I think I need to write a manifesto. It’s getting close to a 1000 entries on this here diary and I haven’t gotten to any universal truths (other than the fact that poop is funny and lawd’s sakes alive, do I have too much to do and why is my pantry still not organized? Because hellooooo, shocked and awed when Esteban reported that he had found Paul Newman’s Four Cheese pasta sauce inside the deep dark bowels of our pantry. Especially since I do all the grocery shopping and have not been able to find my favorite variety of Mr. Newman’s in months and perhaps even the gestational period of a human being, which should disturb just about everyone. Unless I am that scatterbrained and had forgotten buying it, which also should disturb everyone, or at very least my grandmother) or life lessons or perhaps tenets. Stephen Covey would have built a log cabin of words right now, ordered and precise and empowered legions of very effective people to go out and prioritize their goals. Me? Maybe someone out there now knows to wear a beige bra under a white t-shirt, if I’m lucky. And yet, I continue to see the blinding white lacey monstrosities beneath the wife beaters of our land and my life, it has no meaning.
Yeah, so I should totally write a manifesto. Except that it seems exhausting and, you know, like work. So instead, I will tell you about my recent heartbreak. It is this: a few weeks ago, I went shopping for a birthday present for this one and instead of finding just the right thing to tie together my previously acquired but silly little gifts together, I found nothing. Or rather, found a lot of things for myself, the most important of which being a rocking pair of black cowboy boots decorated with red flames. Marked down 70% and then 50% off of that, which brought them to the lovely price of $16. Normally, when I find such buys, they are not in my size, but not this day, for they were size 12 and I snatched them up and then did a little dance in the aisles of the store. It did not occur to me at that moment that I have almost zero opportunities to wear such masterpieces of footwear (red FLAMES), mostly because tragically I am not Patsy Cline (the actual singer, not my enigmatic San Francisco friend) nor so I have a stripper routine choreographed to ‘Save a Horse Ride a Cowboy’. I sort of want to pair them with my suit for my next big important meeting in Shermer, walk into the boardroom, put a leg up on the projector, and yell ‘Yeeeehaw’. Because if anything’s going to get me promoted, it will certainly be that.
Except for reasons that I will not even pretend that you will believe, I had not actually tried them on until today, when I was sort of filled with ennui and hating humanity (for many reasons, least of which is that my Wallet Chain boyfriend got eliminated from American Idol’ holy fuck did I just type that? Because I can’t believe it either) and thought: hey, I’ll stomp around the house in my boots! That will cheer me up. So I took them out of their box, hiked up the leg of my jeans and then tried shoving my foot into one.
It wouldn’t go.
This didn’t make sense. After all, it was my left foot. My good foot. Nay, my less 12C and more 11.5B foot. Clearly I was having a bad sock day.
I pulled on the shaft (heh heh) and felt the sickening twinge of my nail bending backward, threatening to break, so I let go and then stomped around on it. Finally, I managed to cram my foot into it, but the zipper refused to budge.
The world. My world. Oh fuck the world. Ennui!
So much so that I’m going to stop writing this right now.
That was yesterday. My ennui, she still wees.
This morning, it was another perfectly gloomy day (we’ve had a streak where it occurred to me on the drive that I haven’t worn sunglasses in at least four solid days and if you know me even a little bit, you will know that this simply does not happen. Not at 45 degrees latitude where we sit only inches beneath the hole in the ozone layer, where the sun beats into my light-colored eyes with a fucking ball peen hammer, so much so that I have sunglasses for sunny days and also sunglasses for CLOUDY days because oy, my eyes, the rays, Jesus God would someone turn down the sun) (Hi, still with me?) and a few minutes after being greeted by the Ms Prindle barista (who now says ‘Morning, Weet. Venti Vanilla Nonfat No Whip Mocha today?’ when I pull up to the ordering box, to which I respond ‘Yes please’ and then smile because even though it means that she’s just doing her job, in a very small way, I feel loved) (and sad that I’m getting affirmation from the barrista)(speaking of which and since I’m on a crazy parenthetical kick today, I just want to mention that I’m a little disturbed by Ina Garten’s need to earn the love of her husband Jeffrey. And also, I will give 2 to 1 odds that Jeffrey’s either got a chippey in the city or he’s in the closet because that relationship just isn’t right. But seriously, Ina, make YOURSELF something delicious for once. Why all these friends who only use you for picnic lunches and gazpachos?) and receiving my coffee when it started drizzling. I took a minute to appreciate the timing of this: after all, the drizzle and the 43 degree morning couldn’t be all bad when I had a truly delicious cardboard cup of Starbucks warming my hand? However, when I pulled into work and put my car into park, the heavens opened up and let loose with a fury of pounding rain. I sighed and sipped the last of my coffee and then decided whether to wait it out or not. Then it started to pound harder, to the point where the drops were hitting so hard that I wondered if they weren’t hail. I sucked it up, gathered my umbrella (still damp from the previous day) and made the trek inside. My top half remained mostly dry but everything from the knees down was soaked, mostly from the rain drops bouncing back up off the pavement. My shoes didn’t recover until lunch.
Which reminds me: does anyone ever actually heat up one of those Weight Watchers box lunch things and think they smell not like attractively packaged toxic waste but perhaps like actual food that might be good to stick down one’s gullet? Because man sake’s alive, I don’t know if my coworkers have just taken a hankering to the new Spa Cuisine Limburger And Jellied Eel On Sauer Kraut variety or if I have finally reclaimed my long lost horror of packaged food, but those things should be outlawed in the cubicle environment. I’m probably just spoiled, since when I do eat one of those things, it’s Amy’s Vegetarian Holier Than Thou frozen entrees or maybe a McCartney or two (her squash ravioli meal is tasty). Which is not to say that I don’t sometimes get suckered in while standing in the freezer aisle by those white boxes, because I do. And after I buy them and dutifully haul them to work, I then look at them and think about how depressing my life is that I have to work all morning and then trudge to the cafeteria to stand in line with a bunch of other women, all with their carefully boxed proportioned frozen astronaut foods while every guy in our entire office is going out to lunch. And then I say ‘fuck that shit’ and grab my car keys and go out for sushi.
That was Monday. Now it’s Tuesday. This entry has now taken three days to write and it’s not even a manifesto. Fuck that shit.
‘Fuck that shit’ has become the official sponsor of Ennui 2006.
One last thing that I don’t want to forget: on either Friday or Saturday, during the gloamy morning rain, I pulled up to Sbux and saw that the drive-through had a line out to the street. A line out to the street! I am normally happy to wait through five or six cars, but a line out to the street, defying actual ‘line’ properties, having become more of a snake-type configuration? Especially when there were only two cars in the parking lot and I could see at least one of the cars’ owners sitting in the window reading a newspaper?
Fuck THAT shit.
I swerved around the python of SUVs, parked right by the door, dodged raindrops and walked inside. Because I’m a pretty regular customer (to the point where some of the baristas think they’re giving me the wrong drink when I actually did order something against the norm) the baristas know my routine and I’m not usually ordering inside To Go but rather in the drive through, where I can listen to the Pod and practice a Zen-like calm (read: zone out).
Lindsay from Angel Barista looked at me and cocked an eyebrow. The man, I can’t help but say, is really hot. And he knows that he’s really hot. He cultivates that whole ‘I don’t care how I look and my stubble is JUST SO and it’s killing you, isn’t it’ thing and also he has a ponytail, except sometimes? He doesn’t. He’s just keeping you on your toes, that Lindsay from Angel Barista.
He grinned and said ‘Wellllll hello there!’ and I replied ‘Hello.’ He said something about not expecting me to come in, considering the rain (he loves the small talk, that one) and I said, ‘Yeah, except that there’s a line of cars out there all the way to the street!’ (My voice may have squeaked a little on the word ‘street’ because sometimes in the morning I may open my mouth and out may pop Kathleen Turner or maybe Peter Brady, you never know for certain).
He eyebrowed the window (yeah, it’s verb) and then shrugged. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘didn’t mean to add to your stress by pointing that out to you.’
‘Aw, don’t hurt me none. It’s not like they pay me $300,000 to worry about who’s waiting to get their coffee, you know?’
He’s pulling a Chris in the Morning? Hot and pulling a KBHR? Unbelievable. That lucky son of a bitch.
He quickly threw together my coffee, handed it over and then grabbed a broom to sweep up some spilled grounds, all the while the window baristas were lining up marked cups along the drive-through counter. Back in my car, I noted that had I gotten into the drive through, I wouldn’t have even ordered yet, let alone made it the four cars up to get my coffee. And the coffee was, in a word, exquisite.
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