FUCK

So, I auditioned for Second City today and did the best audition I've done in a long time. They call people tonight for callbacks. It's 7:52, and I promised myself that I'd give up at 8.

FUCK!

Dog

I got suckered into adopting a dog. I was fostering the mutt when suddenly, after a terse phone call with the rescue organization, I was told that I had, in fact, adopted the damn thing. Okaaaaay.

His name is Murphy...now. It was Biggins before, which I repeatedly misheard as "Big Uns," which sounds like trucker porn.

I have the coolest friends...

Amongst my friends are a novelist, a newspaper editor, several actors, several musicians and two spies. The ultimate in cool friends, though, is my friend Joanna King, who writes science fiction books, but also has written some EROTIC science fiction books.

I met Joanna when we were 14, at asthma camp. We corresponded for a couple of years, then lost touch. I remember getting large, bulging envelopes in the mail from Joanna, filled with all sorts of random things. It was as if she unloaded her junk drawer into an envelope and then would write long paragraphs justifying the inclusion of each item. She was terribly funny and terrifically interesting.

Fast forward a few years to me, dicking around on the internet at my sucky insurance job (Do my day jobs really suck or is it just my perception of them? It's the whole tree in the forest thing -- if a job existed and I didn't work at it, would it still suck? Probably not...). I have a hobby of looking up people whose names I remember from my past and reconnecting with them. It's because I hate doing jobs that I am paid to do, and I really feel the companies I work for would feel so much better if they only paid ALL of their employees to pursue their outside interests on company time!

So, I looked up Joanna. And damned if she didn't have a website. And damned if the picture on the website didn't look exactly like her when she was 14. So I emailed. She emailed back. She came to Chicago for a book conference and we had pizza and laughed. We send emails back and forth now, though, instead of envelopes of sundries. I can't wait to read her new book. You should check it out:

www.joannaking.com

Can't we all just get along?

So, I've been temping for a few months now, at a job where some psychopath boss doesn't run around talking about how Christian he is while simultaneously yelling at his wife for being "stupid," and I have come to an all-new set of frustrations with one person that I work with.

I like my little temp job. I sit at the far end of the floor, on a nearly deserted aisle, with no one to bother me. I listen to public radio on headphones and sometimes just noodle around online when the work, which is REALLY mindless, slows down. Occasionally, I will get handed a lot of children's books to file, and I read them all... Even a book entitled "Shoo," whose only text was a repetition of the title. "SHOO!" God, I wonder how it ends!!

The past week, however, I have had to break out of my lonely reverie to interact with a woman who designed the database that I am entering information into. She has been curt to me, at best, prior to this past week, and I wasn't looking forward to working with her. This is how she greeted me when I went to her desk to begin our shared work:

"Oh. Hey. I have a cinnamon roll there. You know. If you want it."

"Thanks! I'll pass, though. I just had Pop-Tarts."

[icy glare from Ill Tempered Woman]

"Yeah, I know," I said, "I eat like an 8th grader."

"Well. You don't LOOK it."

"Nah, man, my skin is crap."

"But you're not HEAVY, is what I'm saying." This statement was accompanied by a scornful stare at my midsection.

Feeling a little abused, I said, "Why do you think I'm wearing a skirt? Hides the thighs."

Afterwards, I wanted to kick myself for saying that, even though it brought forth a smug little smile of acceptance on her face simply because I fell into her "Beauty Myth" trap. I want to buy her a copy of "Reviving Ophelia" and present it to her by smacking her about the head and neck with it. I mean, come ON! The only way she could feel comfortable around me is when I made a self-depricating comment! She could only feel good about herself in my presence if I somehow felt bad about MYself. Fuckballs, people, what did the suffragettes fight for? Our right to debase OURSELVES?

I hate it when women compete in nasty ways in reaction to their own feelings of inadequacy. I used to do that, but then again, I was nineteen and I was also eating toast for dinner.

A few years ago, I was faced with this kind of catty competition from another co-worker, but this time it was in the field of theater. She made a couple of comments early on in our relationship that led me to believe that she felt as if I were thinner than her. Not more attractive, not more talented, not more accomplished...THINNER. Because that's all that really matters in the life of a woman, right? Our fucking dress sizes?! Looking back, though, I realize that she must have just been on the cusp of what I had been dealing with four years previously. She was new to theater as a lifestyle (it's so not a job...anyone who has held down three other jobs just to afford the ability to do theater can tell you that) and didn't expect the fact that her appearance was now held up for public scrutiny. I had already been down that road. It was a stupid fucking detour, and now I realize that she had to take it, too. I saw her recently and, god help her, the dumb bitch is still on it.

When I was 19, I spent a semester abroad in England. During my freshman year of college, I had put on the freshman...thirty. So, I was kind of a sausage of a woman, but I knew it and I was exercising more to get the extra weight off. Then, one day, huddled around our English breakfast of heavy cream with extra buttersauce and lard, one of my classmates read a letter from someone back home in our theater department. The letter was full of glowing reports of the gorgeous new freshman women. They were talented, they were beautiful and, moreover, they were thin. Ms. Index Finger, I'd like you to meet Ms. Esophagus...

So, to all the women out there in the world, you had damn well better think of yourself as beautiful, worthwhile and fabulous because if you don't, and if you have the unmitigated GALL to voice it around me, I will FUCK YOU UP.