In the past three days, I have started two entries, only to have my computer (yes, for those of you playing along on the home version of Life With Weetabix it is my NEW computer) strangely reboot itself or something when I leave it alone. Completely obliterating my unsaved Word document. I haven’t a clue. It’s just another thing. I’m mystified.
Recap: I lost my cell phone somewhere. I think it’s in my car, because I listened to messages on my way home from work the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. But I haven’t found it yet. And it’s not turned on, so no, I can’t call it. I’ve been working 12 hour days every damn day this week. Incidentally, they fired the slacker from my old team and my old boss asked what it would take for me to come back. I told her ‘Not bloody much!’ but I know that my current boss wouldn’t let me go. Esteban sent me a dozen roses at work. He was a poop. We had an argument. I told you about it already, but my computer apparently had veto power.
I spent my lunch hour on Tuesday getting my oil changed on my car. MY OIL CHANGED! And it was somewhat relaxing because it was so normal and I could just sit there in the stupid little pseudo-garage’s waiting room and stare blankly into space for ten minutes and the only decision I had to make was when the man in a greasy shirt, whose name might have been Ben or Bent or Bean or possibly even 83CE because his shirt had not been washed since the Carter administration (which is me exaggerating because I highly doubt this guy was ALIVE during the Carter administration. I mean’ I was barely alive during the Carter administration. I remember Billy beer and thinking Amy Carter was kind of a dork, and that was about it) tell me that my transmission fluid needed changing because it wasn’t a nice cherry red color that it’s supposed to be and I said ‘No, no thank you’my transmission still works, so I’ll just pretend that I don’t know my transmission is running on chocolate syrup until at least after the holidays.’ And it felt good to make that decision because no one asked me why. No one asked for supporting data. No one asked for a deadline. No one asked if I could follow up on that. He just shrugged and walked away, to spray more WD-40 on himself so he’d smell like a real mechanic.
This morning, if I had not needed to warm up my car, I would left for work at 6:00 a.m. For your information, it is still dark at 6:00 a.m. in Wisconsin. The stars are still out. The barristas at Starbucks are grumpy then’ or they were at 6:20 a.m. when I rolled through. One of the barristas, the Barbie Barista, looks like Christine Baranski. She’s even got that overly processed hair and upturned nose like Ms. Baranski. I hate her. She’s always snippy to me. For Christmas, she deserves slipper socks, medium.
Pennilicious took Carissa and I out for lunch today, which was delightful, even though I spent the rest of the afternoon burping up Applebees honey pepper grilled chicken. Penny considers this her Friend Payment. I guess this means that Carissa and I can apparently be bought for one free lunch a month.
I had lots of things that I’ve already written about how we’re all going out tomorrow night to the Bad Bar and how I’ve declared that it will be the Night Legends Are Born’ which confuses people because there is a sports bar around here called Legends and they’re like ‘We’re going to Legends? I thought you liked that place on Broadway?’ because my life apparently needs subtitles, like a French film about how everyone’s life is intertwined only no one realizes it. But since I feel like I’ve already told you about it, I have nothing more to say on the matter. Only that it should be a good night out tomorrow and I’m planning on drinking like my genetic heritage.
It’s exceptionally cold here recently. There was a tiny bit of snow on Saturday, enough for them to salt the streets. The snow is now gone but the salt remains, coating everything, leaving everything with this ghostly white film like January. Salt residue is January to me’ it’s everything I hate about January. It’s horrible. I hate salt. Already it’s on my car, but I can’t get it washed because the doors and windows will freeze. I hate bitter ass cold. I like a nice mid-twenties. Crisp. Pretty puffs of white breath. Perfect weather for snow. You can walk around with your jacket open and you don’t need gloves. This four-degrees-fahrenheit-not-including-windchill crap takes your breath away and leaves everything looking like death.
For the last ten hours, I’ve had one of those piercing horrible headachy pains right above my eye. I know that I purse my eyebrows together when I’m concentrating hard and I think they’ve been perpetually pursed for three weeks. Perhaps that little white spot of pain, right in my right eyebrow is the spot where I’m slowly getting a stroke. Perhaps an embolism. I kept checking my brow to see if perhaps I had jammed something in there accidentally. A thumb tack or perhaps a javelin, but no. Nothing there. Then I wondered aloud today if they’d let me go home if I did indeed have a stroke. I sort of think someone is playing a joke on me and there’s actually Sharpie jammed into my skull.
I left work with my roses in hand at 6:00 tonight. Over my shoulder, one of the late folks on my team shouted ‘You should stop and get yourself something nice for dinner. You look tired. Don’t bother to make dinner.’ And because she was the third person to say I looked tired, I believed her. I felt tired. So I started to think about chicken strips. I suppose that’s a comfort food of mine. It used to be Chicken McNuggets until the Chicken Head incident ruined that forever. Not exactly an Operation Hottie approved food, but acceptable after a stressful day. I tooled past KFC because I didn’t want to deal with going inside anyplace, but apparently there were other folks with other invisible foreign objects lodged in their craniums that only chicken fingers could cure. The line was sixteen deep. I sighed, then I went to the next best place, which was a nearby A&W’s attached to a gas station. My own fuel gadge was on E and I know that it’s super duper bad or something to have your gas tank almost empty when it’s so cold, so I figured that I’d fill up while I was there. Perfect.
Because Michelle Branch’s ‘Goodbye to You’ came on, I left my keys in the car while I pumped gas, radio playing. I dug under my seats a bit, looking for my cellphone and any fallen Sbux Venti soldiers that needed to be thrown away. Still couldn’t find my phone. After I was finished filling the tank, I went inside and instantly got irritated with the m’lange of teenagers inside. I’ve become one of those people. People annoyed by teenagers who weren’t giving their jobs as cashiers the proper respect. I picked up a Toffifay’. Another odd choice for me. I’m not a Toffifay kind of girl’ I hate nuts and there’s a big old annoying hickory nut inside each little Toffibowl. But when I’m stressed, they allow me to be obsessive compulsive. I can pop off the little chocolate dollop, then peel off the caramel bowl, then eat the ganache stuff around the nut. And when I’m all done with the actual candy, I can make annoying noises with the little plastic trays, which are better than packaging bubbles. I also grabbed a Diet 7up because I wanted some soda but didn’t want caffeine, since I’ve injested enough caffeine in the last four daysto reanimate Walt Disney. After you thawed him out and stuff. The cashier wanted to only charge me $2.12 because he wasn’t paying attention to the fact that I had purchased fuel as well. And that annoyed me.
Then I went into A&W and I immediately thought to myself ‘I should have ordered here first and then paid for the gas.’ Because when I went in, there was a guy waiting for a refill on his rootbeer and he had that sort of exasperated stance of someone who had been waiting for a long time. I went to the other end of the counter so I could get someone’s attention for him. I ordered and then waited. Two other orders were made and we waited. I should have gone through the drive through. I could have been sitting in my car right then, listening to Christmas carols or Rob Zombie or something. There was a family in there’ or a single mom and her four very closely aged children. The mom was one of those women I have an unreasoning dislike for. The three girls were sitting in one booth while she and the youngest child, who might have been a boy, ate in another’ even though there were plenty of long accommodating tables available, you just knew that it was because the youngest child was the quietest and she just didn’t want to deal with the others. Impeccably thin, wearing jeans which were too tight and hair which was dressed up like she was bridesmaid at Lurleen’s fourth wedding (‘This one’s not in prison!’). At first I thought it was in a banana clip, but I was mistaken’ she had used a regular clip to create the much desired banana clip horse mane. One of her strands was clipped in the back with one of her daughters’ blue barrettes. She had a perfect leather GBP bomber jacket and fold-down leather high heeled boots, the kind with little triangles cut out of them so that it looks like lace. Leather lace’ for those who can’t decide between the timeless Victorian elegance of lace and cowhide.
I waited for what seemed to be forever, but I again sat there in a stupor, simply taking in the world, like the recently lobotomized. I had moments today where I actually felt that point at which my brain went ‘TOO MUCH! Can’Not’Compute! Danger! System Failure!’ and sort of shut down. Luckily this happened while I was on the phone with a member of my team who is similarly fried. She was asking me about mathematical equations and it was making me want to cry out of frustration because my mind just didn’t want to grasp the numbers and formulas. And even as I thought about that, I thought to myself ‘What month is it? Is it January?’ because it feels so much like January. Around the A&W, there was holiday garland wrapped around the People Corral, one silver and one gold, and it’s one of my utter pet peeves to mix the two, but then I reminded myself that it was A&W and they had benches with purple, green and red vinyl. Colors that seemed normal and acceptable in summer and in December they might even seem regal, but in January they would be tragic. In January they will be painful.
And that’s when I got the feeling’ the weird feeling that I was in purgatory and I would never leave. I’m not writing that for comedic effect. I really did. This was purgatory, with the White Trash mom and her four kids, with the gangsta chicas working behind the counter, with the gas station cashiers who only have the job because their parents are making them pay for the insurance on the cars they got for their 16th birthday, and the bone white streets outside. This is the waiting room for hell.
Finally, one of the little gangsta chicas threw my bag of chicken strips at me and utters a ‘Sorry’ as she turns back to yell at a different chica. I don’t know if she is sorry for the enormous wait, for me standing there in my sheerling jacket, or for the fact that I have glimpsed my eternity and it is desolate as any dried riverbed and the clocks that melt in the crooks of trees advertise genuine draft rootbeer.
I fled, paper sack in one hand, Diet 7up in the other. My car was cold already. My roses undoubtedly dying. I turned the key in the ignition. ‘This is How You Remind Me’ by Nickelback was playing and then suddenly stopped.
My ignition clicked.
click
I tried again.
click
Again.
click
‘COME ON! NO! NO! NO!!!’
click
I took the key out of the ignition. I made sure it was in park.
click
‘fucker’ I whispered. I threw my hand once more under the seat, praying that my cellphone would somehow leap into it and have enough charge to call Esteban. Nothing.
I went into the gas station. One of the cashiers was on the phone. The other was busy showing a book to his friend. I waited. He seemed surprised when he finally realized that I wanted his attention.
‘Do you have a phone please? My car won’t start.’
‘Pay phone’s in between the doors’ And he nodded quite rudely to the inner and outer door.
The pay phone was 50 cents. I dug into my pocket. I had $1.50 in quarters. I first called Esteban’s lab, where he was trying to remove a virus off his company’s server. Nothing’ of course it picked up to voice mail right away, killing my 50 cents in the process. I plunked in another 50 cents and dialed his cell. It also went immediately to voice mail. I used my final 50 cents to call Mo, whose house was only a mile away.
‘Can you come and pick me up? I’m at the gas station&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9-
‘I can’t. I have two kids and no car seat.’
‘No, listen’ my car stopped and I can’t get ahold of Esteban and&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9-
‘Weet, I can’t. I have two kids and no car seat!’
‘LISTEN TO ME! I am stuck at a gas station. I have no more money. I just used my last two quarters to call you. I need your help, ok? I don’t have a phone.’
‘I can’t! I’m watching&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9-
‘I KNOW! But can you call someone for me? I have no more money.’ At this point I was almost in tears. I just wanted to go home. I wanted to go home and eat my stupid chicken strips, the chicken strips that had somehow killed my car, and watch stupid Friends and stare into space and not have to do anyone’s thinking for them for at least twelve hours.
‘Did you call Mom?’
‘No. I had a dollar fifty. I called Esteban’s lab. I called Esteban’s cell. And I called you. End of money. I need you to call someone. I’m at the A&W on University and I need jumper cables&AO8AvwC9AO8AvwC9-
‘Ok, listen’ I’m going to send someone to come and get you. I will call someone. Just hang tight.’
I love my sister. That was exactly what I needed to hear.
I went back out into my cold car and sat with my roses, rubbing my right eyebrow and marveling at how it could hurt so much and not actually be a migraine.
She drove up a bit later, alone. Her friend Jason happened to have stopped by right then. He didn’t have jumper cables either (what kind of BOY doesn’t have jumper cables in Wisconsin? That should be a law!) so he sat with the girls while she ran down and picked me up. And when I told her that I was sorry that I snapped at her, but I had been up since 4:30 and working on overdrive all day and on more conference calls than I could count and I had to wait for my chicken strips and then I only had six quarters for the pay phone and the cashiers wouldn’t let me use their phone’ She laughed at me. Then she apologized. ‘I’m sorry, but man, what a bad day!’ And then she brought me home and waited outside until I got into the house with my roses.
I called Esteban’s lab and he answered that time. He had run out for dinner (Thank God it wasn’t for chicken strips otherwise I doubt he would have made it back). Of course he wanted to discuss how the battery could be dead over the phone until I said ‘We can talk about it later, it doesn’t really matter, we need to get back and get my car out from in front of pump 3 otherwise they’re going to tow it.’
So we went back to the car. Esteban decided that it must be the alternator or the starter. I doubted it. I figured that the car is 6 years old and I had left the radio on for fifteen minutes in cold cold weather’ when in doubt, go for the obvious. He hooked up the jumper cables and it started right up. He then made me drive the truck back and he took my car to get a new battery. Unfortunately, because of the way the battery sits in a Monte Carlo, apparently, you need to take it someplace, so $150 later, that’s been taken care of.
I still haven’t eaten dinner.
I hope tomorrow is better.
