|
| Hate to see me leave? You'll love to watch me go! | | |
| At ten o'clock this morning I watched my cat push the glass fish bowl off of the dresser. This happened in the sort of slow motion that breaks once the deed is done, and as the bowl shattered on the hardwood floor I shot to the end of my bed, scanning the debris for Smalls, my red betta fish.
He lay to my left, on the outskirts of the destruction. With some effort born of [the fish's] panicked flopping I scooped him up and rushed into the kitchen. The cat slunk off to observe from a short distance while I deposited Smalls in a cereal bowl hastily filled with tap water.
Realizing that I would not be going in to work as planned, I isolated the soggy cat in the laundry room and commenced to sop up the wet, fish-flavored mess. I gingerly picked shards of glass off my bed and swept the floors repeatedly. I transfered Smalls to a coffee mug and secured him in a small cupboard that the cat couldn't open.
The cat - Moxie - has had it out for Smalls since the day he came to town. Moxie's main agenda was to drink up the fish's home, whereas mine was to stop him from doing that since it meant that I had to repeatedly replenish the water and worry about my less-than-graceful feline knocking over the bowl. As my means to sealing off the fish bowl got better, Moxie's determination to get inside became more finely tuned.
Once the mess was cleaned up I emailed my boss to see if he'd like to have a fish in the office. We had fishes there years ago but they eventually died and despite all promises nobody ever replaced them (the ghost-town of a fish tank was stored, untouched, atop the filing cabinets). He readily agreed and now Smalls lives on the desk in the cluttered office of The Center For Interpersonal Studies Through Film & Literature. He seemed good-natured as he swam about his new home; perhaps he sensed that he was no longer the focus of assassination fantasies thought up by a psychotic tabby cat.
This afternoon I took Moxie for his follow-up appointment at the vet. As Karmic retribution for his actions he had his ears flushed out for the second time, this time without the sedatives he got the first go-around. The news now is all good: Moxie got his just-desserts for trying to murder Smalls, his severe case of ear mites (a souvenir from his pre-domesticity days) is cured once and for all AND his behavior seems a little bit more mellow now that he doesn't have microscopic vermin eating away at his brains.
Now when I'm bored at work I'll get to pass the time watching my fish swim in idle circles around the bowl. Comfort though this is, it does beg the question of just what I'll do when I'm bored at home. I'm telling you: that fish was better than television.
| | |
| Unemployment was rough for a little while, but then I realized: this is it. This is the last time in my life I will be allowed to wake up at seven, go back to sleep at 7:02, sleep until noon, lay in bed until three then putter around the house in my pajamas until five. This is The Life, and this is the last time I'm going to get to enjoy it! So I changed my mind and now - voila! - unemployment is awesome! I remember reading once a freelance writer's description of her job - in essence it involved writing in her pyjamas then watching TV - and I remember that I couldn't decide whether I would find that type of work gratifying or empty. This is the type of unemployment that I now enjoy; I do have a job (two, actually!) but it only takes a few hours out of me each day and I can do the vast majority of it from my home in whatever stated of dress or undress pleases me most. Raised in an academic environment where business casual dress for every day class is expected and tardiness calls for near-death consequences, I have developed a haughty sense of self importance derived from work. If I'm not waking up at eight, putting on slacks and a collared shirt and clacking off to some place in high heels I feel slightly robbed of some title; some Fancy Business Lady title that - when you get right down to it - is sort of empty and silly, anyway. All that I really wanted to say here is done at this point. Here's a short quiz to make sure you got the meat of my message: What does Diana have and actually sort of enjoy?
A. A fulltime job
B. Tuna casserole
C. Nothing much to do during the day
D. A set of 6 sparkling piranhas If you answered C, you can stop reading now. If you chose incorrectly, here's some irrelevant reading material: I struggle a lot with the question of Does this really matter? I can dress up for class and I can ace my tests and I can be in the good graces of my department at school (this takes a truckload of work) and I can have a great resume and get fantastic jobs but when push comes to shove, I ask myself, does this really matter? I think this, also, when I'm watching the Olympics. I stare at the 16-year-olds galavanting across my television screen with the supposed honor of the nation upon their shoulders and I ask myself that question. To them, of course, it matters. There's the question of effort, of passion and - certainly - of integrity. But in thirty years they'll all be people who won an Olympic medal 30 years ago. Will people respect that, I wonder? Will their glory days be long gone? Olympians suffer moments and missteps that haunt them the rest of their lives and that the nation forgets in fractions of seconds and so, you have to wonder, does it matter? It's the importance of our actions in the eyes of others dwarfed by the importance of our actions in the eyes of our minds that gets to me. Things that mean the world to me mean nothing to almost anybody else and that perplexes me. I get to thinking that maybe it's not all that I thought it was, tempted to believe that the truly meaningful things are the ones that anybody can clearly tell the worth of. Obviously this is a dangerous train of thought; with that you might as well just vaporize because there's nothing that everybody loves and truly appreciates (except maybe the Budweiser Clydesdale horses; people really seem to go for those). I have to learn to interrupt the voice in my head before it can finish its sentence. See below: Lights up on Diana, deciding to take a handsomely paying job that will look great on her resume. VOICE IN DIANA'S HEAD: Diana, does this really matter?
DIANA: (Vehemently, interrupting VOICE before VOICE can finish its sentence) YES. Blackout. | | |
| Why do people exercise is street clothes? Could it ever be acceptable - much less comfortable - to walk on the treadmill in khakis and Keds, or to lift weights in a polo?
This - to no end - baffles me; and that is to say nothing for how very much it weirds me out.
Men, I have noticed, are much slower at the gym. While girls exercise with an efficiency that says "get in, get out, get going," guys seem to be making a day of it. When I arrive at the gym there is inevitably a duo or trio of guys (normally this ratio balances out to one trainer and one to two trainees) already poorly executing a set with obscenely heavy weights. When I leave an hour later, they have come nowhere near wrapping it up.
Since the campus weight room overlooks the main basketball court where the team practices, the guys also tend to linger near the windows as if listlessly wishing that they were tall enough/fast enough/skilled enough to be down their shooting hoops themselves. This, I figure, kills a good fifteen-to-thirty minutes of their designated workout time.
Yesterday I watched a young, muscular guy sitting and reading a magazine. After a few minutes he got up, went over to a weight machine, pumped out a few reps with much gusto, then returned to reading. He repeated this several times, never exercising for more than two minutes on any go-around, always coming back to the magazine.
Because I'm unable to fashionably zone out to my music while on one or another nameless elliptical machine I pass the time by critiquing others' technique on the weights. I've watched enough exercise videos and attended enough aerobics and dance classes to have earned myself the kind of amateurish know-how that would make me sound like a jackass if I ever spoke up and actually lent some criticism to the guy who's going to either throw out his back or rip a deltoid doing shoulder flies. However, silently telling him to square his feet with his shoulders, tighten his abs and lift the weights in a controlled rather than swinging motion can keep me entertained for minutes on end.
Amongst the typical gym crowd I particularly admire girls who can hold their own on the weights and other "manly" gym contraptions. I underestimated a svelte blonde who came in and climbed onto a stair stepping machine (used almost exclusively, I've noticed, by women). Just as I was judging her for being what I call a "pretty dancer girl" (this breed, common to and rampant at the OCU campus, is characterized by slim legginess, long hair, and an aura that says she ran with the popular crowd in high school) she got off, went over the the free weights and selected a set heavier than the one carried by the 20-something-year-old guy standing next to her. At this point I silently cheered and congratulated her on being awesome.
Going to the gym is essentially a chance for me to stare at people and judge their every move under the auspices of studiously observing the Great Beyond while chugging away at the stationary bike. There is a great sense - at any gym - that you are being covertly sized-up by every other person in the room the moment you make your entrance. "Am I stronger than that guy?" they ask themselves, "Stronger? Thinner?" Normally the answer must be a resolute "yes" that sets them comfortably back on course for their next three hours at the gym; or perhaps, from some, it's a resigned "no," and they go back to working faster, harder and with more efficient abandon.
| | |
| I always thought that my old college ID photo was embarrassing, but then my new one came along. In the old photo I just looked like an awkward sophomore having a bad hair day. In the new photo I look like a smarmy, possibly a-sexual pirate with a mop on his/her head.
Earlier this week when I walked onto campus, the first thing I noticed was a blue, palm-sized medallion type thing-um planted in the ground. "OCU walking course" it said in gold, and an arrow pointed the way. This was new and shiny so - my original intention for walking over to campus forgotten - I began following the the marked path. They took me halfway around campus before mysteriously ending. Thus abandoned, I got back to doing my errands.
I want you to know something about me: I hate talking on the phone. You can safely bet that once I begin a phone conversation, my primary goal is to end it ASAP. If I'm calling you on the phone it means that I really, really like you as a person. The only other possibility would be that I'm compelled by a spectacular sense of obligation.
Yesterday I locked myself out of my boyfriend's apartment. Don't get me wrong; I had the key to the place. I just couldn't make the key open the door. After several minutes of jiggling the lock I was saved by Scott's roommate looking - I can only assume - to confirm that the person trying to break in was indeed his roomie's hapless girlfriend and not the neighborhood Crazy. Not one minute later I locked myself out a second time when I left my car keys on the dresser and fled, locking the door from the inside.
This is why I'm a keeper.
Enough about keys and IDs, though, right? You came here for the boobies.
I have some strong opinions about these. On the general lady anything goes; I'm not the one to weigh in on who's got great tits and who doesn't. On those pin-up, girl-of-your-wet-dreams ladies, though, I've got a word or two. Recently I became acquainted with a Ms. Denise Milani. Say hello:
My boyfriend (my first source on such topics as giant breasts and why boys are so intrigued by lesbians) says he's seen bigger (humph) but I'm going to stand on my opinion that those breasts are just stupidly large. And that swimsuit??? It takes a special kind of sexy (I'll hand it to you - Denise is at least really, really attractive) to make that look alluring and not obscene. But would it hurt her so much to find a top that fits? She's gonna regret that sun tan big-time.
Or maybe (...yeah, definitely) I don't care how big Denise Milani's bazooms are; she'll get top-heavy tip over in her later years but so long as she's round in the bosom and waifishly thin, she's probably sittin' quite pretty for the present.
Oggle on.
| | |
|
