Objects of my Affection

After many, many years of struggling with my inner handyman, I finally had a breakthrough last night. Amidst a toilet crisis that was preventing Carl, myself, La and Red from using it for any reason, I installed a new flow system in place of the faulty one with no assistance. And it actually worked. Upon completing the task, I exclaimed 'that's right, bitch" and it got me thinking about how many different situations over the last few days or weeks that I've either uttered those words or thought them to myself. Regardless, I find that I assign the name 'bitch' to countless inanimate objects on a regular basis; i.e. the toilet.

Coins/change play a huge role in my life. I pay several tolls over the course of my daily commute and on days when I carpool, i have to feed a meter to the tune of $3.00 in change to cover me for 12 hours. When the fate of my toll fare hangs in the balance and it's iffy as to whether I'm gonna find that last nickel or dime, it's then that the final piece of the toll fare puzzle becomes my bitch. Once I've located the last of it, whether it be under my seat, in the CD case, on the back seat...it comes out. "That's right, bitch." If it has been a particular struggle to find that coin on a given day, I'll hold it up between my thumb and index finger and look at it as I say the phrase. I want that coin to know that its value goes far beyond the five or ten cents it displays itself to be worth.

There's always that one, annoying piece of skin that hangs off my thumbs or fingers that never seems to be quite big enough to pick off. Granted, I've been making a concerted effort to quash my habit of gnawing off my own skin (as great as La is, not even she is cool with bloody, scabby cuticles), but still there are those hangnails that appear here and there. When they're finally at the stage where there's juuuuust enough to get it and erase it from my memory, it becomes my bitch. I get that classic symbol of concentration going when my tongue is sticking slightly out of the right corner of my mouth and when I get that piece of skin..."that's right, bitch."

I'm not entirely sure why that phrase has so much lure. But I'm comfortable saying that there's no harm in calling an inanimate object a bitch. I suppose it goes beyond objects, though. When I get a call at work and I don't feel like answering it, I dread the impending voicemail. But on rare occasions the caller won't leave a voicemail and I throw out the "that's right, bitch", as if I willed the person not to leave a message. The same can be said of the sun when it's just above tree height in the morning. I swear, sometimes the sun is out to get me. It wants to blind me and cause me to swerve off the road and into a tree. The x-factor in the sun's pursuit of bringing me down is that one cloud that moves in and sets a pick for me at the last second. At that point, I'll throw out the phrase and taunt the sun with an emphatic point with my right hand. I guess I'm also thanking the cloud at the same time. I've also used it on chunks of earwax that have been so elusive up until I get the paperclip in as far as I can push it and finally hook my target. That one piece of popcorn kernel that gets stuck in my back molars, the in-grown hair on my inner thigh that stings when i walk, the one fucking piece of lettuce that I can't stab with my fork...once i finally get any of these things in my control, out it comes.

Onto another subject, I thought of this joke the other day:

How did the lawyer turn into a comedian?

He slept funny.

I presented this to La when it came to me and she laughed. But it wasn't the kind of laughter you want to induce upon telling a joke. It was the kind of laughter that only comes from pity and embarrassment of knowing me...I still see it as a success, though.

I'm gonna try a new segment here, called Reasons Why You Should Be Thankful You Don't Have My Job. I hope I can carry it over to some future posts for your sake...for my sake, I hope it crashes and burns.

1. My boss has somehow grown fond of walking by my cube and 'crop-dusting' every time he's flatulent. To clarify, 'crop-dusting' is the act of leaving your gas as you walk so that someone can experience it but not truly know where it came from if you've executed it properly. However, my boss doesn't try to hide it. He sits directly behind me, and every time he gets up to do this, he alerts me that he's ready to dust my crops. Does he like me, or really, really, really hate me? Jury's out on this one.