So. What have you been up to?

Seven Things I'd Rather Do than Work Right Now:

1. Sell socks door to door
2. Give a speech before a crowded auditorium while wearing tight pink spandex
3. Sprinkle my dog’s toenail clippings on a salad for some extra crunch
4. Relive the seventh grade
5. Eat a box of sidewalk chalk
6. Fashion a crown of tampons and wear it to an important meeting
7. Live in a world populated entirely by Dr. Phil clones
   

As I’ve written of in more creative days of yore, I am now in the thick of our “crunch period” at work. Believe me, this has nothing to do with granola or sit-ups. I wish it did. Anyway, I thought I’d give you a status report so you can live in my world for the next 47 seconds. Lucky you.

Current Status of …

My love relationship: I’m married? Wow. So that dude on my couch must be my old man.

Hangnails: bloody tatters. I thought about posting a picture of my fingertips here, but it would probably trigger your gag reflex and/or frighten you away forever and/or convince you I have serious neuroses, which you may have already deduced.

Dog: she’s eating her own poop again. And the barking. It is incessant.

Children: Wait. I don’t have children. Thank God, because if I did, someone would have called Social Services on my ass weeks ago.

Hygiene: Let’s just say I could land a role as a bag lady on CSI without even auditioning.

Relationships with friends: neglected. But I did speak last night with the lucky pal who just returned from Venezuela. S, I love you dearly, but a small part of me hopes you brought cockroaches home with you in your baggage. (This is the jealousy talking. Shut up and sit down before I smack you, jealousy.)

Houseplants: are you familiar with the term “desertification?”

My brain: has been replaced with a bag of marshmallows. If I close my eyes, I can hear the faint strains of “Turkey in the Straw” emanating from my left ear canal.

Daily interaction with peers: lately, the only people I’m interacting with are my coworkers and our office’s 85 year-old cleaning lady, Dorothy. Topics of conversation with Dorothy in the last two days have covered funerals, nursing homes, church, her negative attitude toward binge drinking, the possibility of me taking her out and getting her drunk, people who feed robins ground hamburger, and the weather. Dorothy conversations are always initiated when you are trying to add a column of 746 four-digit figures manually.

And yes, Dorothy is 85. Because I work in the Hotel California. You can check out, but you can never leave. Or retire. Ever. When we employ quality staff, we keep them. Yes I am duct-taping my talented coworkers K and L to their chairs as they close in on retirement age. I have already warned them. Shit, their chairs have WHEELS, so I don’t know what they’re complaining about. All we need are a couple of colostomy bags and they’ll be ready to roll. Pun sadly intended because that’s the kind of lame garbage my brain is capable of these days.