awesome it is to find that cool spot in the middle of summer...)

2) How, when you date online, you really have to meet three distinct people. (And like them all.)

The first person you meet is the person in the profile. For me to be interested in this person, he has to be cute enough to spark my interest and he must say at least one thing that makes me crack a smile. You send some sort of communication to Person One, and hope that he’ll like your Person One in return.

The second person you meet is the person who sends you emails. These emails must be charming, witty and have mostly good spelling and grammar (unless suitable excuses have been made in advance). Ideally, Person Two is the same as Person One, but I have yet to find more than three people for whom this is the case. This is all OK, as long as I like both Person One and Person Two.

Then comes Person Three. The guy you meet at the coffeeshop (if you’re me, and still adhering to your First Date Should Involve No Drinking Just to Make Sure You’re Not Just Enjoying Getting Tipsy With This Guy rule). This guy is almost never anything like Persons One and Two, but if you’re lucky, the only thing that will matter is whether or not you like him and/or hit it off.

(The more I date, the more my life resembles a Dr. Seuss book.)

3) The mass quantities of baked goods that have passed through my oven doors recently.

Let’s put it this way: I baked vegan pumpkin raisin cookies (from a recipe), a pumpkin bundt cake (also from a recipe) and mint chocolate brownies (kind of from a recipe) on Saturday. I spent the rest of my life in the gym.

4) It’s my blog’s 2nd Birthday!
Well, it was, about three days ago. I meant to celebrate. I just couldn’t because I was so busy eating cake.

5) Our Office April Fools’ Joke

My boss reminded us that today was, in fact, April Fools’ day, and in honor of that, she sent out the following email (with our help and suggestions):

Just a few words about the new copiers being installed today, April 1st.

When we moved into the building, some of you thought it was odd to have coffee machines in the same rooms as the copiers. That was actually the beginning of a space-saving project that will take a huge leap forward with the new copiers. On the new models, the coffee machines are actually built in to the copiers (now known as "Coffiers"), which makes all kinds of counter space available for storing abandoned copy jobs and, starting this June, for summer associate work space.

If you click the "Coffee" option on the coffier screen (see below), you will be able to save your settings for cream and sugar and charge the appropriate client at the same time.


The new copiers will play a big role in our Records Retention policy, too. By adjusting the retention settings on the copier, you can have your copy and print jobs sent directly to an off-site shredder. We anticipate that this will considerably reduce the amount of paper being stored on the 13th floor.

And this just in. . . Lexis-Nexis has just announced its acquisition of Xerox and its name change to Lexeroxis. Starting today, April 1st, all Lexeroxis copiers will automatically Shepardize all cases and cite-check all briefs being copied or printed unless users go through a simple 37-step process to disable that feature each time they print or copy a brief.

The new copiers’ scanners also boast an improved OCR feature that will not only recognize handwriting and foreign languages (including Cyrillic and simplified Chinese characters), but which will automatically detect any inappropriate anatomical copying and forward the copies to HR along with a DNA sample of the offender.

In terms of integration with our other systems, the copier will be hooked into Meeting Room Manager, and can automatically re-route copy and print jobs to the 11th floor after meetings where food has been served, so that people will actually have a reason to be down on the 11th floor at those times. Speaking of the lunchroom, copier upgrades being considered for the future include a toaster attachment, which should help clear the bottleneck on Bagel Fridays.

Please let me know if you have any questions about these features.

Thanks,
Carol