monday

Monday.

Damn you to hell.

***

I don't know, but it seems to me that if your entire life is one long weekend, Mondays should have absolutely no influence over the cosmic collective of your life. This is where I envy the Sims, who may live at the whim of a tyrannical and arbitrary deity, but are free of the quixotic cruelties of Mondays, living as they do from day to day regardless of the timing within the week.

Back up a bit to Saturday, which was Barb's bridal shower. Barb and Karl, two of those annoying people that simply cannot be disliked, will be getting married in a couple of weeks. This is a cause for much celebration amongst friends and acquaintances; they've been engaged for three years now, after all, and people were starting to worry that they would never get up the momentum to actually toddle up to the altar. Barb and Karl, in collusion with Tara and Remington, were responsible for my introduction and subsequent bliss with the Guy. Needless to say, we will be there at the joyous event, some of us with far more grumbling than is really appropriate under the circumstances.

Enough with the accolades. Barb is cool. Karl is cool. Check. We've covered this. The bridal shower was cool. Did we cover that? Doesn't matter. Check. The hostess was cool. The house was cool. The food was cool. In fact, everything was incredibly awesome, up to and including the one-eyed grey cat who cozied up to me, knowing perfectly well that I: 1) adore cats; and 2) am allergic to cats.

Even sadder than the fact that cat dander makes my two-dimensional face with its two-dimensional nasal passages swell up like Ann Nicole Smith's breasts after marriage; the fact that I forget that I'm allergic to cats. Item 1 always makes it to my mind long before item 2, which is not so aerodynamic and has a bit of a weight problem, and thus has a hard time chugging it over the synapses to my cortex. Usually, by the time item 2 shows up panting at the door, item 1 has rendered the warning moot. In this particular instance, the cat made certain of item 2 by stuffing his tail firmly up both my nostrils before dessert was served.

It must have been a male. I've noticed males have a thing for stuffing body parts up unoffending nostrils.

Of note during the shower; the subject of men, books, and bathrooms arose, as is probably inevitable in a wedding shower that consisted almost exclusively of married women. Why, some of the women wanted to know, do men always go into the bathroom with a book or a newspaper and then stay there for hours at a time, just reading? The subject has reared its head several times so far in my book club, also made up solely of women. The closest my book club has come to an explanation is that it's a more efficient use of time, though this hardly explains why a man would take two hours on the toilet.

One of the women at the shower was a loud, earthy, and hilarious character named Sonya. "I keep telling them, just relying on gravity isn't going to do it," she said. "You actually have to push to get something out."

A whole new perspective on the age-old mystery.

***

So on Monday I was supposed to have my first interview of the unemployment season, and I woke up sniffling and sneezing. "Awwuhgies," I thought dully, and scrounged for some leftover Allegra from the previous allergy season. Pills were located in a clear plastic container inside my pill cabinet in the bathroom. Hurrah. I popped one. Sneezed. Sprayed Allegra-flavored spittle all over the living room.

Point one for Monday.

The problem with my allergies is that once they get started, they just don't know when to stop. This year's allergy season was kicked off by the cat, and went seamlessly from animal dander to miniscule pollen specks. The histamine gods, having established their dominion over everything above the neck, inspected the Allegra and collectively thumbed their noses at it. ("What ez zis? Zis is ze pill they attempt to be subduing us weeth? We scoff at eet. Ptooey. We hurl our soiled frilly underclothings in eets general direction!")

I borrowed the Guy's car and headed out for the interview.

And got into an accident.

Really, 'into' is a misleading word. The proper way to describe it is 'witnessed,' as in 'I witnessed a horrific car accident and the ugliness of Menlo Park suburban life.' This is not something that one wants to have happen on the way to an interview. It makes the interviewer a little jumpy to receive a phone call from the interviewee that involves the word "police."

"Uh, hullo? This is Yuhri. We had an appointment for one o'clock, but I'm afraid that the police have detained me and I don't think I'll be able to make it. Is it possible that we could reschedule?"

It also makes the interviewee a little jumpy, to put it mildly, when the interviewee is harmlessly tooting along to an interview and is forced to pull up sharply when the ridiculously expensive car ahead of her (the one she was not tailgating, let that be a lesson to you all) abruptly slams into the side of another ridiculously expensive car that is pulling out of a side street. Apparently, ridiculously expensive cars are not answerable to the vagarities of traffic lights and stop signs. This must be part of the contract signed when purchasing the car: traffic laws, optional.

Point two for Monday.

It makes the interviewee even more jumpy when she pops out of her car to make sure everybody is okay, only to be grabbed by two utterly psychotic, well-dressed suburban power housewives who subsequently scream obscenities at each other while wrestling for the rights to use said interviewee as a witness in her favor.

Point three for Monday.

When the police arrive and separate the two women and tell the interviewee to sit tight, well, that only frazzles the interviewee a little more because she's going to be late to the interview. And when she discovers that she's forgotten her cell phone at home because, after all, it's Monday, so she won't be able to call the interviewer to confess that she'll be a little bit delayed, well. Isn't that the icing on the cake?

Point four for Monday.

Interviewee cut loose by police, who -- half an hour after the interview was supposed to start -- suddenly can't figure out why she's there. Interviewee drives home to shake. Interviewee leaves babbling, abject message on interviewer's voicemail, who subsequently calls back and kindly reschedules for Tuesday.

No marks on car.

Screw you, Monday. My game.

***

A little light in the afternoon for me; feeling the need to support someone who has, to all intents and purposes, all his cookies -- of whatever flavor -- in the right jar, I donated some of my hard-earned government unemployment to Lileks' site, which has provided me with a textual gratification only matched by NPR's aural hydration. It wasn't as much as I'd like to be able to give, but I've chalked that up to the great cornucopia event I've scheduled for the day I receive my first new paycheck.

At any rate, I followed the links through his page to Amazon.com, which offers a transaction service for those nonprofits that are otherwise ill-equipped to receive credit card payments, and went through an exercise in tipping for the 21st century. Eventually, I reached the "Thank you" page, which promised to send me an e-mail confirmation shortly. Not entirely unexpectedly, Amazon had seen fit to add a few ads at the bottom of the page, a not unreasonable way of getting profit out of the overhead of supporting this worthy service.

Want to know what it said?

"Did you know that Amazon.com also sells books?"

Posted by yhirata at March 25, 2002 11:01 PM