The Kind of Leave Where You Never Come Back

This amused me.

Good Day, Katharine!

Can you provide the last day of work for Mr. _____ _____ (xxx-xx-xxxx)?

Also, Prudential needs to confirm the type of Leave for Mr. _____ (i.e. personal or medical). Let me know if you have any questions.

Thanks

Charles

Charles-

Mr. _____'s last day at work was 09/26/06. Also, he is dead, not on leave. Please inform Prudential of this fact.

Thank you!

-Katharine

I can't decide if I should have been more professional in my response or not. Yes, I could have used the word "deceased" or the term "has passed away." But I really think they should just be grateful that I didn't say "he bought the farm, dumbass - you should know, since you're looking at the exact same data in the same system as I am."

An Apache Helicopter

As I believe I've mentioned elsewhere, Richard is extremely quotable. These aren't your run-of-the-mill quotes, though. These are less Yeats and more Yogi Berra. Here are a few gems I've been saving up over the past few weeks:

Richard has been staring out of the window, dreamily, for a good, solid five minutes.
Me: Whatcha thinking about over there?
Richard (after a long pause): If I could fly anything, it'd be a helicopter.
Me: Oh.
Richard (about thirty seconds later): An Apache helicopter.

We're driving in my car; Richard is, as usual, complaining about my music.
Richard: What is that shite?
Me: It's Rent.
Richard: It's gay. Turn it off.
Me: Fine. What do you want to listen to instead?
Richard (completely serious, but in a high-pitched, excited voice): Phantom!

Richard is holding an umbrella, looking quite consternated.
Richard: How does this thing work?
Me: Huh?
Richard (even more annoyed now): I said, how does this thing work?!
Me: ...Did you just ask me how an umbrella works? Seriously?
Richard: Yes. Are you going to show me or not?

I'm sitting at my desk, at work. My phone rings.
Richard: Hey! What's up?
Me: Not much.
Richard: Where are you?
Me: I'm at work. Where you called me.
Richard: Oh. Right. Sorry.

The next day...
Richard: Hey! What's up?
Me: Not much.
Richard: Where are you?
Me: I'm at work. Where you called me. Just like yesterday.
Richard: Oh. Right. Sorry.

I love this man.

Yes, you.

Colorful

I'm not quite sure what this means: "Wow, you look really colorful today..."

I don't know if that's a compliment or not. I mean, would you take that as a compliment? Maybe if I was aiming for "colorful," then I wouldn't even be thinking about this. But somehow "colorful" is resonating in my mind as an adjective that someone came up with because they couldn't think of anything else to say.

Or maybe I should just stop wearing this outfit to work:

I forgot to shave that day, okay?

Hair Misadventures

While poking around tonight on YouTube, I found this amazing video of two of the great modern masters, Yo Yo Ma (the cellist) and El Gran Ástor, Ástor Piazzolla (the bandoneon player). If this doesn't move you, then you're made of stone:



I think most people have heard of Yo Yo Ma, but Ástor Piazzolla is still largely unappreciated in this country. He basically reinvinted tango music by taking it from the nightclubs and cabarets of Argentina and elevating it to a legitimate art form by fusing it with modern jazz and classical music. So go and give El Gran Ástor a try sometime. If you like him, you'll probably like his protege, too: Dino Salduzzi. My newest CD is also Dino's newest, Ojos Negros, which also -- coincidentally -- happens to be a recording of duets between a bandoneon player and a cellist. Very, very good stuff.

In other news, after an unfortunate hair-dye incident yesterday, I am now a brunette. I made the sad mistake of attempting to dye my hair (I was tired of the dirty blonde look) and, out of an overinflated sense of my own styling/coloring techniques, I decided to do it myself. First mistake. I went for a "strawberry blonde" shade -- at least, according to the Clairol "Coloure Experte" box. That's the last time I buy hair dye whose own packaging can't even spell the world color. Second mistake. Needless to say, the color didn't quite turn out as expected. Instead of "strawberry blonde," I got this:

Only more frightening. I waited a full 24 hours and shampooed it furiously, praying that the color would tone itself down, but to no avail. Instead, I ended up doing the walk of shame into my local Visible Changes today where I was the butt of many jokes in the coloring department. I was even an example to some trainees of how not to "do red." No shit? Yeah, I think everyone got that memo already.

So, three hours in the salon, a headful of bleach paste (yes, bleach paste) and $250 later, I am now a brunette. It's obviously not my natural color but the stylist said that putting anything else on over the bleach would damage my hair too much. Then, of course, she loaded me down with hideously overpriced salon shampoos and conditioners and hair masques and I bought them with my head hung, simply grateful that anyone was able to correct my Pennywise 'do and ashamed of my own hubris.

The brunette is growing on me, though, and Richard is strangely attracted to it. I always knew he had a thing for brunettes... Maybe I've had enough of being a blonde for a while. At the very least, now I can start conquering that other physical attribute that causes people to immediately assume that I'm a blithering moron:

They're not mine, sickos.

BBQ?

This is a great website, but...man:


...and I thought I was an asshole. Can you imagine receiving this from someone on the street? Or, more likely, from somebody in an Urban Outfitters who's trying way too hard to fit into the whole emo scene but in whom you can still see the glimmers of an angry, disenfranchised nerd?

At least these cards don't take themselves so seriously:

Seriously? I want these for Christmas / my birthday / a wedding gift / Arbor Day. I would hand these out like candy.

Engrish

As a person who is somewhat (okay, very) anal-retentive about the proper usage of the English language, its grammar, its punctuation and its spelling, working for a foreign-owned company whose global corporate office sends out hilariously-translated memos and other errata amuses me to no end. Today, I received this gem:

This message is to confirm you that your service request Folder Access Form was registered the: 6/13/2007 9:21:03 AM with the ticket number 2590777

Our commitment is to solve it no longer then the: 6/14/2007 12:48:00 PM

And yesterday it was this:

Policies

Additionally, here are the effective policies pertaining to your request:
I. It is required to completely fill out the form (throughout Lotus Notes or the Intranet), all the fields are mandatory, if there is any omission, the request will not proceed.
II. The full path must be indicated since only access to the final folder will be given.
III. The Business Process of each area, is the responsible for validating that the information owner has authorized the requestor to access the folders or network directories mentioned.
IV. A copy of the request must be sent to the Business Process of your area. Nevertheless, the request does not guarantee the service execution.
V. Once the Business Process has given the approval, the Global Service Center proceeds to execute the service and notifies the user that requested it.
VI. If the request has been declined by the Business Process, the user will be notified and the service will not proceed.
VII. The person to whom the access is provided, is subject to the Information Security policies effective in _______.
VIII. Supervisor or Area Manager approval required.

We appreciate the time you took to read this message and we invite you to extend it to whom you may consider necessary.

Granted, the language isn't quite insane enough for this site, but it's just stilted enough to make me giggle at random points during the day. I seem to be the only person doing this, which leads me to believe that either (a), everyone else here has gotten used to it or (b) no one really cares. I'm leaning strongly towards (b) right now.

Nine Times?

Because there's not enough douchbaggery in the real world:

10 Great Big Movie Douchebags

He's just leading you down the primrose path...

Geography

I came across an interesting map today (yes, maps can be interesting) here: States Renamed for Countries With Similar GDPs .

And here's a (really crappy) picture of the map for those of you too lazy to click:

While California may have bested us in this particular economic category, I'd still rather be Canada than France any day. Welcome to Texas, eh?

Define:Irony

On Friday, I tripped and fell. Actually, it was more like I went ass-over-teakettle and bit it, hard, in front of the entire department, all of whom were gathered to celebrate a fellow co-worker's birthday. I mean, drink-in-my-hand-flying-everywhere, bruised-and-rugburned-knees, sprained-ankle, down-for-the-count bit it. And since it was only my second week on the job, I'm sure I'll be known for at least the next few months as "that girl who busted her ass in front of everyone."

But here's my favorite part: I tripped and fell over a stack of safety posters that had been waiting to be hung on the walls for about six weeks.

If that's not a euphimism for Human Resources in general, I don't know what is.

AH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!

Man, I couldn't make this shit up if I tried. From a Worker's Comp report I was reviewing today:

Per patient report, injury occurred prior to care in our facility. Mr. ________ was lifting a vibrator weighing 100 lbs. when he felt sudden pain in his back.

Really, now?

Currently being sought for questioning.

I Ain't Saying She A Golddigger...

Why am I wholly unsurprised that this lovely little nugget of a story came out of Dallas? Granted, it was written and published in my hometown newspaper (seriously, I might as well live in Legoland or Smurf Village given the quality of our newspaper; it's a total joke), but it was completely inspired by the husband-hunting hags in Dallas.

The feminist in me wants to curl up and die right now out of sheer embarassment for my gender.

Going for the gold
You have to use the right bait if you want to land a rich fish - er, husband

By EILEEN McCLELLAND
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Dress for Success
Author J.C. Conklin offers the following tips for what to wear while husband-hunting.

Heels: At all costs.

Bra: The pushup is best.

Hair: Long and blond, if at all possible.

Thong: Always, and it should match the bra.

Accessories: Now is not the time for big jewelry or purses. Both scream high maintenance to men.

Makeup: Most men don't even realize you're wearing it. They think you naturally look that good. Now is not the time for them to find out otherwise.

Know your strengths: If you have good legs or arms, show them off.

But remember: Dress like the girlfriend, not the one-night stand.

Hunting for a rich husband?

Think camouflage, but not the woodsy kind - unless, of course, you're at a rattlesnake roundup, prime husband-hunting grounds in Texas.

In an urban milieu, you've got to look prosperous enough to blend in with your prey's elite social circle. For example, drive a leased Lexus only if you can't borrow a Mercedes.

J.C. Conklin, author of a snarky new novel about Texas women and their pursuit of a rich husband, advises that even spiritual matters matter. Choose a popular Texas religion, Methodist or Baptist.

And don't hesitate to resort to plastic surgery. At the very least, bleach.

"You should have long hair and if you can, be blond, be blond,'' says Conklin, author of The Dallas Women's Guide to Gold-Digging With Pride (Ballantine, $22.95). "Every man I've ever talked to has never described a woman who's blond as mousy.''

In the satirical novel, ex-New Yorker Jenny Barton, 29, works for a frumpy female boss-from-hell at the Wall Street Journal's Dallas bureau. Recovering from a recent split from slacker journalist Rafe and under the influence of her blond, husband-hunting roommate, Aimee, Jenny attempts to lure a rich Texan or two.

There are certain parallels to the author's life. During Conklin's four years in Dallas, as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and then the Dallas Morning News, she was surprised to meet women in their 20s stalking wealthy men in their spare time. Women who wear stilettos to shop at Whole Foods. Who liposuction their uncooperative thighs to squeeze into size-4 Vera Wang wedding gowns. Who order room service for their traveling boyfriends to make sure they're spending the night where they say they are.

Born in Houston, Conklin grew up in upstate New York and graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle with a degree in comparative religion. Landing in Dallas was a culture shock.

The women she met weren't hunting for just any husband, but the super-rich variety. To that end, they underwent plastic surgery, starved themselves, bought clothes they couldn't afford and even popped pain killers so they could sleep with guys they found revolting. (Sexy and rich is not that common a combination, Conklin's characters lament.)

"Some of it's exaggerated but a lot of it is what people told me," said Conklin, now 29 and living in Austin. "There is a high premium on looks. I don't think that's exaggerated. There is a high premium on tracking the men. There has been breaking and entering, or breaking into e-mail at the very least."

And when they weren't snooping, they were grooming.

"You can't be too overt," Conklin said. "You can't have a short skirt and a lot of cleavage. You have to choose one or the other. You have to imagine what he would be thinking of you as a wife. Dress appropriately, not desperately. Heels are always good. Accentuate the assets that you have, not the style of the day, because men never know what's in. They only know what looks good on you."

Other strategies apply once you have set your sights on a particular target.

"Find out what he likes so you can pop those things into the conversation before he does. And learn to cook one really phenomenal dish so it looks like you're a good cook." You can always hire a chef after the nuptials.

It helps if you're not too squeamish to engage in sports, or better yet, hunting. Wrangle an invitation to a rattlesnake roundup.

"Anytime you show no fear of blood or killing that adds to your ranking," Conklin said. And Texas guys reportedly love to play with rattlesnakes. "I saw a guy holding five rattlesnakes by the tail in his mouth. His left hand was all shriveled from the venom. It's a very macho, very Texas thing to do."

Conklin's Dallas friends had jobs, careers even, but didn't expect to work for very long. After the wedding, the marriage becomes a full-time job.

"What you have to do to keep the rich husbands is just amazing," she said. "All the exercising, all the devotion to this other person. It's not your life. It's the other person's life and you're just staffing it."

Still, there was something about their goal-oriented pursuit that started to change career-girl Conklin's thinking about the whole marriage thing.

"I didn't husband-hunt for a rich guy," she said, "but I was dating a lot of guys who were slacker-reporter guys, and being in Dallas made me realize that was a dead-end proposition. It made me look for guys who wanted the things that I wanted, like a family. In New York, you don't think about getting married until you're well into your 30s."

Some of the changes she made when she moved to Dallas made her more approachable, she said, more marriageable. In addition to becoming nicer and less competitive, she said, "I got a lot blonder.

"I started to work out a lot more. I never used to get my nails done, never used to get my eyebrows waxed, all the beauty maintenance. And when I was living in Dallas, I was wearing heels every day, skirts, suits, very dressed."

Today, she has an 11-month-old son and a daughter on the way. And yes, she is married, not to a millionaire but to a guy with a stable income and goals she shares.

"All my friends in New York are living the kind of life I led 10 years ago," she said. "I got married last year. That's a very Texas influence, I would say."

As if I really needed another reason to despise Dallas and its disturbingly pervasive influence on the way that Texas is perceived...

Honestly, though, I think what bothers me more than anything is not the utterly desperate ends that these women will go to in order to line their pockets, but rather the men who so eagerly accept them as wives. What does this say about them? I don't know what the general consensus is, but I can tell you that every single time I see a man with a trophy wife or girlfriend on his arm, the first thought that comes to my mind is, "What an insecure moron."

See, I think it says a lot more about the man than it does the woman -- and maybe that's just me. Unfortunately, we still live in a society where so many young women are told that they need a "provider" and so many of them are valued based solely upon their material accumulations and outward appearance. We perpetuate this in our society and until that vicious cycle ends, we will always have misguided women. That's an argument for another day, though.

But we've never prided ourselves as a society on allowing people to prey on our money and take advantage of our insecurities. Those are things which, should they happen to you, you'd normally correct or hide or both. Yet, here we have these men -- whether they be aesthetically-challenged, emotionally-challenged, or simply common-sense-challenged -- who are proud of their trophy wife investment! They display them proudly and the message that they hope to convey is, "I'm a success both in my business and my personal life and I have this fine piece of ass to show for it!"

Instead, what they are really saying is, "I'm deeply insecure and/or stupid and willing to forego having any kind of real love, companionship or meaningful relationship with a woman and instead require this Botox-ed, silicone-enhanced, bleached-blonde, Mystic-tanned, money-hungry bimbo to overcompensate for my many shortcomings. Now, can I please have some A-1 for my steak and a piece of lettuce for the lady?" Good job, guys.

/approves

Hot, Warm, Nervous Hands

Woody Guthrie is deeply underappreciated.

Remember The Mountain Bed

Do you still sing of the mountain bed we made of limbs and leaves:
Do you still sigh there near the sky where the holly berry bleeds:
You laughed as I covered you over with leaves, face, breast, hips and thighs.
You smiled when I said the leaves were just the color of your eyes.

Rosin smells and turpentine smells from eucalyptus and pine
Bitter tastes of twigs we chewed where tangled woodvines twine
Trees held us in on all four sides so thick we could not see
I could not see any wrong in you, and you saw none in me.

Your arm was brown against the ground, your cheeks part of the sky.
As your fingers played with grassy moss, and limber you did lie:
Your stomach moved beneath your shirt and your knees were in the air
Your feet played games with mountain roots, as you lay thinking there.

Below us the trees grew clumps of trees, raised families of trees, and they
As proud as we tossed their heads in the wind and flung good seeds away:
The sun was hot and the sun was bright down in the valley below
Where people starved and hungry for life so empty come and go.

There in the shade and hid from the sun we freed our minds and learned.
Our greatest reason for being here, our bodies moved and burned
There on our mountain bed of leaves we learned life’s reason why
The People laugh and love and dream, they fight, they hate to die.

The smell of your hair I know is still there, if most of our leaves are blown,
Our words still ring in the brush and the trees were singing seeds are sown
Your shape and form is dim, but plain, there on our mountain bed
I see my life was brightest where you laughed and laid your head…

I learned the reason why man must work and how to dream big dreams,
To conquer time and space and fight the rivers and the seas
I stand here filled with my emptiness now and look at city and land
And I know why farms and cities are built by hot, warm, nervous hands.

I crossed many states just to stand here now, my face all hot with tears,
I crossed city, and valley, desert, and stream, to bring my body here:
My history and future blaze bright in me and all my joy and pain
Go through my head on our mountain bed where I smell your hair again.

All this day long I linger here and on in through the night
My greeds, desires, my cravings, hopes, my dreams inside me fight:
My loneliness healed my emptiness filled, I walk above all pain
Back to the breast of my woman and child to scatter my seeds again.

I wanted to play this song at the wedding (the Billy Bragg/Wilco version), but Richard said that he'd only indulge my eccentric tastes if I would indulge his and allow him to play Rock You Like a Hurricane for our first dance. Thanks so much for that idea, Marge.

The Horror, The Horror

After many years of being a faithful and devoted Outlook user, I find myself forced to become intimately acquainted with that coelacanth of the IBM era: Lotus Notes.

I loved Outlook. No, you don't understand. I loved Outlook. I had a special bond with Outlook, a symbiotic relationship, a knowledge that no matter where I went or what new software or processes I'd have to learn, Outlook would always be there. In return for its steadfastness, I learned all of its ins and outs, the little quirks, the keyboard shortcuts that meant I never even needed to use a mouse while in Outlook (I hate mice/mouses/whatever, a holdover from my college days spent in front of the comforting green glow of CLIs on our Sun computers).

But now I've been thrust into an entire new e-mail world and I'm completely and totally disoriented. It's an awkward feeling. I've always felt comfortable learning new systems and software pacakges. I'm the person (nerd) who can fool around with a piece of software for a few minutes and feel totally at home with it. I'm the person (even bigger nerd) who goes home at night and researches shortcuts and idiosyncrasies and experiments with new and different ways to achieve my ends with those new software packages.

But Lotus Notes has me in a stranglehold. It is a dinosaur. It is a mammoth wallowing in a tar pit. My 51-year-old mother even laughed at me when I told her that we use Lotus at work. Her reaction: "I haven't seen Lotus since 1989! Loser!" I haven't seen or heard from Lotus myself since my "microcomputing" class during my sophomore year of high school. I didn't know that it still existed in any practical form, much less at a global corporation known for its affinity for technology. But I'm stuck with it for now.

It has by far one of the most unappealing and unintuitive GUIs I've ever seen. Granted, it apparently developed the idea of tabbed browsing long before Mozilla or the fancy new Explorer did, but the tabs themselves are tiny, hard to read and open and close at random (Replication? I didn't click on Replication!).

It's advanced enough to know that you've received new mail (yes, but so is the new Hotmail server, so BFD) but it's not advanced enough to actually display that new mail unless you go to a tiny menu in the far bottom corner and click on "Receive," which is maddeningly close to "Send Outgoing Mail" and which I unfailingly click on every time instead of "Receive" because I am so freaking clumsy with a mouse.

If you fail to interact with Lotus for more than five minutes, it will lock you out. It doesn't notify you that you've been locked out, however, so in the meantime you're pecking away at your keyboard and toiling at your other work actitivies, blissfully unaware that there are about fifteen e-mails waiting for you that need to be answered. And when you finally do cotton to the fact that you've been locked out and log yourself back in, the goddamn thing takes about five minutes to "Replicate" all of your e-mails and actually display them for you.

Furthermore, there is no real capability for storing e-mails in folders (the system which I've always used to sort through the masses of crap I get every day). It exists, and Lotus will let you do it, but it's very stilted and difficult and I get the feeling that every time I move an e-mail to a folder, Lotus creakily opens its eyes like an ancient tortoise and stares at me quizzically as if to say, "Whaaat are you doingk, yaaawngk one? Ve do not store files in this vaaay."

And in one of my least favorite moves so far, it has the most ridiculous address book system I've ever encountered. To send an e-mail to someone within the company, you have to know their middle name. That's right. We have over 22,000 employees in North America alone which equals roughly 25 Rogers, 68 Alans, 112 Johns, etc. An intelligent program would rely upon their last name to whittle things down from there. But not Lotus; here we use middle names. So not only am I learning everyone's names and positions and locations, I'm also becoming acquainted with their sometimes bizarre nomenclature (ex: Ernest Quest Daniel III). And it gets worse with people external to the company -- all of my outside contacts like brokers and consultants have to be painstakingly and meticulously added to the little address book subprogram before I can send e-mail to them. Otherwise, I have to pull up an old e-mail of theirs, copy their e-mail address and paste it into a new "memo" (not e-mail, memo...grr) or else I have to type the entire thing in from scratch/memory.

Luckily, I'm not alone in my sentiments. While doing some of the aforementioned nerd-research, I found these sites:

• Lotus Notes Sucks
• Gripes About Lotus Notes
• 70 Reasons Lotus Notes Sucks
• and my favorite: Lotus Notes - The Horror, The Horror

What I have yet to find, of course, are any sites with names like "I Love Lotus Notes!" or "Lotus Notes Is The Greatest Thing Since Vacuum-Sealed Lunchmeat!" I won't be holding my breath for those.

Leonard Cohen

Well, after many moons of posting blogs on another site, I've decided to transfer them over here to lovely Blogger, which I once utilized and then callously abandoned about three years ago. Unlike Myspace, Blogger is actually accessible here at work and -- what a sad commentary this is -- I do most of my writing at work. It's not that I don't have real work to do, it's more that when I'm sitting here in a big, mostly empty office with music playing, that's when ideas come to me. That, and it really helps diminish my stress level when I can put things aside for thirty minutes or so and just gush randomly onto a little white screen and into a mostly unknown audience.

It's a Rufus Wainwright kind of day over here, by which I mean that I've been listening to old Wainwright CDs all morning long. He makes the perfect contemplative music -- relaxing yet edgy and thought-provoking. I also love the random covers that he does; if you've never heard his cover of Careless Whisper with Ben Folds, go ye to YouTube right now and check it out. It's just awesomely funny and trippy. And right here is where I could head off on a tangent about how much I love Ben Folds now that he's no longer with Ben Folds Five, but let's just stop right here, shall we?

Anyway, one of the covers that Rufus Wainwright did was an old Leonard Cohen song, Chelsea Hotel No. 2, hence the title of the new-ish blog. It's my absolute favorite Cohen song, which is saying a lot (I think that my perverse obsession with Leonard Cohen has been well-documented elsewhere in my blogs, so I'll not go into this right now). I love Cohen's voice, but in the same way that you love Bob Dylan's voice. You accept that it's not perfect, it's often off-key, it's gravelly and not in the good Don Henley way and that's okay because - goddamn - the man wrote some of the most beautiful lyrics this world has ever seen and he can fucking mime them if he wants to because they're his. It doesn't matter how his voice sounds; to actually hear the man that wrote the words say or sing them aloud is an experience in and of itself. It's akin to listening to Eliot read The Wasteland aloud (please, please, please check this out if you've never heard it) and hearing where emphasis is placed upon certain words and phrases, where the pauses and breaths communicate deeper imagery and meaning, far removed from a world where scholars endlessly pick apart his lines and insert their own agendas and interpretations into his work.

But listening to Wainwright's voice with Cohen's lyrics...that was a revelation, too, the first time I heard it. Rufus Wainwright has the amazing ability to take lyrics that aren't his or that are his but have nothing at all to do with him (listen to The Art Teacher for an excellent example) and make you believe that he's felt all of the agony or excitement or passion himself. Now that's a great artist, a great performer. When I listen to Chelsea Hotel No. 2, I ache. I ache for lost opportunities, lost friends, lost times and possibilities and potential. But aching is not a bad thing, not always. Aching - any kind of unpleasantness, for that matter - just paints the good moments in starker contrast to the bad, forces you to appreciate them both more.

Now that I've driven on that side road for long enough, back to the highway. The main point here is that I wanted to share these lyrics because - as I've always said - there isn't enough Cohen in the world:

Chelsea Hotel No. 2

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were talking so brave and so sweet
Giving me head on the unmade bed
While the limousines wait in the street
Those were the reasons, that was New York
We were running for the money and the flesh
And that was called love for the workers in song
Probably still is for those of them left
Ah, but you got away, didn't you, babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jiving around

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
You were famous, your heart was a legend
You told me again you preferred handsome men
But for me, you would make an exception
Then, clenching your fists for the ones like us
Who are oppressed by the figures of beauty
You fixed yourself and said, well, nevermind
We are ugly, but we have the music
And then you got away, didn't you, babe?
You just turned your back on the crowd
You got away, I never once heard you say
I need you, I don't need you
I need you, I don't need you
And all of that jiving around

I don't mean to suggest that I loved you the best
I can't keep track of each fallen robin
I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel
That's all
I don't even think of you that often

BONUS POINTS: Whosoever of you can tell me about whom Leonard Cohen wrote this song will receive, by U.S. Mail, a shiny penny.

Thank you, come again!

In the ongoing, agonizing struggle to free myself from the townhome that I was leasing (very little of which I've bothered to complain about on here because: provokes anger), I had what I thought would be the final walkthrough tonight with the leasing agent and the new tenants. The new tenants are nice enough, I suppose - although I could really give a shit at this point - but they are the type of very anal-retentive foreigners (you know the type, don't act like I'm the asshole here) that make people from a certain subcontinent look really bad and perpetuate a certain stereotype, which I hate (stereotypes, I hate stereotypes). So, by the time that they're finished with their "walkthrough" an hour later - and what am I even doing there? I'm not the landlord! - they've compiled a handwritten, two-and-a-half page list of "problems" that need to be fixed before they'll move in. Which they then give to me. And the proceed to explain at length how they won't be moving in until I fix these things. Again: not the landlord.

Among the many, many things on the list are the following items:

1) Re-key the locks (I'M NOT THE LANDLORD)

2) They want the showerhead that was in the bathroom when they originally viewed the townhome, which was mine. I explained that the showerhead currently in the bathroom is the one that came with the home and that the one they saw was my showerhead, which I suggested they could purchase at Lowes for $49.99. They didn't seem amused by this.

3) They also want the shelves that I had hung in the bedroom. Again, my shelves. When I explained that they were my shelves, the husband launched into a shrill tirade which went, verbatim: "We agreed to rent this particular unit based upon the assumption that certain items would be retained in the unit and if these certain items aren't included with the unit, then we will be unable to rent it!" So, in other words, you want me to bring back my shelves, rehang them and just flat out give them to you? Sure thing. I'll get right on that.

4) One of the wall sockets in the bedroom was missing A screw. One.

5) The baseboards were dusty.

6) And, finally, my favorite - they were convinced that I had been living - nay, squatting - in a townhome with no electricity and no A/C and they wanted me to fix this immediately. Actually, the electrician that had been out the day before to fix the wiring had accidentally turned off the breakers in the breaker box. But no matter how many times I tried to explain this and the fact that I'd been living in my new house for over a week and not in the townhome, they just kept asking me, "How could you live like this?!?" in incredulous voices as if they were speaking to a woman who'd been found living in a house filled with 57 cats and two feet of feces in every room.

I can't even tell you how incredibly relieved I am to not be living in a rented house anymore. Escaping my lease has been an utter nightmare - a story for another day, though - and I can't wait until we're completely settled into the new house, drinking beers on the patio with the doors open, listening to salsa music on the stereo until the late hours, and then - much later - driving by my old townhome with six dozen eggs and egging it for all it's worth.

I love italics.

Lumbergh

Okay, I only have a little bit of juice left on this thing today, but here we go:

So, I quit my job at Neighborhood Centers last Friday. I think we all know that by now. Everyone, apparently, except my old boss. On a whim while at my new job this past Thursday, I logged onto the old NCI mail server to see if the retards over there had disabled my e-mail access yet. Of course they hadn't. But it gets better...

My boss was still sending me e-mails. E-mails with subject lines like "10-Month Employees" and bodies like "Katharine, will you please take a look at the attached spreadsheet of 10-month employee payroll errors and get back to me? We need to get these fixed." This is the same guy, mind you, that I handed my letter of resignation to less than two weeks ago. NEWS FLASH, MORON: I DON'T WORK THERE ANYMORE.

*sigh*

So glad to be away from that place...