A Slow Slurp

I am slowly being slurped into the bosom of the University medical community. True, I am but a humble support person, but I am rather handsomely paid and will use the first of my handsome earnings to buy a dictionary of medical terms. Eventually I will understand. Oh how exciting! In the meantime, I am relieved merely to have access to the damn library again. I really feel like a crappy that has been flopping uncomfortably on the dock for the past couple of years in the terrible state of not having a university library card. Indiana flung me into the richest waters I have ever known, but since then, I have been stranded. Little did I know that I would one day come right back to where I started. It feels very funny being back here in some ways, but some of that might be due to the fact that summer session always feels a little funny. At any rate, it's not something to waste time on. This time, I must bypass wondering if I belong and skip straight on to being grateful for the Fine Arts stacks.

Penultimate day at Company X. No more will I sneak my quiet, quiet music at the front desk. No more will I impishly double-dose the coffee or hear the hoarse, woofy tones of the mid-office lasses. Never again will I weep silently and secretly to the barely audible strains of "Unbreak my Heart" in the fee group. It hasn't been fun, exactly, but it has been amusing. This is a respectful office, which is wonderful. But I do wonder if the starched tone is the result of fear of retribution. The thing is, there are just so many lawyers. So our culture is getting a little sterilized, right? So I can't help but surmise that the concentration of lawyers in this very room might have something to do with the bland interactions that are the norm here. I still believe that we all posses personalities.

In other news, yesterday I had the unexpected pleasure of taking a drug test for my upcoming job. At first I was unhappy that I had to do this, but I must confess that the test itself was fun. The office had a temporary look, as if someone were covering up another business with a row of chairs and a card table with a sign-up sheet. I think that the solitary employee felt self-conscious about dealing with pee all day, because she had so many air freshening crystals scattered about the place that it was hard to tell if one were in a pine forest or standing in the midst of some drying linens.

In closing, I would like to point out the advertisements that now festoon my ramblings. Note our demographic, friends: glass paneling and air fresheners. They're not really getting this, are they?

How Things Smell

The lion of summer has padded in at long last. It was warm as blood when I rode home after the opera last night. A welcome feature of this configuration is all of the open car windows. Cars are like little floating islands. Riding among them in the open air, one catches drifts of cigarette smoke or vanillaroma car fresheners. One hears Mariachi music or a few thuds of hip-hop or snatches of conversation sometimes.

Most of the smells come from the trees and cut grass these days, but downtown smells like hydraulic oil (from busses, maybe?) and fresh wood planks from all of the construction. I hate to say it, but my new apartment smells like Ikea right at the moment.

Of all the plexiglass panels in the office of Company X, there is one facing the front door that bears a frosty etching of our esteemed logo. I had wondered about the factory that made these special panels and about the box somewhere that must be full of them. I had thought that here was the scant remnant of proud architectural identity: a mere panel of etched glass, but a little stamp of authenticity nontheless. Today as I was faxing a stubborn invoice to Bermuda, I glanced up at this thing and noticed that IT IS A STICKER. One more reminder, darlings, that in the world of finance especially, nothing is real. As if we needed to be reminded of that.

In other news, great changes have been afoot. In the space of a couple of days, I landed a cute apartment and an even cuter job. The opera has also been in the ON position, absorbing every drop of evening I've had for the past couple of weeks, so I am predictably overcaffeinated and ready for sleep at all times. It's fun though. The tenor has to sing one of his arias in a bubble bath, and Ashley, Angela and I get to dress up as old west bordello girls and scrub his back and feed him whiskey and sympathy. We don't have to sing, which is good because of the corsets (eighteen inches, Mammy!). Anyway, one of my favorite parts of hanging out in the theater is passing through the corps de ballet locker room. The ribbons of their shoes slither out of the bottoms of all the lockers and there lingers the faint scent of cigarettes. They post unabashedly self-affirming notes and photographs of handsome male athletes. (The techies post witty things of the shocking/European variety and the orchestra folks tack up cartoons from The New Yorker.)

The Language of Fees

You're so cute! = You moron, you did it wrong.
She's so cute! = What was she thinking?
What are you doing? = Hello.
Wanna do something fun? = Please drop the tedious task and do this one instead.
Do you love me? = Go get me something from the kitchen.

Do you know why you're not supposed to ask a temp to pop your popcorn for you? Because she can't really say no, and it actually is a little bit demeaning. Sigh. But I do have some new survival tricks that are making my life in fees just splendid. Behold the miracle of gamelan music in the afternoon! Clears the mind of everything, really. Also, I enjoy massaging my face with Neutrogena hand cream. I wonder if people can see me from the conference room...