Lucy's Spleen

Just Wrong

• I thought that I would use Twitter more with the advent of lists but I'm not. So far my lists are "The Old Standbys," "Ril Frenz," and "TBD," plus I have a "Who Gives A Shit List" which pretty much sums up my feelings on that topic. 

• Swine flu alert in the workplace! My cubicle neighbor's kid has it. I am making a concerted effort to not turn into Angela from The Office over it. I will have to quit immediately and take a job in a restaurant or hospital or day care or anyplace legitimately germy if I catch myself employing wipes, sprays, or spritzes or -heaven forbid- posting signs on anything. 

• The very first thing that happened in my day was a chimp putting its dick in a frog. How about you?

Neurosis

I am doing what no one should ever attempt which is eating a pomegranate at my desk. In order to not splatter one's entire cubicle with very sticky, very squirty, very stainey pomegranate juice this requires performing total dissection in the kitchenette beforehand. I did that with the first half of the fruit, but now I am feeling lazy and also: I can't get up to take care of this elsewhere. I need to pull this fruit apart, right here and now. Then I am my mother, watching and warning, "You should stop now. That's not going to work out for you." And I am a seven year-old, too engrossed/determined to quit, plus experimenting with defiance. I know this is perilous and I don't want the mom to see me still going for it, so to shorten the duration of risk, I hurry. But one bit is difficult to get apart and in struggling with it- oh no! A smattering. Then I am the mother saying, "See there," and cleaning up after. But, the thing is, my mom never did this kind of thing. She's never been an I-told-you-so-er; whose mother am I channeling? Is that the kind of mother I'm going to be? I'm seven years old and obstinate, and I'm my own future-parenting-style-I-hope-I -don't-really-wind-up-going-in-for mother to myself. I am the world's least fun unsolveable logic problem.

I think I might be getting sick. Here's a photo.

Me: Fuuuck. What am I going to post about?

Him: Pictures.

Me: Eh.

Him: The weather. Everybody loves to hear about the weather.

Me: Snort! 

Him: Chinese food.

Me:"DearblogIlikeChinesefooddoyoulikeChinesefoodIliketoorderthefriedChinesefood deliveryduringablizzardwhatkindofChinesefooddoyouliketoorder?

I'm thinking the "Dear blog" concept is going to catch on big among web diarists. It will be like letters to the president, only more self-absorbed and less adorable. What will remain constant will be that there will continue to not be any point. 

Furthermore, 

Mle 

8

The perfect Autumn day. Pumpkin pie, an afternoon photo shoot among the leaves in America's first garden cemetery, dinner with friends.

I can't wait to see how the photos come out.

Ta-Ta(s)

So, guys. In all honesty, how often do you check in on the sisters? Do you perform a routine check for The Cancer? If not, why not?

Personally, I never check 'em. Even though my grandmother had a mastectomy during my lifetime, though Stan's grandmother died of breast cancer years before he arrived on the scene, and though his step-grandmother is right now having a cancer recurrence at the site of her mastectomy right now, I never remember to think about it. Or, if I do think about it, it's while I'm on the train, or in my cubicle or some other such inopportune situation. My friend B. discovered this a couple of days ago and reprimanded me firmly enough that I've been meaning to perform a self-exam, but... Eh. You know?

I've been thinking about the million excuses I have for not doing it. They include: 1) I shower in the morning, I haven't had coffee yet, how can I be expected to remember then? 2) The hot water runs out too fast; I have to make the most of my shower time in washing, not circling.  3) I'm young, I (hope I')m healthy, what's the rush? 4) Uh...

The only other best thing I can think of is "my boobs are too big so the whole thing seems unwieldy and it's unlikely I'll be able to discern anomalies anyway." So I have no good reasons. I bucked up and did a titty check in the shower this morning, only to discover (just a second ago, after Googling the process when I sat down to start writing this) that I have merely scratched (har har) the surface of the global examination process. There are like forty more steps I missed that I'm apparently supposed to be taking care of- argh!

So dear reader (where by reader I mean Gar and/or Brohawk since I'm pretty sure you guys equal my Total Audience), do you routinely look in on Mary and Lois to see about their respective lumpyness? Brohawk, do you regularly feel up your own fun bags? Or, Gar, do you feel 'em up for her?

Anybody else, if you're out there, how often do you perform a self breast exam? What's your incentive?

5

Fine:

General Friday-likeness all day today.

The fit factor of the t-shirt on my coffee crush this morning.

A long break for a fancy birthday lunch for pal B. at Sportello. My God that place is good.

Regular:

Not having any complicated work to do when we came back to the office all tipsy and jolly and ineffectual.

Later, remembering to take the beer out of the freezer.

Gross:

Stan and I were in charge of a buddy's car while he was abroad for a couple of weeks. We used it a bit and had a great fine safe place to park it and it was there and it was there and it was there... until this morning, when our pal went to pick it up to drive to an appointment and found it had been towed to make way for some utilities maintenance. Le Big Suck.

P.S.

Another fine thing! Stan was invited to attend some secret society dinner tonight for the world's oldest continually published humor magazine. It was held in a castle. He's coming up the stairs now. I'm going to go hear all about it.

Food, On the Subject of

1. You want to know what blows superlatively? The 365 Everyday Value brand soymilk from Whole Paycheck. Every day I have it in my fridge is a day I value any other brand besides that one, so it sucks extra that I unwittingly doubled up with this purchase, meaning now I have some to value avoid using at work and some to value waste at home. Great! I suppose they make it taste like ass on purpose so people will be willing to spend more on the name brands, so how about all the resources that go into producing something intended for people to not buy? What does that say about your values, Whole Foods, hm?

2. I have an urgent need to make these browned butter Rice Krispies snaxx, but will hold off until there is an acceptably non-insipid ersatz Milche Preparation in the house to savor with them.

3. What’s for dinner?

MORNING

There's a new boy slinging coffee at my downtown coffee place and I'll tell you- Oh, my. I was already enthusiastic about going in there, as the place plays a key role in my daily achieving-of-consciousness, but let's just say now they have two ways of getting my blood going. Pitter pat!

My first reaction when I discovered him was to be startled. I can't remember the last time I was attracted to someone besides my spouse. I had to run that first little excitement through the ol' data processor for a minute before I could identify that what was happening was my cartoon pupils turning into heart shapes at the ends of a pair of cone-shaped eyes bulging out of my cartoon head.

NOON

How often have you been mindlessly humming some tune, something you know backward and forward without even thinking about it and you've been humming or running it silently through your head (depending on how much at work you are) for the past two hours or two minutes (who can tell, and what difference does it make?) it's just THERE, you've been not-thinking it for so long that it is a part of yourself, it's the theme song of your life, it's what your days just go along to, possibly what all your days have always been going along to, only all of a sudden you realize you're singthinking it all fucked up and wrong? 

"When you're/ With the Simpsons/ Have a yabba dabba doo time..."

NIGHT

Speaking of my (beloved, first above all others even up to and including junior baristas) "spouse," otherwise known as my partner: right this minute (and at all other times, it seems to me lately) I'm supposed to be working on putting together some exquisite, labor-intensive, crafty assemblage to ship out later this month by way of save-the-date notices for our wedding next summer. Or should I say our alleged wedding next summer? Given the way I've been fiddling around with this blog and every other possible distraction, there could turn out not to be a wedding. I'm currently going for being in denial about all the effort involved, so I'll be able to work myself into an appreciable frenzy/World of Hurt next spring when suddenly it's all upon us and everything. Quick! Somebody give me a smart little epigram about procrastination so I can better shame myself as I continue to fart around and not do anything.

Too late, I have an old family favorite on hand already.

EPIGRAM

If you will not when you may, when you will there shall be nay.

What am I going to do with this space? This space I used to love and to which I sometimes feel called but sits mostly neglected due to nerves and the general distaste I feel for it now. I need to write every day, and I pay to keep this virtual composition notebook always open, but it doesn't feel open to me anymore. I have to turn through too many used up pages to get to the great blank non-captious available space that I need, and it's a diary always open for sisters and colleagues and exes to ransack. There's the bit of a community left that I don't want to lose- an underground network of spy allies covertly keeping one another under tender surveillance. There are still roots here, but runners were sent out long ago and there are healthy little propagated clones now quietly thriving at Flickr and on Facebook. Those are both excellent spaces with Fs and everything, but where am I going to write?