Operation Pink Herring

The most wonderful time of the year

Reasons number seventy-eight you should not have two margaritas on an empty stomach while surrounded by coworkers:

"Isn't is marvelous," I swooned.  To my boss.  She'd just asked what we all thought of Fall TV. 

But I'm not ashamed!  I'm in love, I'm in love and I don't care who knows it.  Last night Joel asked what my favorite new fall show was, and WELL, SINCE YOU ASKED.

There's The Event.  I'm digging it so far, even though it is treading a little too close to Lost's territory, what with the disappearing magic plane in the very first episode. They've got some aliens in there to change things up -- at least I'm pretty sure that chick from ER is an alien -- and a little government conspiracy to boot.  I'll give it a try, even though I was extremely disappointed by the casting of Luke Danes as a terrorist.  It turns out he wasn't a terrorist after all, he was acting under duress!  And now he's dead, so he can go back to being Luke Danes. 

Besides, Luke Danes being made to wear an awful pilot outfit instead of his eternal flannel shirt is the least of my problems as far as character defamation (har, get it?) goes this TV season. Let's talk about Hawaii 5-0, shall we?

Now, I am too young to have ever seen the original show, so I don't care at all if they ruin its "legacy" or whatever.  But again with the ripping off of the Lost -- here's Jin! And he's speaking English!  I realize that he was just pretending not to speak English in Lost -- that's what actors do, after all, they act -- but hearing someone who will always be Jin to me speak perfect English is extremely disconcerting.  It's too soon. Take a vacation for a year or twenty, Jin.  Or just never work again.  The latter is my preference.  That also goes for Mohinder, and I don't care if he was actually faking the British accent in Heroes and the new American accent in Covert Affairs is real.  No. Just... no.

However, this is my biggest issue: Boomer.  When you've been immortalized as Cylon Number Eight, you should just retire from acting. I don't want to see you playing some police academy newbie.  I am actually enjoying Hawaii 5-0 enough, but are there no other actors in the world?  Besides Jin and Boomer, we've got Mick St. John from the short-lived and admittedly terrible vamp series, Moonlight, playing the lead.  I'm actually OK with that, because his acting was so godawful in Moonlight that I never fully identified him as his character.

What else, what else... I'm OK with that Dark Blue show, as long as we're assuming that there is room in this world for yet another law enforcement drama.  NCIS LA continues to make me angry with its ridiculous plot lines and complete refusal to put LL Cool J in anything other than a solid-colored, tight-fitting long sleeved shirt.  The Vampire Diaries makes my life complete, but why do all the good shows have to be on Thursday night?  I mean, we've got Vamp Diaries, Nikita (LOVE), Jersey Shore and Project Runway on the same night?  And then on Wednesdays I'm forced to watch yet another drama-filled season of Ultimate Fighter because there is nothing else on?  Is this really necessary, TV schedulers of the world?

Supernatural continues to kick ass, proving that beloved characters CAN continue their careers when they are written off a long-running show like Gilmore Girls, provided that 1) there is a suitable gap between roles, and 2) they can actually, you know, ACT.  

Smallville is finally, FINALLY, coming to an end -- but not before introducing an army of Lex Luthor clones.  Yawn. This show, it kills me. WHEN IS HE GOING TO FLY, GODDAMNIT?  We've been waiting ten years.  It is time.

Am I missing anything wonderful this fall TV season?  It truly is marvelous, isn't it?

 

A lesson on dog walking from a non-dog owner

So, you've got a dog! Good for you. I like dogs. Dogs are great. Here are some quick instructions on how to care for your dog in the city.

1. Feed your dog. Dogs like food. 

2. Walk your dog. Dogs eat food, and then they need to poop.

2(a). Pick up your dog's poop.  I know, it's poop, it's gross. But if picking up poop is too gross for you, you should not have gotten a dog. Too late now! PICK IT UP. Use a bag.

2(b). Tie the bag up. This keeps the poop from getting out. If you need a diagram on how bags work, one can be provided for a small fee. 

2(c). Take the bag home with you and throw it in the trash. What's that? You don't want to carry the bag all the way home because it's full of poop and it's gross?  Again, too late. You should have thought of that before you got a dog.

2(d). Here's an idea!  If it's trash day, why don't you just deposit your bag full of your dog's shit in the first trash can you see on the sidewalk?  I mean, it's YOUR dog and YOUR dog's shit, but I'm sure that the owner of the trash can won't mind storing it for a week!

2(e). That was sarcasm.  If you don't want to carry your dog's shit home with you and store it until the next available trash pickup, imagine how much the owner of the trash can does not want to have that same shit rot in their trash can for a week. 

2(f). Yes, dumbass, that's what it means when all those empty garbage cans are lined up on the street: the trash collectors have already come by. The next pickup is in seven (7) days.

2(g). The owner of that trash can especially does not want to store your dog's shit for a week if you've neglected to follow instruction 2(b) regarding bag closure.

3. If you find yourself unable to follow the instructions above, watch your step. An angry neighbor might just leave a litterbox full of cat piss on your stoop.

How was your day, honey?

When Joel and I were doing pre-marital counseling one of the things our counselor recommended was a "daily debrief".  Every evening, you just take five our ten minutes to talk uninterrupted about what happened in your day.  It felt kind of silly at first, but it's become a very natural part of our day.  "So, what's going on today," Joel will ask as we're brushing our teeth.  Free pizza lunch at work, maybe, or three-hour meeting that no one is looking forward to.  Evening reports are no more exciting, but it's a good way to catch up when you spend 8 hours apart each day and come home to laundry that needs to be done and dinner that needs to be made and cats that never stop yowling.  Free sandwiches for lunch (my reports often revolve around food of the free variety)! I was accosted by a crazy person demanding fifty cents on my way home!  Had to kick a girl off the treadmill I'd reserved at the gym and she totally gave me attitude, and then five minutes later I realized I had my shorts on backwards! Thrilling stuff, really.

Except for yesterday, when my workplace (which, yes, you can totally figure out, but I'm not naming on purpose here) made the front page of CNN.com because there was a shooting. 

I was puttering around getting things ready for a lunch seminar in the morning.  I set up the laptop and projector, loaded the presentation, opened the door when the catering guy arrived.  I was making what felt like my forty-third trip down the hallway when a coworker erupted out of her office, cell phone in hand.  "Did you get the alert?!" she asked. "There's a shooter!"

Um, pardon moi?

The news spread very quickly after the emergency alert (which I never got, THANK YOU VERY MUCH) went out: there was a shooter in the hospital.  It was rumored he had hostages (this turned out pretty quickly to be false).  Buildings were supposedly on lockdown.  Everyone was supposed to go into their offices, shut the door, and stay away from the windows. 

Of course, what's the first thing people do when you tell them not to look? We wandered into the office with the street view and watched wide-eyed as the cop cars and fire trucks pile onto the street below.  Wait, was that a SNIPER lying across the street?  Look, it's the police helicopter!  Um, is that a SWAT truck?

While there was obviously a very serious situation going on across the street, we seemed pretty safe with a rainbow assortment of law enforcement officials between us and the building in question. There were no sirens, not even from the police cars below -- and I work at a hostpital. There are ALWAYS sirens. There was no announcement from the PA system telling us to calmly exit the building or to take shelter or to do anything, really. In fact, I've seen people here get more worked up over winter storm advisories.

"So, we're still doing the seminar?  The show must go on?" I half-joked.  Might as well, we figured.  And so we did.  We went about our day in an oddly normal fashion, taking breaks to press our faces against the window and watch the corporate security guys hustle around on what was certainly the most exciting day of their jobs.  I sent an email to my mom and texted Joel, telling them not to worry, I'm fine and by the way I think we're on the news.  I snapped a few more pictures with my phone and went back to my desk.

Two hours later, the situation was over.  We saw the SWAT guys shake hands with the police and drive away.  I watched the mayor give a press conference and wondered if I should go downstairs and run around the block to get a cameo the "live cam" CNN.com had set up on the street corner (hint: I did not).  When 5pm rolled around I packed up my stuff and went home, just like any other day. 

It was one of the strangest days at work I've ever had, and the story that has emerged is tragically sad. I hope that I will have nothing even remotely exciting to report tonight.

 

Scott Pilgrim Versus the Old Notebook

Over the long weekend I spent several hours organizing our home filing cabinet. Lately I have been feeling like our house is a total disaster, but I didn’t really feel like cleaning. So instead I organized the filing cabinet while watching Tivoed episodes of my new favorite show –- it’s called Man, Woman, Wild and it has completely replaced that lying liar Bear Grylls in my heart -- and then I felt better about my messy house. Don’t question the method, it works.

In the back of the filing cabinet I came across a stash of old notebooks. Now, here’s a confession: although I am a huge fan of home organization, getting rid of clutter, and taking trashbags of junk to Goodwill, I have trouble letting go of notebooks and day planners. I get a sort of archaeologist thrill flipping through my old pen-and-paper calendars, trying to remember what “6pm Black&White” on May 17, 2002 meant and reminiscing about the days before I used an Outlook calendar, when I used to color-code all of my school, work, and social obligations using purple, green, and black pens. I also can’t part with anything school-related. When I finished my last Master’s class, I neatly organized all my notes and papers and stowed them in a banker’s box in the basement. I stashed the remaining notebooks with empty pages in the back of the filing cabinet to use as scrap paper and then promptly forgot about them. When I discovered them this weekend, I pulled out two smaller notebooks that I thought were empty and brought them in to use at work.

As I flipped the first one open yesterday, I found a few pages of notes scrawled in Joel’s handwriting. All in all there were about fifteen pages filled with college-era scribbles and notes. July 25th marked not only our first wedding anniversary, but also the eighth anniversary of our first date. Eight years! Skimming through Joel’s notes made me feel so nostalgic, recalling the days when we were boyfriend and girlfriend, meeting up after class to eat dinner and watch Smallville, back when Smallville was still a good show. There were some coaching notes on the first few pages, followed by instructions on how to refinish a door. After that was a page with job possibilities listed out and another page with numbers of computer repair places. Finally, at the very end of the used notebook section, I came across a list titled “Things to do this Summer”. It was so cute to read.  Baseball Game, Annapolis, Smithsonian, Matthew’s Pizza. A few items were crossed off, and I tried to remember doing them. The Baltimore Museum of Art ($5/person), yes, we definitely went there a time or two. How quaint, we had to pay!  Now it's free.  Go to DC and do the tourist thing, yup, we have a picture of us standing in front of some memorial during cherry blossom season on our bookshelf, me with my super-short hair and Joel in that blue t-shirt. Try crabs…well, that’s strange, because I know I didn’t have crabs, real crabs, hit-them-with-a-mallet crabs, until last year. I wonder why that’s crossed off? And “beach”? When did we ever go to the beach? I hate beaches.

And that’s when I noticed the year scribbled next to the list title, 2001, and did some quick math. This is 2010, minus 2001, equals nine. We have been together eight years. Eight is less than nine. RIght? Well, let's see: we graduated high school in 1999.  So that was the summer before freshman year.  2000 would be the summer before sophomore year and 2001 would be... the summer before junior year.  We met at the very end of that summer, and when I say "met," I mean that I crashed on the couch of my friends' house, where JOel had just moved in, for a few weeks before jetting off to Madrid for my summer abroad.  Our conversations, if we had any, were not memorable.  We did not hang out.  We most certainly did not go to the beach together.  I realized that this list, Things to do this Summer (2001), was an accounting of fun things that Joel did with his old girlfriend.

Internet, I do not know if I have ever felt such an intense wave of jealousy. This list looked exactly like the kind we make together, except Joel made it with someone else! Some woman who is NOT ME! I was instantly hateful of this stupid hussy, who from the very little I know about her was a perfectly nice girl.  I wanted to punch her in the face. I wanted to tell her to stay the hell away from MY man. I wanted her to not exist.

As I said, Joel and I met for the first time in August of 2001.  We didn’t say more than a quick hello to each other until I came back from Spain in the spring, and we didn’t start dating for another six months after that.  I spent most of my semester abroad (Mom, close your eyes) going out to Spanish clubs and staying out until 5, 6, 7am. Nearly all my friends that semester had left boyfriends back in the States, which left me and my one other single friend responsible for making out with more than our fair share of Spanish boys, a responsibility we took quite seriously. We even had matching pseudo-boyfriends named Alejandro Uno and Alejandro Dos for a few weeks! So it is not only ridiculous for me to feel mad about Joel having fun summer adventures with someone else during this time, it’s completely unfair and hypocritical. 

And yet, I cannot look at this list without feeling a jealous fire in the pit of my stomach. I want to find this girl he went to the beach with in the summer of 2001 and tell her, Hi, I don’t think we’ve met, but you dated my husband nearly a decade ago and the two of you broke up before we met. And guess what? YOUR LOSS! He’s mine now, I win, back off, and go back to living what I hope is a very happy life in which you are oblivious to my existence.  PS: Stay the hell away from my hunky man.

Time to get the old hearing checked

You may remember the minor freakout in which I was convinced our entire household was going to die in our sleep due to a gas leak in the oven.  I can call it a minor freakout now because it all turned out fine.  The problem was with the oven, not the gas line, and it was quickly fixed for a couple hundred bucks.  No big deal!  God, why am I always so dramatic?  I guess I've seen too many of those BGE commercials.  Wires down, red alert, don't go near, you'll get hurt!  Yeah, I totally know all the words.  Safety first, my friends.

The fix to this problem, unsurprisingly, involved having a guy come over to fix our oven.  Unfortunately, I hate having repairmen come to the house.  HATE IT.  It is so awkward. 

The worst was the exterminator that we've had to have come over several times to deal with the massive ant invasions we suffer here in the heart of the concrete jungle.  He was gross to begin with, all grunty and sweaty (I am quite forgiving of sweatiness, but this guy was above and beyond any normal limits of perspiration).  But even worse, he would always ask me about the baby.  Did I need to go feed the baby?  Should he be extra quiet in case the baby was sleeping?  It would have all been very considerate of him, if, you know, I HAD A BABY.   Which I do not.  Never have.  I got the vague idea that he was trying to hit on me a few times, like he was waiting for me to exclaim that I didn't have a baby because I was single and lonely and wanted to go out on a date with him. It was fucking creepy.  If I had had a baby, I would have kept it far away from him.

But even the ones that don't repeatedly inquire about my non-existent offspring are awkward.  I never know what exactly you're supposed to do while they're fixing your alarm system or replacing that leaky pipe in the kitchen.  Do you hang around in case they have questions?  Just go back upstairs to watch TV and wait for them to call you when they're done?  Are you supposed to clean your house before they come over?  Are you supposed to tip them?  Offer them coffee?  GAH.  What do you say when they tell you "your house is pretty," as the guy who cleaned our dryer vent did?  (I said "thank you" and then spent the rest of the day wondering if he was being sarcastic. On that particular day I'd decided that no, you don't have to clean the house for repairmen.)

Anyway, the oven repairman came, fixed the broken heating element in the oven, and left.  I stayed upstairs while he was working because I was in the middle of a Pretty Little Liars episode, but fear not -- Madison the Cat kept an eye on his every move.  I'm sure he appreciated being micromanaged by a snaggletoothed cat. 

Before he left, I asked him to take a look at one of the stovetop burners.  I never thought it was a problem before, but flames sort shoot out from under the burner when it's on, and after a near-death experience with the oven I wanted to get it checked out.  He said it needed to be replaced, but he didn't carry the parts with him.  They'd have to come back, and in the meantime we shouldn't use that burner.

I was really hoping that it would be a different guy for the second appointment, for the same reason that I never go back to the same hair stylist: I hate making small talk with semi-strangers.  No such luck.  Same guy.  Same cat demanding to supervise his work, same messy house.  This time I opted to just stay downstairs, reading a magazine in the next room while he worked, feeling ridiculously awkward. 

After about ten minutes, I heard him say "Ma'am?", and BOY, good thing I wasn't upstairs, I told myself.

"Yes?"

"Do you by any chance have a bathroom?"

"Of course," I told him, "it's right upstairs and to the left." And to myself, I thought, dear Jesus, please let the toilet be flushed.

"Upstairs?",  he asked.

"Yup, upstairs and to the left.  You really can't miss it."  When was the last time that toilet was used?  Oh god, are my bras still hang-drying on the back of the door in there? 

"Upstairs, and to the... left."  He gave me a strange look and resumed fiddling with the burner. 

Well, I told myself, I guess he didn't have to go too badly.

A little while later, he put his tools down.

"So, it's upstairs and to the left?"

"Yup," I confirmed.

He slowly went up the stairs.  Then I heard him start to come back down.  There had been no toilet flush.  Crap, I thought, was it THAT bad in there? 

He appears at the bottom of the steps holding our purple Dyson vacuum.

And then I died. 

And when the locksmith came over last week to put a new deadbolt on our alley gate, Joel handled the entire transaction while I hid upstairs in my pajamas.  Amen.