The devil's frequent flier mile account is INSANE.

I've lived in Arizona for... sixteen years now. That first year it hit 122 degrees and the airport shut down because the tarmac was melting and the landing gear kept getting stuck. The devil was vacationing in Scottsdale at the time but when it got too hot to walk barefoot by the pool he kicked a baby in the face and shipped out to Key West. (The devil is surprisingly tenderfooted.)

My parents have coped with the searing heat (and the wrenching pain of having been ripped from BeachFront PerfectTown and dropped into the godforsaken desert because of a job that would inevitably have my father gumming baby food at three in the morning for his ulcer, putting company payroll on his AmEx, and generally begging for a sweet merciful stroke) by taking every possible opportunity to announce how warm we are at all times. They have found this to be a particularly hilarious game this time of year, and have been known to actually get in the pool in January so that Mom can call the relatives with a hypothermic hand and announce in a weak, shaky (yet victorious and haughty) voice that they're swimming.

Until recently I was of the opinion that these condescending weather jokes weren't funny. That we all have our highs and lows, as it were, and it just wasn't that sporting to rub someone else's "low" nose in our "high".

But I've changed my mind. It was 81 degrees here on Christmas Day. And if it wasn't 81 degrees where you are, I'm sorry, that's fucking funny. Please see the following list of weather jokes for proof that Arizona winters are inherently comical, and that my parents, ulcers and all, were right all along.

1) Q: "How many Minnesotans does it take to plug in a car to keep the engine from freezing into a giant block of worthless ice?"
A: "What?"

2) "Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Tank top."
"That's awesome."

3) Q: "Is it hot in here to you? Do you mind if I turn on the air?"
A: "Oh my god, please."

4) Q: "What's long, made out of yarn, and you wear it around your neck to keep warm?"
A: "Flip flops!"

If you don't think these are funny it's only because you're freezing right now and you can't see humor through the pain. Maybe reread in like August when you've thawed out and when the devil is at the Phoenician sucking back a margarita in his Tevas and when I'm lying on my stomach on a bed of ice, praying for death.

It's A Foolproof Plan If There Aren't Any Cops Around.

I went into this organic co-op yesterday because I had $73 on me and a hankering to buy a bunch of shit I don't need and won't eat, and also because I was wearing a pair of pants that are too long and sort of "spare utility" looking, and I hate to waste that social bling at the Safeway. So I tote my cart full of organic lotion (made with pure bark! seed! oil. extract. um, gland.) and magic homeopathic water up to the cashier, and after the cashier has made up prices for everything and ripped the cash money from my hand, he looks at all my shit at the end of the counter and he looks back at me and asks casually, "Oh, do you need a bag?" And it's made very clear here by the cashier's raised eyebrow hooks that the only people who actually accept the offer of the bag are weak Escalade drivers who leave all of their bathroom faucets running while they shop and who throw dirty styrofoam and lit cigarettes into National forests on their way home.

"Noooooo," I admonish. A bag? Kill a panda? What? "I'll just..." (and I start to gather up my roots and twigs and shit) "I've got all these pockets, I can just... sort of... wait!" It hit me. Like a genius brick. "I AM ON A BIKE."

"Ohhhh!" Eyebrow hooks nod and wobble in understanding and acceptance. A bike! A bike trumps everything. You could run over a baby on a bike and everything's cool because that baby was probably just going to grow up eating meat and voting against the legalization of marijuana anyway.

"Here you go!" And he tosses me a bag. I emptied fourteen pockets of crap into my bag and walked outside... head held high, car keys smartly hidden, smiling at Begging Dreadlock Kid, nodding at "Hey, We Told You To Keep It Outside" Tarot Music Loud Singing Lady, just enjoying my cool pants and my two dollars and my bag, and then I stole some dude's bike and rode home.

I know I would.

If everyone’s sitting around telling semi-embarrassing stories (the time you had to run naked through the hotel lobby to get to the bar... the time your mom asked you- in front of company- to please rinse out the tub the next time you decide to razor-bald your privates), and you spontaneously decide to blurt out that your husband once pecked a man on the lips? Maybe think that through. Because if the reason your husband did that was to get you and another girl to make out topless? He’ll probably give that up.

Happy Holidays, everybody!

This holiday season, my office is different from every other office in America in that we've decided to-- get this-- collect food and necessities for the less fortunate. It's an astounding concept, I know. Luckily I work with philanthropic, creative genius, "think outside the parallel lines" kind of people. So while you and your office folk are sitting around shredding cash and denting canned goods, we're making shit happen.

That's a big box, people. And it's almost one-fifth full. It's only been sitting in the breakroom for three weeks... Imagine the wounds we could salve if we let it sit there for seven or eight years!

Oh yes. That's right. Benadryl. And Zantac. Those are vendor display size, bitch, and they're bigger than any pussy "stomach pumpable overdose" size they sell at Costco. In addition to the do-it-yourself meth lab, please note the marshmallow-flavored microwave popcorn. Does the church still appoint saints? Because goddamn.

I know you can't tell what the thirty million tiny tubes are full of, but I'm happy to report that it's none other than Gold Bond Powder Lotion. And it's SPF 15, as if you needed that additional kick in the face. Anyone with a sample-sized body part that's both itchy AND burn prone? Oh, you can get up off your knees, my friend. (There used to be five cans of edible food in the bottom of the box, but we had a pot luck hit a bean snag.)

Not JUST Chapstick... that's the MOISTURIZING FORMULA! My original intention here was to take a picture of the broken multi-pack from which someone had snagged some tubes, but unfortunately by the time I got there that particular pack had just been stolen in its entirety. Moisturizing, though. It's hard to throw stones.

In other news, I won the office Chili Cookoff today. And with the nineteen dollars and seventy-six cents that I won from the "Angel Tree" pool, I treated myself to an okay bottle of wine.

Oh, "K" as in "Knight"!

I just listened to a voicemail from this woman was trying to spell a name, and she goes, "Last name is 'Korte', 'K' as in... 'Karol'?... no, wait... 'K' as in what? (long pause)... I guess 'K' as in 'Kathy'."

Very helpful. Thank you.

Fuck You, McCormick. And You Too, Schilling.

I listened to "Waiting for a Star to Fall" by Boy Meets Girl on repeat in the car this morning for my hour-ten commute and now I need a blood transfusion.

 

I made French Onion soup from scratch last night because I like spending two hours producing something that tastes like it came out of a forty-nine cent dip package. The next time I spend eleven dollars on gruyere cheese and an hour clawing at my onion mascara eyes like a meth addict it better be because I'm making brownies.

OLD PEOPLE CLOTHES, that's what.

I have to go to a party tonight and I really don't want to go to a party, I want to go to the bookstore. I went to a stupid party LAST night, and it was full of realtors and mortgage brokers and they didn’t play the White Elephant game (the only redeeming feature to Christmas parties, watching the head of the Realtor Office Men's Lunchtime Bible Club select and unwrap the "Lovin' Lamb" blowup sex toy that I brought) and no one would volunteer their home so they had the party in some guy's apartment complex recreation room so every time I went to the bathroom I had to talk myself out of getting in the sauna. Plus they ran out of wine after like seven minutes.

Luckily I'd hidden three bottles under the table.

Tonight’s party is at some guy's house, and the only thing I know about the guy is that he's hyper-Christian and has a phenomenal new house that makes people feel inferior and he likes it that way. I think that might be the only reason why he's hosting this gig because after he and his wife had four kids in three years she took a long hard swim into the deep end of the bitch pool and has yet to return.

The party started at four. O'clock. So we're now late. What the fuck do you wear to a Christmas party that starts at four and serves dinner at six?

I've been going through resumes at my desk for two hours. This is officially the last one.

"Aloha,

Below is a resume that summarizes my skills that qualify me for the position of Construction Superintendent and Project Engineer, or of any kind of financial, engineering or construction job, or a job to help those less fortunate, or to share the Word of God."

So ahahaha, this is funny.

Someone got to this site by following this link, the link to my photos page. I forgot I ever had a photos page, and if you click on it you'll see why. When I clicked on it five minutes ago, my first instinct was to fix that broken link in the middle (a picture of gigantorm strand of M&M Christmas lights, specifically the sultry, long-lashed green M&M light if I'm not mistaken) and maybe update some shit (that's a lie), but A HA HA HA: I can't figure out how to access the page. So now there's this page just out there, a page with Amy Choppa's awesome hat and some shell raptors and Christmas from 2003, and there's not one goddamn thing I can do about it. Or, rather, there's not one goddamn thing I can do about it that doesn't involve any effort of any kind. I can't wait to see what other half-ass pages I created and abandoned. Let me know if you find one with my thesis on it. I'll copy / paste that shit into a masters.

Stace and Sean and the impending Daymented Squishy-Squishy have thrown me into a yarn frenzy the likes of which the craft world hasn't seen since that time my grandmother was suddenly admitted to the hospital and my mother threatened to cut my arm off if I didn't finish the "Christmas" afghan I started for her when I was nine. Last week I had to be escorted out of Michael's. JoAnn's has a restraining order. I make the WORST blankets in the world. Horrifying, really.

"They offend all the senses," my mom confirmed. This as she was rolling her gift blanket out the front door. These blankets can't be carried. They must be rolled. Or kicked. Preferably rolled. Kicking becomes frantic and then the blankets pile up and use their street advantage.

"You can't judge like that, " I countered, yellow and fuchia and puce frays clawing at my ankle. "You haven't seen all of them."

My mother straightened. The blanket flinched, its nectarine panels smelling escape.

"I haven't seen ANY of them. I'M BLIND," she said, slapping at a fiesty ecru chenille panel.

"You're milking this whole blind thing," I told her (not true; she pretends she can see to make other people more comfortable). "And my blankets are gorgeous." (Also not true; my ex-fiance of five years returned his blanket after our breakup. He paid international freight plus a hefty "taste endangerment: excessive and violent fringe" tax to get it the hell out of his townhouse.)

"If there was a color-blind isosceles triangle... " Mom hypothesized, one leg hovering off the ground to confuse the evil, "and it had fallen into a well in February? Yes." She kicked an instinctual leg and by pure coincidence caught a particularly vibrant stripe of lime on the make. "I would heartily recommend this blanket."

So Stace? You have to have an isosceles baby. Boy or girl, whatever. These colors go with everything.

Damn.

If you're in a meeting and you decide to launch into what you think is a pretty hilarious—if somewhat vicious—description of an ex-coworker, the worst possible response from any member of the group is… "That's my mom".

And may I say that while "commit to your story" may be a sometimes effective (not to mention ballsy) strategy when caught red-handed perpetrating a crime, you will not successfully extract yourself from the above situation by squaring your shoulders, looking the offspring dead in the eye and countering with, "Well, she's still a lazy bitch."

It's way past kind of serious so hurry.

Everything was moving along just swimmingly this morning until I realized that I have a weird red rash on the tops of my hands and on my arms. Due to my inherent nature, it goes without saying that now my eyes itch uncontrollably and I'm having trouble breathing. I immediately called my mom to see if she can drive me to the E.R. in the event that I start convulsing any second now.

ME: "I don't know, maybe anaphylactic shock?"

MOM: "Remember when you were seven and you cried about how much your stomach hurt? And you could hardly get out of bed or in and out of the car and your dad and I thought for sure you had stomach cancer? But then you started bragging that you'd won the sit up contest in P.E. the day before?"

ME: "Or toxic shock? One of the shocks? What other shocks are there?"

MOM: "Or when you were eleven? And there was something so horribly wrong with your bowels that the specialists-- the specialists, plural-- made me go down to the school every day and get stool samples from you at lunch? I'd have to pull you out of the cafeteria so you could crap onto a piece of aluminum foil, remember that? And I'd cry the whole time you were in there because I just knew that we were going to have to pull out your diseased intestines and I'd picture you dancing at your wedding with a colostomy bag and I'd cry and cry... and then we figured out that you'd been eating the blackberries that grew on the 7th hole fairway, and once you stopped eating a CARLOAD of fertilizer you were fine."

ME: "I think my throat is closing up."

I think my throat is closing up, people. Can someone come get me? I think I definitely have one of the really serious kinds of the shock.

RE: Avoidance of Broccoli Tragedy

Dear Ms. Erin,

I wanted to thank you for unwittingly performing a public service. Your link to the archives of outofcharacter may have saved me from the agony of a scalding. Through the knowledge I gained from reading that bit of history I was inspired to be extra cautious the other night (Wednesday) when I was steaming broccoli & can confidently report that I suffered no burns whatsover. Attached is a picture of the broccoli that could have caused me discomfort, but didn't. Please keep it for your records. File under "broccoli".

Yrs in a steamed, vegetative state,

Nigel

If You Wanted It You Should Have Taken It With You.

So we're about to be knee-deep in the Holiday Party Circuit again, and I'd just like to say that this year, instead of getting all cocky and sure of myself and over-confident in my mad social skillz, I'm going to take a minute and remember that time a few years ago when Randy and I went to dinner and the couple at the table next to us finished their dinner and left, leaving half a bottle of wine on their table which I snuck over and stole and then drank and then the couple came back to their table from the patio where they had been dancing.

That should do it.

Another List Of Things That Make Me Really Uncomfortable:

1) I burned my finger last night making candy apples. If you ever melt four bags of Brach's cinnamon disks and bring that lava to a molten orgasmic froth of sugar and fireants and boiling churning devil fire, don't stick your finger in it. DON'T STICK YOUR FINGER IN IT. Correct, I have learned nothing. Perhaps you have done better. But then again you're here.

DON'T. STICK. YOUR. FINGER. IN. IT.

Apropos of burns, my family are a fundamentally hygienic people. I grew up in a house of unquestioned daily showers, weekly nail clippings ("outside. OUTSIDE!") and twice-sterilized needles for splinters. ("OUTFUCKINGSIDE!") So when I arrived at work today with an index finger so grotesquely and hotly blistered that it wouldn't bend (as well as a tray of the hardest, most impenetrable candy apples in the history of stained glass and titanium), all I could do to ease the blister pain was to rub it lightly on the exposed flesh of others and make a sad face. And then (after multiple rubs, multiple pitiful faces) my boss-- mother of four, not kidding around-- knocked me to the floor and stuck a thumb tack in my finger. Just pulled it out of the wall and jammed it into my blister. No boiling water...no matches to char the stabby end (the char means it's clean!)... just her and me and a yellow thumbtack. And some... liquid blister. Onc she picked her knee up off my chest I scampered down the hall, afraid that she might want to disinfect the surgical area with a thrice-used Lysol wipe, but it made no difference. She'd tasted blood. Every five minutes she was sneaking up behind me, brandishing a bent staple, asking if I needed a "re-stab". This was uncomfortable-- both physically and mentally-- but even more uncomfortable was the realization that, in addition to having to be tricked, bribed, or physically trapped in the shower, I've now lost the very last "get in, and that soap better not have any letters on it when you're through" remnants of my sterile Methodist upbringing. My boss stabbed my blister with a thumbtack. That she ganked out of the wall. And we were IN.SIDE. My grandmother's towel pantry full of clean washcloths finds this whole situation very, very uncomfortable.

2) It makes me uncomfortable that Jennifer Garner has been eight and a half months pregnant for 14 months. BREAK IT OPEN, ALREADY. I don't think I can handle another US Magazine picture of her sans makeup waddling arm-in-arm with Ben Affleck with a decaf latte. And I can't stop reading US Magazine, so you need to WORK THIS OUT, BENIFFER.

3) I just found out that the guy in my office who heads up Food Safety Management is ALSO in charge of collecting specimens of all hairy, strange, enormous, foreign, quick and/or poisonous insects that pour out of any produce crates imported from fucking HOLYJESUSSOMEBODYCATCHTHATBECAREFUL. Yeah. He keeps them in his office. Once I found out, he started coming around, offering to let me watch the feedings. It's not so much the cordless phone-sized insects that he keeps in styrofoam coffee cups stacked on top of each other on the floor, but the fact that I don't know where he's getting all of these kittens is making me uncomfortable.

It really is.

I missed Stace's second call in two days. Call #1 occurred while I was sleeping. Call #2 occurred last night while I was working. I saw that she had called, but I just had a chance to sit down and listen to her second message:

"Are you fucking sleeping again? There's no sleeping. Give me a call or email me. Yeah, email me. Listen to this. [background music gets louder... background music is Kenny Loggins and Stevie Nicks singing "Whenever I Call You Friend".] You know this is your fault." I can't stop laughing. That's totally my fault.

And potentially Tuesday.

Despite working until almost 10:00 last night, I was determined to end my 14-year late streak and get to work on time today. Some people like to start their self-improvement resolutions on Monday, but I like to start on Friday so that if I'm successful I can pat myself on the back and take a break on Monday.

Knowing that nothing short of trickery / full bladder / knives can get me out of bed before the critical lateness stage, I set the clock last night so that in the morning I would be fooled and think that it was later than it was. I know you're thinking that this whole scam works better when a person doesn't have first-hand knowledge that the time is wrong, but I'm generally pretty stupid so I thought in my case it might work.

Unfortunately (and this is where you'll take back the "You're not stupid," that you muttered on the off-chance that you were defending me... to me) I got a little woozy and light-headed when I was setting the clock (all those buttons! BLINK. BLINK. BLINK.) and I set the time EARLIER than it actually
was. Instead of later. So while my PLAN was to wake up, rub my eyes and see that it was "wow! 6:42, I need to get moving!", what I ACTUALLY did was wake up, rub my eyes, and see that it was 6:07. Oh, god, PLENTY of time. Snooze. Snooze. Snoozesnoozesnoozesnooze.

I got myself dressed and out the door in perhaps an all-time record time of six minutes. My head itches, my eyes are sort of watery and I don't remember exactly how I got here, but by god I was on time. I'll be damned if I'm going to squelch on a Friday resolution... how else can I justify bailing on Monday?

If only I knew how.

A representative for Monster.com came in today to meet with my boss(es) and explain that if we don't shell out insane amounts of money for the privilege of posting minimum wage retail positions on the web our company is going to go bankrupt faster than Scarlett Johansson's humility. Her three-hour pitch reached an orgasmic crescendo when she locked the door behind her and quietly showed my hyena-fanged superiors how to "business logon" to the site and see who in our office has posted a resume recently.

I think it goes without saying that she got the account.

I, of course, was not privy to these closed-door shenanigans, but once the safehouse was cracked and Ms. Monster had Manolo'ed her soul-selling ass back out to her Maserati, I was upper-arm ushered into a quiet office by four sets of gripping sharp fingernails to share the potentially blackmailable glee that is "Seriously Ill Gotten Gains In The Workplace".

And like all Seriously Ill Gotten Gains, it was awesome. I mean, once I had gone through the whole, "Jesus fucking Christ, did I post my resume to Monster? Because I motherfucking meant to... wait, did I? Or did I bail? Did I figure it out? Or did I give up?" gambit. Which was fun. And not at all pale and clammy.

Turns out I had not posted my resume. Which saved me my job, I'm positive, because not only would I have had to explain to my boss(es) why it was up there, but also why it was FULL OF LIES.

I shared this whole ecstasy-clam-relief experience with a coworker whom I rarely talk to but who shares my general "get the fuck out, abandon ship" mentality. She stopped date-stamping pointless forms and smiled knowingly.

"That's the Lord looking out for you," she said, shaking inky "11-09-05" at me.

"That's exactly what that is!" I answered emphatically, remembering why I never talk to this woman and realizing that I had just bought myself six more months on the "Christian spam poetry prayer email" circuit, but you know what they say... you catch more flies with sacrilege and hypocrisy!

Deep down I know that it wasn't any god at all that spared me the humiliation of having to come up with like 800 bad lies at one time. It was my twin shrines to Lack of Any Kind of Follow-Through and Total Technological Incompetence.

I really need to get around to building those.

Justified.

I had this dream about my boss last night... she asked me to meet someone somewhere the next day at 9:00am, and I decided to meet him at like 11:00am instead. In flip flops. When I finally met this person he told me that he had just gotten off the phone with my boss, and that she was pissed. That she had called everyone in my department in for a phone conference to discuss the situation.

I spent the rest of this SEVEN HOUR DREAM in turmoil. When I wasn't hanging on the poor guy's arm, begging him to tell me EXACTLY what my boss had said ("No I know, but HOW mad?") I was trying to figure a way to cheat my way out of trouble. At one point a very nice dream-lady offered to hack into the timeclock software, but my dream-hopes were dashed when she couldn't fit under the dream-desk to get to the dream-server.

I hate that feeling, that "I fucked up for no reason and now I'm legitimately up against the wall for it" feeling. It was such a relief when I heard the alarm this morning that I slammed it off and went back to sleep and overslept by forty minutes.

So FYI.

Yesterday I upgraded my cell phone to this tiny chrome thing that does everything but print money. It keeps rolling it's little LCD eyes at me because I'm only using like 4.2% of its talent. I'm frankly starting to get a little bit of a complex because my lifestyle is conspicuously and embarrassingly "voicenotes" -free. I've been making people guess what time it is in Taipei so I can stare at the World Clock, and if anyone needs something uplinked to something else, let me know. Apparently I can take care of that for you.

I always feel a little bit like a loser when I program "Mom and Dad" into the Contacts list first thing. They've had the same number for sixteen years; the likelihood of my freaking out and being all, "OH MY GOD I WISH I COULD GET IN TOUCH WITH MY PARENTS WHO LIVE A HALF-MILE AWAY FROM ME IN THE SAME HOUSE I LIVED IN WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL" is relatively low. But I keep doing it. Mom and Dad. Meemaw and PawPaw. Aunt Mimi's pager. Uncle Freddy's office fax.

Ladies, remember when you were like seven, and you had a purse but nothing to put in it? So you'd carry around a couple of dolls, some legos, a cup, and an enormous plastic horse in pointy-legged prance pose? That's how I feel with this cell phone. Like I'm carrying around a big Prada bag full of Barbi clothes and crayons. There are six numbers programmed in it, and I'm related to four of them. I've gotten one call. From myself.

BUT. The text messaging! How did I escape THIS heroin for so long? Unfortunately (or fortunately) I only know three people whom I can text message:

1) Randy's daughter who, away at San Diego State, is way too cool to deal with me learning how to do this. The pity factor would be on par with watching your grandmother dance to Eminem. I'll take a text class or something first.

2) Randy himself, who refuses to learn how to actually SEND messages, but who will tolerate opening his phone and reading my messages to him. This is like writing to a stroke victim. Only with more technological disdain and general confusion. And less drool. Or more drool. Depends.

3) My boss. Which, yeah. Let's go ahead and open THAT fucking window.

So I'm left pretty much just staring at the pretty screen and taking pictures of the wall and estimating the flight time between here and Mongolia.

I think when I started this my principle point was that my number changed.

How about now.

My boss has her computer volume on "high" and she's singing along to a Mariah Carey CD right now.

Just one song.

On repeat.

It's 9:08 in the morning.

At what point can I completely fucking freak out?