deeplyshallow // bloggin for booty

bloggin for booty

Well, it’s been a few days. It’s a little paralyzing to learn just who reads your blog. The lesson to be learned here is: do not ask who reads your blog. Because what happens when you do is people who you had no idea were reading your blog tell you that they read your blog, and other people throw magazines with covers that say things like HOW TO BLOG YOURSELF TO THE BANK onto your desk, or you finally connect somebody to an IP address and realize just how often they’re picking through your stuff.

At work I have been remembering what it is like to work with people my own age — or at least people in the ballpark — again. Do you know what it is like? It goes something like this, a few times a day:

J.: Do you have a vector version of that logo?
M.: For a buck fifty.
J.: GIVE IT.
M.: FUCK YOU.
J.: NO FUCK YOU.
M.: Bitch.
J.: Dildo.
M.: Cunt ball.

At which point the battle was over because I came this close to spraying soda all over my monitors. My verbal sparring skills need a little work. Plus I don’t think I could’ve come up with ‘cunt ball’ on the fly like that.

At work I get a lot of crap for my eating habits. I’m picky, okay. I can totally see a bunch of fourth-graders ribbing their classmate every day, day after day, because he picks the onions off of his burger, one by one. But when we’re all barreling down on thirty, isn’t it enough to say, just once, “I don’t eat lettuce,” and that’s all there is to it? Apparently that’s too much to ask. I had forgotten this about office environments: everybody sees everybody else only at work, mostly, so everybody’s personality traits get jammed under the microscope, and the flaws and eccentricities become reference points, a sort of shorthand for really knowing your co-workers. So these points get referenced, again and again and again and again. Years from now I will be remembered as the guy who ordered the turkey wrap and barely touched it because the wrap turned out to be a spinach tortilla. “What was his name?” they will say. And they will want to call another old co-worker to ask, but they’ll have forgotten that co-worker’s name as well.

I get a lot of shit for the beard, too, which is all new to me because the beard is, too. I’ve been called ‘grizzly’ and ’scruffy’ and on at least one occasion I have been referred to as the Unabomber. People keep asking me when I am going to shave it, or did I trim it, or would I ever consider skimming it back to just a soul patch and sideburns; or they tell me excitedly that I should totally shave off half of it and come to work ‘just to see what people would do!’ When one guy saw what I drive he said, “I totally knew you would drive something like this.” Another guy gave me a CD and said, “I know you listen to this kind of stuff, huh.” Beard profiling hurts, people. And for the record, your CD sucked, man. Bob Schneider is a tool, and a gimmicky one at that.

I’ve actually tried to update the site several times during the silence of this past week. I’ve stared at a blank screen a few times, have false-started a few entries, and even got a thousand words into a new Eleanor sketch before I recognized it for the boring piece of shit that it was. So to answer the one person who complained that I wasn’t posting often enough: I have been trying, buttmunch. Sometimes it just don’t work right.

Tomorrow I’ve got to zip back to the MB on my lunch break to give a check to the asshole realtors that Susan and I have been dealing with. She skipped a day at work strictly for the purpose of viewing a house we’d been keeping an eye on, and the bastards got all snippy with her:

R.: It doesn’t sound to us like you’d be the only person living in this house.

S.: Well, not for good. But for a little while.

R.: Because it says right here on your application: Reason for moving, getting married.

S.: Right.

R.: Well, we can’t let you see the place until the other tenant-to-be completes an application.

That’s me, by the way. The tenant-to-be. Not the groom-to-be or anything like that. Tenant-to-be. Fat monthly rent check-writer-to-be.

Whatever. The place was too quaint and nice to let slip through our fingers just because some dumpy plumpy had a bad day. So Susan went home, and the next afternoon I stole away from work early so that I could check the place out. And it wasn’t bad. It’s a little old — built in ‘59 — but it’s got more than enough room, plenty of natural light (which is good, because homes built before 1960 don’t have electricity), an actual front and back yard (which is rare in this neighborhood of rock gardens and fully-paved properties), and even a small studio apartment with its own entry. In other words, a good first home, and a good place to land for a little while as we contemplate buying something. On top of all of that, it’s not even a block away from where I live now. I’ll be paying the neighborhood kids to scamper back and forth between my place and the new one, loaded down with boxes and working happily for a buck an hour.

This afternoon the owner approved our applications, so we’re in. I’ve just got to fork over a quarter of my savings — for the deposit alone — to make it happen. I keep choking on that part, but whatever. Gotta do what you gotta. We shall exact our revenge in lease-breaking: pets are not allowed, but we have two. And one of them peeeeees.