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When putting on a pair of button fly jeans, the proper buttoning method is from the bottom up. Do not try it from the top down; this will make it difficult, if not impossible, for you to ever button the pants at all. I hate buying clothes. Of all of the necessary-but-undesirable ways to flush my money down the toilet, clothes are to me the most galling expense. I hate buying clothes even more than I hate tossing out money on the intangibles, like insurance or taxes or mob protection. Because clothes… I mean, you just don't get anything out of them. They bring no pleasure, no satisfaction, no feeling of security. They don't play music or videos. They don't take you where you need to be at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour. They just hang there on your body. It's like having to pay to keep your skin. I have too many other ways to be bored. And I'm not one of those people who puts on a really snazzy outfit and suddenly goes from being meek and self-loathing to being a world conqueror. If I feel ugly and put on a really nice outfit, I suddenly feel like an ugly guy in a really nice outfit. This is a philosophy commonly referred to as "realism." It's a lot cheaper than anything at the Gap. As a result of all this clothes-hatin', I tend not to ever have any new clothes, obviously. The other day, though, I looked in my closet and suddenly became disgusted with myself. "For God's sake!" I said to myself. "Four pairs of jeans! That's your wardrobe. Every day, rain or shine, you're wearing one of these four pairs of jeans. What kind of man are you? That does it. It's time to give these jeans a rest. We're getting dressed, we're going to the store, and we're getting you something beyond these four pairs of jeans." So I went to get myself a fifth pair of jeans. I went to this store called Old Navy, which I knew was owned by the same company as that Gap the kids like so much and which sold the exact same clothes in exchange for less money. (It is one of the great crackups of American life that every time Old Navy comes up, someone mentions "it's the Gap but cheaper," and yet the Gap still reliably makes enough money to bombard me with those freaky singing-model commercials. I mean, the store is practically named "Gap But Cheaper." What the hell is wrong with people? Do they dislike having money? If the guys running Old Navy were really enterprising, they would sell sewing kits and labels that said "Gap Jeans" for $10 at the checkout counter. They'd have their corporate cousins going out of business within a month.) I went to Old Navy because I had Old Navy's golden key. My cousin had gotten me a pair of Old Navy jeans last Christmas, and as a result I knew my Old Navy size. I cannot overstate the importance of this fact, because I've learned to my chagrin that my size changes depending on which store I'm in. It's like interplanetary gravity; I can only presume that my waist and legs expand or contract depending on the b.o. density of Wal-Mart's atmosphere. Target is 1.17 Wal-Marts. It's all very complicated, and I will be damned if I'm going to waste even five minutes trying on f***ing clothes on a Saturday afternoon. I shudder to think of all those childhood excursions with Mom to Dilliard's or JCPenney's, hours squandered by putting on and then taking off thousands and thousands of strange garments, my mom bursting into the changing room just in time to see me hanging myself with a pair of khakis just to end the waking nightmare once and for all. No no no. I only get so many Saturdays. Determine size. Penetrate store. Grab item. Buy item. Leave store. Elapsed time: 4.5 minutes. The boredom neurons never even had a chance to fire. I made sure the jeans were my size, took them home, ripped off the tags and threw them in the closet. One morning soon after, I was getting ready for work and decided to put on my new jeans. I grabbed them out of the closet in my 8:30 stupor, pulled them over my legs, and attempted to zip them up, only to learn that my crotch was studded with buttons.
Note to self: button-fly jeans still exist. So, I spent a brief moment cursing my inattentive button-fly ownership and made the best of it. Unfortunately, I had never worn a pair of these things before, and it soon became obvious that I no longer knew how to put on pants. Pants technology had passed me by, like my grandma trying to program a VCR. The notion that I could simply start from the bottom didn't occur to me for some time, giving me plenty of opportunity to stare down at my crotch and think dolefully, "I have a college degree. I cannot put on pants. Double major, mind you. From SLU, yeah, but still. I guess I'd better call work and tell them I won't be in today. 'Hi, Gwen? Yeah. It's Jim. How ya doin'. Listen, I can't come in today. Yeah. No, no it's my pants. I don't know how to wear them. Huh? No, no they fit just fine; I know my Old Navy size. They're just too advanced for me. I might be in later if one of the neighbor kids helps me or something.'" I haven't felt that stupid since I nearly flushed my still-living fish down the toilet last spring. And I'm compelled to get that fact published, even though I was alone and no one would ever otherwise know about it. For the public good, people need to know that I am actually the dumbest person who has ever been alive. Keep an eye on me. I am a danger. You have been warned.
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Well, the annual food poisoning went off without a hitch. Wonderful show, much bigger than last year's. The parade to and from the toilet went on much longer this year, and the fireworks--! Talk about hard to top… all I can say is, I do not envy the e.coli planning next year's festivities. No, sir. The thing is, while people give me grief for eating a lot of fast food, I don't really. I eat less junk now than I have in a long time. I go out and grab lunch a couple of times a week, I go out to dinner at actual restaurants a couple of times a week, and the rest of the time it's all bagels and sandwiches and, well, grocery food. The grocery store's closer than any fast food restaurant; my laziness is aided much better by eating well. None of that changes the fact that, Tuesday night, I was as sick as I have ever, ever been. And I hate the stereotype that men act all tough until they get a little sick, at which point they act like it's the end of the world. That is how you can be sure that I am completely sincere when I tell you that I very nearly died that night. I got home from a play at about 10, and from 10:30 to 4:00, I threw up every 45 minutes. Never has my body been so angry with me. Never have I been so angry with my body. But I've gotten sick to my stomach three times in the last three years, and on every previous occasion one iteration got the job done. So I was very businesslike about the whole affair at first. "All right, dammit. I'll go throw up, we'll get this taken care of, and everyone can get on with their evening… hey, it's only 11:30! I can get this done and still be in good shape for work tomorrow!" Oh no. There would be no work. That became apparent at about 3:00, as yet another little nap that was supposed to be my good night's sleep got interrupted. My muscles ached as if I'd been working out all day, and I suppose I had; my "propelling food out of the body the wrong way" muscles, in particular, felt as if they'd been punched by a gorilla. I get very analytical when I'm sick. Maybe a level of detachment is just what I need to keep from whining out loud. But as I sit there on the floor, the wrong end of me directed at the porcelain, I do have investigative conversations with myself. "Isn't that interesting? I threw up lunch before dinner. And yet, one would think that the contents of lunch would be below those of dinner in the stomach, causing the dinner contents to be forced out first by necessiBLEEEEEEAAAAAAAAH! Cough cough hack. Yes. Fascinating." I stopped short of knocking on my esophagus and shouting, "What is going on down there? Could you keep it down, please?" I was talking to myself out loud by 4:00. "Oh, come on! There's nothing left! I only had a little pasta for dinner! Did we miss a noodle last time? Is that it? F***ing body." *** Last week was one of those... I woke up one morning, and everyone I knew was in tumult, and everyone had broken up with everyone and gotten back together with everyone else, and so-and-so was mad at such-and-such, who was in turn furious with Completely Unrelated Party #12, and the phone rang, and the people talked, and the things sucked, and the seas boiled, and the skies fell. And none of it had anything whatsoever to do with me. That only sounds like a good thing. It was actually a lot like being an unlucky tourist in Florida, standing naked and wet in someone else's hurricane, astonished at how powerfully your day-to-day can go cockeyed without even requiring your involvement. One minute, I'm asleep on my couch; the next, I'm devising a flow chart. "Okay, so don't mention him around her and her... she sides with her, but is friends with him but WORKS with HIM… I wonder if I have any aspirin." Actually, the whole thing was so irritating, I don't even want to get into it. How's that for anticlimactic?
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I've been taking a lot of pleasure lately from not writing. Not that I dislike writing, necessarily; these past weeks, I've just really enjoyed not doing it. Having stories but not telling them. I get a letter about once every two weeks or so from people I've never met, telling me that they've found my tales and that they really enjoy reading them, and I get a real charge out of that. Make no mistake. Lately, though, I've been thinking about the people who do know me. Those people who read me instead of actually participating in my life. Those people who never call and ask how things are going because they don't need to. I think of those people checking my page for weeks on end, finding nothing, and wondering if I fell into a ditch and died or something, and the feeling is actually good enough to keep me from publishing. Last week, I wrote entries and didn't even put them online. Forgive me my petty satisfactions. Plus, I get a sense sometimes that a couple of my friends check my page just to see if they got mentioned. When you spill your head on paper, and people know about it, they tend to sneak in to get hints about what you're reeeeally thinking. Well, let 'em wonder this week, eh? *** Valentine's Day was as good as it could possibly be without having a girlfriend, or any girlfriend prospects, or a date, or any date prospects, or any clothes tight enough to provide pleasant friction on the erogenous zones, or anything positive. I bought cards for all the single women whose addresses I knew, and it gave me just the right medley of hopefulness and denial to make it through the weekend. Unlike a lot of guys, I don't hate V-Day; I never do a good enough job at it, but I enjoy trying. I recently came across a card I got from one of my exes while we were dating, and the inside of it was filled from top to bottom with flowery handwritten prose about how much more she loved me with each passing day and how much she looked forward to spending the rest of our lives together. As V-Day approached, I gave more than a passing thought to putting that card in an envelope and mailing it back to her without comment, but the laugh I got from the thought wasn't worth wrecking somebody else's day. Besides which, I'd have had to look up her address. Actually, one of the women I mailed a card to is a real slice of heaven. My crush is substantial, despite equally substantial evidence that it would never, ever work out. I would quit my job to free up more time to hang out with this woman. And she seems to like me well enough, invites me out, calls me spontaneously, waives the restraining order… but I've just been out of the game too long. Plus, the whole thing has a really high weirdness density. She makes a point of saying she has a boyfriend, and then she makes a point of saying she hasn't spoken to him in over four weeks despite the fact that he lives nearby. I don't know which of these revelations are for my benefit, or if any of them are, or if I'm supposed to say something, or if I'm supposed to keep my distance. All I do know is that I say something about it that I'm not supposed to say every single time I see her, and there's no way I can ever see it coming.
ME: Does your car have four-wheel drive? My feet are so well ensconced in my mouth that I keep socks rolled up in my cheeks just to save time. A mutual friend once told me, "You know, she and the boyfriend are on the outs! The boyfriend is not an impediment!" leaving me to reply, "Yeah! I had a girlfriend who thought like that once. No thanks." So that's where I'm leaving it. She's been a good friend, I've missed having female friends, and I could die a happy man if that's where we stayed. If anything else manages to happen without any help from me, then I will relish the happy accident. *** actual workplace conversation: WOMAN: Jeez! This ring is killing me. (continues working) It pinches! And I think it's going to cut off the circulation to my finger. Good God! Ow!… (pause)… Ow! JIM: Hey! Hey there. You know what? You could probably take the ring off of the finger entirely. I know it sounds crazy, but… WOMAN: No, I can't do that. JIM: It's stuck on your hand? WOMAN: No, but I can't take it off! My husband would get mad at me. JIM: Get…? What? Why? WOMAN: He would get really upset with me. He gave me this ring. Pssh! 'Take off the ring.' Sheesh. OW! JIM: Is your husband coming here? WOMAN: No, he's at work all day, just like me. OW! God! JIM: I was about to call you an idiot, but I just realized that your dilemma is a metaphor for a lot of things in my life. Later in the day, the ladies came across some kind of zany online valentine game. From what I could gather, you told the game things about yourself and it matched you up with a hunky, dreamy celebrity valentine who in reality would have his bodyguard shoot you repeatedly if you ever approached him. If I know my online games, this one also took note of all the things you were telling it so that it could helpfully subscribe you to some relevant mailing lists. So, everybody wins. Anyway, they started to play this cute little game very blatantly. One of the girls said to the other, "You've gotta come over and look at this!" and she did, and they just kept playing. It started to become kind of a long time, just blatantly playing this game. And I looked over at the both of them, right in front of me, and I said, "So, uh, how's the whole work thing coming along today? Are we all out of chores?" And they looked at me and said, "Oh, I just can't seem to get motivated anymore today. I just don't feel like working." And they just went back to playing the game like I wasn't even there. Upon my head weighed heavily the flaccid Crown of Impotence. I was crimson. I was about to go check my underwear to make sure there were still genitals in there, but instead I settled for saying, "While I was out sick, did they announce that I wasn't the boss anymore?!" I felt a lot less useless after that; I got some dirty looks, but at least everybody went back to work.
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WOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooooooo. It's like living on Splash Mountain sometimes. Long, slow climbs up the hill in the dark, and just when it's getting tiresome, ZOOM! Today was supposed to be a big day, but I seem to have slightly underestimated the bigness. Now, granted, I had no evidence whatsoever that I would end the day in a completely different league than I started it, but I knew there was a doin's a-transpirin'. I was invited to The Meeting. Every once in a while here at work, some big decision comes down the pipeline (a price increase, an organizational restructuring, what to order for lunch, that sort of thing) and they have to have The Meeting. The Roosevelts, Churchills, and Stalins of the office leave inexplicably in the late morning, are gone for several hours, and by the time they come back Germany's all divided up. The rest of us get a memo and maybe a little meeting of our own for us to nod at in agreement, the changes are implemented, and life returns to the new normal. Apparently, though, I have advanced up the rungs far enough to merit invitation to The Meeting now. I'm a senior. Next step: an off-campus lunch period! Anyway, I guess they figured that if I'm the one who has to enforce all the new rules on the Angels, I ought to at least be there to help make the new rules. (We call them the Angels because I supervise three women of differing talents and hair colors, making me the Bosley to their Charlie's Angels. The fact that I get all my orders from an unseen boss in a high-backed chair makes the symmetry almost eerie.) So at about lunch time, my boss tapped me on the shoulder and we quietly left the office for the comforts of a meeting room that had been reserved for us at a nearby restaurant. And the meeting was pretty much what I thought it would be, "We're gonna raise prices," "That's a bad idea, I'm a salesman and high prices scare people away," "Yeah, but what about those people who won't shop at Target but buy the same stuff at Neiman Marcus," "I still think we shouldn't do it," "That's because you're a #%$$&," blah blah blah. Just like I thought it was gonna be. All pretty standard really, until the owner said, "Now, as a final point of business, I've sold the company out to The Man. Who wants a margarita?" She didn't say that really. She actually told a very long story about her business plan, and wanting to make it a reality but not having the capital, blah blah venture capitalists are crazy and bossy blah blah hunting for investors long story short she took a bunch of the stock and sold it to some Englishmen. Yeek! My natural inclination in these situations, of course, is to update my resume and have a packin' box ready. The more we talked about it, though, the whole arrangement sounded really, really sweet. She went with the Englishmen after thoroughly looking into them and the way they run things, she talked to other people they'd bought into, and she felt comfortable that we could keep our "corporate identity" (read: jeans and logoed "f*** formality" t-shirts). Plus, she kept a controlling interest in the company. Which helped. Also helpful: news that we're finally moving out of the little blue house and into one of those waterfall, cafeteria, elevator offices (with room for a foosball table!) "Also, as part of this deal, we're going to reward everyone who's stuck with us through our Little Blue House era. We like to appreciate loyalty, and as we grow, so grow our rewards." "But... I thought that was just a lie we told to trick people into taking PR writing jobs for $2.70 an hour!" "It was, but we can afford to mean it now. Next week, you will all be getting a retention bonus, a big check equivalent to 25% of your annual salary." "I beg your pardon?!" "If we do as well as we did last year-- and keep in mind that we've outdone ourselves 100% every year we've been in business-- you will get another 25% bonus check in January." "So... hang on. Did you, just now, raise my annual income by like several, several, several thousand dollars??" "Well, you and everyone else in the company. Yeah." "I see. Excuse me, won't you? I need to go buy a new computer. Made of gold." We then got thrown out of the restaurant when the waitress came in to refill my drink and I ordered her to kiss my ring. They're right; wealth does funny things to people. We went back to the office and broke the good news to everyone else. Everybody was psyched, of course, except maybe for some of us old-timers who have heard the "we're moving to new offices, no really this time" every four months since we started working here. I think we might actually pull it off this time, though, especially with the big bucks behind us. Or the big pence. Whatever they are, they're big. So, where's Typical Jim in all this? Well, he's gone over the numbers and the facts a few times today, and he cannot find a downside to this deal. There doesn't appear to be anything worrisome, and that's what worries him. Everything has a downside, kids. Check back in six months. I'd love to figure out what it is now, but my mind is otherwise occupied coming up with new ways to spend great heaping sums of money.
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Computer shopping takes on a whole new timbre when you know you could walk out with anything in the store. Isn't that obnoxious? Listen to me! Look at the things I'm saying! What an @$$! I've always hated people who talk about money. Still do. But I've gotta get it out of my system now and shake it off. Because I've been living comfortably for a while now. Like, four-leaf-clover-how-did-I-manage-this? comfortably. And I'll tell you, after spending what felt like several months in front of the business end of the pungent subterranean Disrespect Spigot, my situation is feeling very, very gratifying. I'm making friends who actually live in the same city I do, a couple of whom may well be more than friends eventually. Some of my old friends have started moving back. My irritation level is waaay down. My apartment is clean, safe, and in the middle of everything. My fish is still alive after almost a year. And, oh yes, I go to sleep on a great big pile of what I have taken to calling "f***you money." '98 and '99 were often dismal; If I revel a bit in how 2000 has gone so far, I beg your indulgence. When my new British taskmasters are making me groan in some unforeseen way shortly, you can come back and gloat at what an @$$ I am right now. In truth, I couldn't buy anything at the computer shoppe. My big bonus check won't be with me for a week or more, and in the meantime I've got plastic with a $15 credit limit. It's the same friggin' card I got in college, my soul signed away in exchange for a free t-shirt (which, in all fairness, I still wear often to work.) Several of my coworkers, when asked, "What will you do with your bonus?" immediately shouted, "Pay off my @%#$# credit cards, of course!" Not me; my limit is so low, I could work at a hot dog stand without finding a way to go into debt with it. I once asked them to raise my limit so I could buy some plane tickets, and the guy told me, "Tell ya what: I won't let your card max out this time. But you'd better put your check in the mail today." So technically, a purchase was not happening. But it was nice to look anyway. If the new Discover card had arrived before I left instead of when I got back, I'd be installing software right now. *** This is what my life has become. Saturday night, my big kick-butt social activity was a trivia night at a local high school rec room. And I was pumped. "But Jim," you're saying, "I didn't even know you were a middle-aged housewife!" Well, I am. And so are all my friends. Actually, my friend Mary Catherine is a teacher at Incarnate Word, a private girls' school which bears the distinction of having had a violent combat-boot-stomping catfight break out at every single dance I ever attended there. They were having a fundraiser trivia contest, and MC and Joe had signed us up. I initially thought they were joking, but once I realized this was really happening to me, I got into the spirit fairly quickly. I can't do a pull-up, but put me in a knowin' contest? Against a bunch of Baby Boomers, fer Chrissakes?! I'll kick yer @$$, Grampa Moonbeam! By the time you come down from your flashback long enough to stop complaining about your stock portfolio and answer a question, I'll be at home with the trophy, sucka! Bring it on!!! So yeah. Took it a little seriously. But then again, I was in a group of eight of my peers, and I was positively subdued by comparison. I can only guess that my teammates watch a lot of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire at the Cost of National Sanity?" because a couple of them started to look like they were on Angel Dust when we got rolling. I acted pretty embarrassed, I know, but there really was something about the fact that we didn't know anybody else there and were probably never going to see them again. The whole thing got more hilarious with each moment we were there. I mean, we began to trash talk the other tables. Loudly. We began to talk about how we were going to spend our winnings. It was all we could do not to wander the room and hip-check people at the other tables. Whenever we finished an answer sheet, we clapped and banged on the table to freak out our competitors, tipsy soccer moms who just wanted a night out of the house and instead got a deathmatch with Team Hubris. After about round three, one of the neighboring tables (comprised of the parents of some of MC's students) began to throw things at us. We'd be in the middle of the round, and Joe would suddenly have a paper airplane in his hat brim. Or popcorn. That kind of thing. We began, as tables, to banter.
"Uh-oh, kids! A 1970s question, a little before your time, huh?" And that was another thing. Bible questions? Hmm, pretty tough... unless you've got one of the school's theology teachers on your team! Besides the Bible category, we had a food category (and a chef at the table), a presidential history category (with Joe "Living History" Hodes at the table), and on and on. They might as well have done sections on "Star Wars Figure Collecting Trivia" and "Things in Joe's Room." It was utterly like taking candy from a blindfolded baby, which makes it all the more amazing that we totally failed to win anything at all. Perhaps I exaggerate. We came in fourth out of thirty teams. First, second, third and fourth were separated by one point each, but there were no spoils for fourth. If only it hadn't been for "Sports Nicknames." I mean, who the hell is the Iron Horse? Am I supposed to care? Now, knowing who provided the voice of E.T., now that's relevant knowledge. (If you don't know, shame on you. Go look it up.)Sports are always finding new and interesting ways to intrude in my life. Afterwards, I went to locate a grade school friend of mine who'd randomly shown up (his girlfriend coaches at the school) only to find he'd left without saying goodbye. I took this to mean that our team had been too unbearable to be seen with in public. That, and the fact that he'd earlier responded to winning an attendance prize by leaping up and shouting, "In your face!" at me. Anyway, I returned to our table only to see the team engaged in something of a huddle.
"What's going on?" I like our odds. South City isn't famous for producing a lot of great thinkers. If I could only find someone who's good with sports nicknames....
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