Month: April 2000

Staples‘ search engine is head and shoulders above Office Depot and Office Max. Whereas Office Depot’s search engine said "Compressed Air? What’s that?", Staples‘ search engine said "Compressed air? You want compressed air, we got compressed air! Here, here are 30 different kinds of compressed air! Pick one!" Ooh, a lady is standing in the parking lot giving her significant other/ co-worker all kinds of hell. I think he’s more than a co-worker, ’cause she’s all in his space. Her hands are flying all over the place. Is that a girl thing, the hands waving all over the place when you get upset? I know I do it, when I’m mad and when I’m excited, too. Hey, he’s laughing at her. Now she’s playing with his hair. I guess there’ll be no physical fisticuffs for me to go break up. Not that I really would, you understand. So I’ve actually done some work this morning – I straightened off the shelves off the bookcase in my office, tossing a lot of useless crap no one needs. That took me all of about 5 minutes, and then I spent 15 minutes looking for a form "Thanks but no thanks" letter to send out to the zillions of people who mailed and faxed their resumes in response to our ad in the paper a month ago. I found a form letter to follow, but lost interest in that, and then spent an hour surfing on Office Depot and Staples ordering office supplies. (Damn, Staples charges almost $9 a 12-pack for Coke! There goes that idea… Talk about your prohibitively expensive!) Now I’m back on Office Depot, looking for a desk for the marketing chick who will begin work on Monday. Now I’m getting annoyed ’cause she’ll need a phone too, the bitch (kidding), and Office Depot doesn’t apparently deign to carry just PHONES, simple one-line phones, nosiree, that would make too much sense, wouldn’t it?! Grrrr. So I left work around noon yesterday and wandered around the house, picking stuff up and putting it away or tossing it in the trash, and then I watched the last movie I rented Friday and hadn’t yet watched, The Opposite of Sex. To my surprise, I really liked it. I like Christina Ricci, despite the smack-me face. Then last night, Fred, the spud and I watched Star Wars: Episode 1, and while I thought it was pretty good, I didn’t fall in love with it the way Fred did. I would have been more impressed, I think, if I had seen it in a movie theater. I’m glad to have seen it, though. —–]]>

Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which came out on video today. I wandered around the store searching in vain for the DVD before giving up and grabbing a tape. Once I arrived back at the office, Fred told me Lucas isn’t releasing any of them on DVD ’til they’re all made. Would’ve been nice to know! Who’s the Einstein who decided it would be a good idea for Diane Sawyer to interview Elian Gonzalez? And further, which Einstein on the Gonzalez side allowed her access to the poor kid? Why don’t they just send the kid back to his father and be done with it, for crying out loud. Diane Sawyer is so uncomfortable around kids, it’s laughable. What, she’s a woman so she’ll have a good rapport with kids? Anyone who’s seen her with the Dilley sextuplets knows how untrue that is. Those Dilleys sure are cute, though. So, can someone define middle-class for me? Fred swears up and down that the neighborhood we live in is a lower-middle-class neighborhood, and to me that’s far from correct. We live in an almost 3,000 square foot house, and while we have the largest model the builder offered at the time, the houses around us are far from tiny. To me, it’s an upper-middle if not lower-upper class neighborhood; everyone who lives around us has two or more vehicles, and they’re nice ones, too. The car I had when we moved into the house – a ’90 or ’91 Ford Tempo – was far and away the only crappy car in the neighborhood. And, besides: we have a POOL. I’ve always thought I grew up in a solidly middle-class home and neighborhood. There were four of us kids, and we may not have always had every single thing we wanted (unlike a very spoiled spud), but we never came close to starving or going around in ratty clothes (unless we wanted to, of course). My father kept a strict eye on the thermostat in the winter, and we had a wood stove in the basement, so if you were upstairs in my room you’d be cold, but if you were in the basement, you’d be sweating your ass off. We didn’t go without, but my parents didn’t buy unnecessary things, either. They didn’t have a snow-blower the entire time I was growing up, because – hell – they had kids to shovel, didn’t they? Not that I remember doing all that much shoveling; I think my Dad took care of most of it. When first we moved into the house where I lived from sixth grade on, the driveway was a dirt driveway. My parents had the driveway paved eventually and didn’t we think we were the shit, skating back and forth on that driveway. I recall my cousin Kim spending the night once, and our parents went out to eat, so Debbie, Kim and I skated around on the driveway in our nightgowns and struck hitchhiking poses as cars drove by. The house we moved into had three bedrooms, one bathroom, and an unfinished basement. Debbie and I shared a room for a few years. Eventually, my father finished the basement with pine wood walls, and Debbie and I had our bedrooms down there. Tracy, being the oldest (six years older than I, eight older than Debbie) was responsible for watching us while my parents worked. For the first year we lived in that house, now that I think about it, my father was finishing out his last year of service in the Air Force. So it was the four of us and my mother. Ah, I’ve rambled off the point once again; I do that a lot, don’t I? I don’t know what my point was supposed to be actually, maybe a simple comparison between what Fred considers middle class and what I consider middle class. Of course, his father lives in a huge house on the mountain and was able to retire at the age of 55, so what does he know? 🙂 I think I’ll probably be putting most of my archives back up this weekend; I don’t want to wait until the end of April. People are coming to the site and not finding old entries to poke through, so they aren’t staying long; I don’t like that. So I’m going to toss the old entries back up (the cd was behind my desk, under a stuffed Coke reindeer; told you I’d find it! – and almost everything not backed up to disk was on my computer at work. Let me tell you, I was RELIEVED.) this weekend. ]]>

High Art with Ally Sheedy. I know the role was a real departure for Ally Sheedy – she hasn’t acted in forever, has she? – but despite the photographer-lesbian-drug addict role, she was still very much Ally Sheedy. She had all the same mannerisms, the shrugging one shoulder, the looking sideways while she talked, the same impish smile. I was very aware while I was watching it that she was Ally Sheedy – she didn’t get lost in the role at all. It wasn’t a bad movie, though. Speaking of people who get lost in roles, when we watched The Sixth Sense last week, I still couldn’t believe that the kid at the beginning was Donnie Wahlberg. The first time I saw the movie, in the theater, I had no idea it was him. This time, even knowing that it was him, I still couldn’t believe it. He looks nothing like himself – and he doesn’t even really sound right, either. He must have lost a lot of weight for that role, and I think they did something to his eyes, too, contacts maybe. Hell, while we’re on the topic of movies, Fred and I watched Drive Me Crazy last weekend. Yes, we love dorky high school movies, what can I say? So we were watching this very formulaic movie (halfway through, I guessed that Dee was the computer chick) and something happened that surprised Melissa Joan Hart’s (who we still call Clarissa, no matter what she’s in) character, and she made a face, spurring Fred to note, "She sure does go all slack-jawed and stupid-looking when she’s surprised, doesn’t she?" I couldn’t have put it better myself. Lord. While I was looking for those movie links on IMDB, I noticed that Melissa Joan Hart is slated to star in a remake of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. That’s gotta be interesting. So while we were on IRC at work this morning, another regular – let’s call him Del – who hangs out in the channel (it’s a programming geek channel, but I like the people – most of the time, anyway) was telling us that a headhunter he’d been e-mailing with had e-mailed Del and told him that he (Del) needed to change the message on his home answering machine, because it wasn’t "professional." How rude!, was our response. What does the message on your answering machine say? Del said that it was his wife saying, basically "We can’t come to the phone right now ’cause we’re ALL TIED UP, but leave a message after the beep, and we’ll give you ALL the attention you deserve." Sounds pretty harmless and kinda cute, doesn’t it? Well. Fred called me back to his office and used his speakerphone to call the Del’s home phone so we could listen to the message, and it sounds like the answering service for a sex line – she’s got a low, breathy voice, and the message is interspersed with lots of heavy breathing. As I told Fred, "What the hell is she working three jobs for? She could get a job as a sex-phone chick in ten seconds flat!" Anyway, Fred helped Del write an email to the headhunter telling him, basically, to go fuck himself. I’ll be interested to find out what the headhunter has to say to that. Y’all have a good evening, and please excuse any mis-spellings or typos; I don’t have time to proofread, because That ’70s Show is about to come on. God, I love that Hyde! Night, all. —–]]>

First for Women, I came across a story about three women who did various things to combat aging, from a chemical peel, to a makeover, to a facelift. First likes to present every story from three sides – or, I guess I should say, they like to present three ways to deal with a situation. At the beginning of each story was each woman’s eye-opener, what happened to make them realize they needed to do something. (No, I don’t know why I subscribe to this magazine either; I think it’s the three ways of dealing with marital problems they present each month which interests me) Anyway, the first woman One night, my husband of 20 years walked in the door and announced "You’re not pretty anymore. You look like an old hag. I want a divorce." This is where I, personally, would have brought up the fact that he had a tiny dick (always go for the obvious shot below the belt, I say) or just hit him over his self-righteous head with a frying pan. Not this woman. No, Barbara Beck, web site designer, went in for laser and chemical peels. Happy ending: a man in his late 20s hit on her. Next: One day I was standing in my boss’ office as she spoke to me in hushed tones. "Diane, you’re starting to look old, and it’s hurting your image. If you can’t do something about it, I’m afraid you’re going to be out of a job." Did this marketing director tell her boss to go fuck herself, or sue the company for ageism? Nope, Diane Briskin, marketing director, went the makeover route. Happy ending: she got a much better job elsewhere, hopefully telling her boss to go fuck herself on her way out. And, last: Church was over, and I was walking to get coffee with my daughter, Tashya. Across the room, I saw a woman I hadn’t seen in years smile and walk toward us. "And this must be your granddaughter," she said. Face lift. This is why I would never say to someone "So, this is your granddaughter?" I always, always err on the side of caution. Even if the woman looked 95 and was accompanied by a 5 year-old, I’d say "So, this is your daughter?" or even "So, this is your sister?" Oprah Winfrey once asked a woman when she was due, and the woman said "I’m not pregnant." I never mention a woman’s pregnancy unless I know for sure she’s pregnant, or unless she mentions it first. Anyway, Margaret Kowalski, bakery owner, went for a facelift. Happy ending: she showed one of her customers a picture of her daughter, and the customer said "You two could be sisters." Hell, I’m not against plastic surgery; if you can afford it and it makes you feel better about yourself, go to it. My gripe is that each of these women was spurred into making major changes (not, I guess, that a makeover is that much of a change) by the insensitive remarks of another person. I, myself, am so contrary that if Fred said "You’re not pretty anymore, you’re a hag" (yes, hopefully he knows better) I’d not only not have a facelift or chemical peel, I’d stop brushing my teeth, plucking my eyebrows, and whatever else I could do to make myself that much more hagg-ish. Well, I’ve got magazines to read, and naps to take. I’ll see y’all tomorrow. —–]]>