Watch Out Now - Straight Outta the Cubicle!

It's official. I'm work-blogging. Don't tell the boss.

The truth is, I can hear my entirely work-related print job happily printing away a few feet from this here desk, so some could call this multi-tasking. If you are one of those people, then you are a lazy bum, too.

Here's a handful of highlights from the past week:

Last weekend I went to a concert and was told by this total asshole that I should find another place to stand because I was blocking his view. I was standing up, and he was sitting down. This was at an outdoor concert on a Friday night, mind you. At a rock concert, by the way. I asked him if maybe him and his friends wanted to stand up and enjoy the concert, too (not even in a bitchy way), but then he said that what I was doing was "really uncool" and that if I didn't move, he would "contact security." So I didn't move for a minute for the pure principle of it, but then him and all his sitting down friends actually started booing at me. It was amazing. Bottom line: I can't stand people who tell you to sit down at concerts.

I was at dinner at a friend's house a few nights ago, and this friend happens to be a police officer. We were talking about how high the murder rate was and this and that, yadda yadda, and then he mentions that not only was the murder rate way too high in our city, but that I should also be aware of the recent rise in rape sprees near my neighborhood. Come again? "What's a rape spree?" I asked. I mean, how many rapes makes a spree? My friend's pregnant wife didn't much like the direction of the conversation, so I guess we just kind of moved on, but I found out later that said spree was only 2 rapes. So that's good.

Oh, another interesting tidbit from My Dinner with the Cop: a charge of mayhem is what a perp (look, cop talk) gets when they bite off a piece of somebody else's flesh. So by all means, watch out for the mayhem.

It's been pretty hot lately and the city gets a little stinky, but when I drove out into the suburbs, it smelled nice like eucalyptus trees.

I'll be happy when the auditors leave, because one of the auditors is a little too friendly with me, and sometimes I think I catch him spying on me when he goes out to smoke cigarettes.

In other news, the atheists and agnostics did better than everybody else on the Pew Research Center's Religion Test. They were followed closely by the Jews (L'Chaim!!). I took the abridged version of the test and found out that I did better than 80% of my fellow Americans. And I don't know jack about religion. Seeking some deeper analysis of the test results, I inadvertently landed at a Fox News opinion piece entitled "We Didn't Flunk the Religion Test." Actually, we did, but whatever.

More interesting than that guy's bunko story was a headline I saw on the side of the page: "Gay Cupcake Controversy Heats Up." Swear to God. The story itself was about a bakery owner who didn't want to make rainbow cupcakes for a Lesbian/Gay/Bi/Transsexual university group's celebration for National Coming Out Day. Pretty sad. Sort of newsworthy. Anyway, the most fascinating thing about it was the number of nasty comments from readers. The best one was this, and I am not editing it for punctuation, grammar, or spelling: "You'd think that with a, er, shitload of gay men, you'd have all the chefs you need... "

On that note, sleep tight all, whoever you're sleeping with.

Depression on the 1 to 10

I went running this evening for the first time in months. Mainly because I've felt like crying for the last 24 hours and I can't seem to shake it.

A few months ago, when I found myself swimming in sadness more than was legitimately healthy, I started thinking about suicide. Not actually contemplating it for myself, heavens no, but really just thinking about how it didn't seem entirely implausible for other people to off themselves, and how I was kind of surprised more people didn't pull the trigger, so to speak.

I remember thinking that you never hear about people who go out hiking or jogging or something and then decide to kill themselves. And maybe (this is just a guess here, I have done zero research to back this up) if some of those people who decided to jump off a bridge had decided to take themselves on a long walk in the woods first, maybe they would make another choice at that final grim moment. Which led me to the conclusion that if I ever feel really bummed, I should probably get my ass out into the world and get my blood flowing.

I did run the whole way, and my spirits are indeed on the rise, but unfortunately, about 2/3 in, I saw a giant Canada Goose with a bum leg, hobbling around looking awfully pained, and I just about lodged myself into Lake Merritt while my eyes filled with tears. Ridiculous.

My boyfriend told me that he thought I had been physically sick more in the last year than anybody he's known in his whole life. Statements like that don't tend to make the recipient feel much better. And if they're real examine-their-own-lives-to-a-fault type, they'll probably overthink statements like that so much that they create some sort of psychosomatic disease that keeps them sick forever.

This ain't no novel and I'm still not convinced that white type on a black background is indeed easier to read than the other way around, so I'll wrap it up. Fear not, you will not read about a 30-something white woman living in Oakland who slit her throat tonight for no apparent reason. Instead, I'm going to heat up some potatoes that I had previously undercooked (weird), over-easy an egg on top, drench it in green tabasco (the only tabasco that is worth anybody's time, in my opinion), and call it a day. If that doesn't brighten my mood, the nightly antics of a certain Girl Cat and Mr. Meowsers are bound to make me laugh before the gig is up.

I also hope New Orleans wins the football game.