the ocean

Sigh

Today is my last day off before I start my new job. It has been so crazy amazing to finally have some time off that I'm really saddened by the thought of being gainfully employed again. I mean, there are so many old episodes of The Real Housewives of New York that need watching. And who's going to compulsively eat the six boxes of Bottlecaps candy I brought back with me from Quincy? So few people are willing to stand up and take personal responsibility for ridiculously wasting time in the way that I am. It's tragic, really.

I have gotten a lot done over my break, though. In addition to taking a trip to Quincy, I have repainted my deck, relandscaped the front yard, put together a new sideboard for my dining room, created a new filing system for the various papers I needlessly hoard, and essentially looted the remains of the World Market that's closing in my neighborhood, obtaining much wine for 40% off. (On a side note, the World Market has giant signs on all of its windows and doors that say "Store Closing Sale." Yet when I was at the checkout, a lady walked up to the checker and asked "Is this store closing?" completely unironically.) And that's not even counting the hundreds of issues I've googled. I am putting out fires all over the place, although clearly not literally.

But anyway, the next chapter starts tomorrow. I'm sure it will be great. It's just that it can't possibly be as great as sitting on my roof in the sun and reading Entertainment Weekly. Even if it is a lame double issue.

Adjustments

After nearly seven years in the fast-paced world of high stakes corporate litigation, it is sometimes hard for me to adjust to the pace of life as a guest at my parents' home here in Quincy. I constantly feel that I should be drafting pleadings and hosting discovery conference calls as opposed to, say, walking dogs and doing penguin puzzles with my parents. My impulse is to shove a sandwich in my mouth at lunch and get back to business as opposed to luxuriating before an all-you-can-eat salad bar for hours at a time. And I tend to leave half an hour to get to places, as opposed to the fifteen minutes it takes to get to nearly anywhere in town. Oh, and sometimes I'm an asshole for no reason. But that happens pretty much everywhere, so it barely even counts.

Anyway, now that I've quit my law firm job and am going back into government work, I do think I'll be able to slow down a bit just generally, which will be nice. I mean, I'm not saying I'll be taking macrame classes at the Y or anything (I wish!), but I do hope to at least see some of my friends again and prevent my home from completely descending into Hoarders territory. And I'll be able to run errands again -- oh, the errands I will run! I'll pick up prescriptions at Walgreen's and get my dry cleaning before I even get that stern call threatening to destroy by items and maybe I'll even go to Bed Bath & Beyond if I have time, who knows?

So yes, a new chapter beginning soon. But for now all I have to do is figure out how to fill the next 16 hours or so with my parents. And since I can reasonably devote 8-10 of them to sleeping, I think we should be in amazing shape.

More of Same

How hot is it in Quincy today? So hot that the Memorial Day show choir concert was moved from the riverfront park to an indoor location, that's how hot. I know that because my grandmother kicked me and my sister out of her hospital room early today for fear that my sister would miss her train back to Chicago, leaving us with an extra half hour to kill, which we decided to do down at the the riverfront. I of course had no inkling of the possibility of a show choir concert, though I performed in that self same concert any number of times, but I saw the related signage. And then I saw the river, which looked much the same as the last time I saw it. It wasn't in anybody's living room or anything, so that's good. Although I can tell you from experience that filling sandbags can be an excellent cardiovascular workout.

And our air conditioning is officially broken and no one will come to repair it because it's a holiday. Stupid American lack of work ethic. I bet if this were China our air conditioning would be not only fixed but really great at math. But instead I am sweating through my t-shirts and going down to the TJ Maxx for a break in the heat. You are welcome for the lovely word pictures I am painting here.

Heat Wave


Perhaps chief among the many delights of staying at my parents house -- which include ready access to now-vintage JC Penney catalogues that have never been destroyed and various forms of wildlife that get into the attic or garage -- is the lack of normal heating and cooling. Or, rather, the lack of normal heating and cooling specific to my bedroom on the second floor. I've long been accustomed to spending my Christmases sleeping in sweatshirts and three pairs of socks under several layers of blankets while my parents pad around in shorts and t-shirts on the main floor. In the summer, I usually get by just by getting rid of all of my covers and sleeping in next to nothing, but the past few days are presenting a new challenge. It's 90+ degrees in May and I still just have one tiny vent pouring out lukewarm air. So last night I woke up at 3 AM sweating bullets, couldn't get back to sleep, and thus spent an hour and a half lying on a bean bag chair in our living room cooling down and for some reason watching Chicago on WGN America. Oh, and playing on my phone. Thank God ThugNASkirt53 was available for a late night game of Scramble.

I'm trying to view this as an interesting challenge to live as my forefathers once did, namely in a pool of sweat and indignity, but so far it's not really working out for me. I would just get a hotel room, which would also afford me the amazing opportunity to hobknob with people who actually decided to pay money and travel to play 3 on 3 basketball in our streets this weekend, but I know my parents would view this as the greatest affront of all time. So instead I just sit here tired and cranky, which has to be twice as delightful for them. Memorial Day 2000!

General Hospital

Memorial Day Weekend got off to a less than auspicious start for me with the announcement that my grandmother is in the hospital. They think she's going to be okay, but at 100, there's really no such thing as a minor illness or a brief hospital stay. And the hospital, it turns out, is not fun for anyone. The television is tiny and you have to share it with your roommate, they make you ask for help to go to the bathroom, and the food menu, though offering a wide selection, is entirely prepared using low sodium and sugar free methods. My grandmother didn't even want to eat her cookie yesterday; that's how bad it is.

I've already been out to see her several times and it seems that the medication she's on causes her to go through mood swings. In the mornings, she is manic and excitable, such that she actually ordered breakfast twice today. In the afternoons, her medicine makes her sleepy, causing her to drift off mid sentence. (Impressively, she nearly finished an anecdote about a restaurant in the '40s after falling asleep today.) At night, she is alert but cranky. There is a list of grievances and I am not sure how much longer I can avoid being on it.

The one great thing about the hospital in my view is the diverse personalities on display among the staff members there. There's a daytime nurse who is possibly the meekest person I have ever encountered; she apologized for approximately 317 things in the five minutes she was in my presence today. The night nurse, in contrast, is a bit of a force of nature; she delivered a ten minute monologue as an introduction and all of it was in the shouty voice people sometimes use with senior citizens and small children. I fear I will die by her hand and yet I am strangely attracted to her all at the same time.

Aliens

So I started watching the Alien movies this week. I have never seen them, although I was actually alive in the 1980s and shockingly aware of adult pop culture for a grade schooler. My parents were really weird and made sure that things like that were off limits while having no problem with, for instance, taking us to a Woody Allen film festival. Because Hannah and Her Sisters is essentially The Wiggles with bigger hair and worse fashion. And yes, I was spurred to action on this front by the impending arrival of Prometheus, although there's not a snowball's chance in hell I would actually see it in theaters, given my much-publicized (by me) dislike of being startled. It's fine for me to read the full plot synopsis ahead of time and play with my phone during all the scary parts when I'm just sitting on the couch at home, but I have a feeling my fellow theatergoers might not care for it.

Anyway, the first two movies were both good. I've always loved Sigourney Weaver if for no other reason than that she is Zuul the Gatekeeper, and the plotting was really good and suspenseful even though I had done my utmost to destroy any potential surprise. Unlike a lot of movies from earlier eras of special effects, neither movie looked dated or ridiculous. And neither seemed to be like six hours long, which is generally my problem with every movie ever, so that's good.

I've heard mixed things about the third and fourth movies, though, so I'm anxious to watch them as well. It's easy to criticize, and fun, too.

NATO Madness!

I am loving Chicago's massive freakout over NATO, which has been the subject of wall-to-wall local media coverage for the past week, despite the fact that it does not actually begin until tomorrow. They've been warning us about traffic snares and transportation delays and riots and looting and terror threats, when all that appears to have actually happened so far is a few street closures. Yesterday my office sent around a red exclamation point email to let us all know that approximately 100 nurses were gathered a few blocks away for a peaceful protest and they had put the lobby into lockdown as a result. (Those nurses can be tricky -- they may be armed with thermometers or tongue depressors.) Half an hour later we were informed simply that the nurses had dispersed. Nowhere did they mention whether these were sexy nurses, which seem simply unforgivable to me.

We also closed our office at 3 yesterday and for the whole day this coming Monday, so yeah, NATO is frickin amazing. And they let us wear jeans the past two days, in case protesters were "targeting businesspeople." I wanted to wear a full-on hippie disguise, complete with long shaggy wig and tie-died t-shirt, but that's where they drew the line. The hippies, I mean, not my office. They had to stop the ridiculous stereotyping somewhere.

Items I Have Found While Cleaning Out my Office


-- A minature tape measure with my firm's name on it.
-- Three tubes of Skittles flavored lip balm.
-- Probably hundreds of (unused) napkins.
-- A recall notice for my car from five years ago.
-- An unflattering photo of Kate Hudson someone (me?) cut out of a magazine, seemingly around the time of the Owen Wilson incident.
-- A bright orange hat with the words "Evacuation Team" printed on it. (I'm keeping it.)
-- A Pez dispenser with a plastic bat on top of it.
-- A file folder containing two McDonald's bags with pictures of Apolo Anton Ohno on them.
-- A PowerPoint presentation on appropriate business casual dress.
-- My natural light lamp, non-functioning.
-- Everlasting love.

Help Wanted

So I'm getting down towards my last day at work, and accordingly have had to bring seven years of crap back home with me. I'm sure that all of these copies of the rules of civil procedure and my certificates of admission to courts all over the nation will come in handy someday. For the most part, I've just been throwing a few things in my bag each day to bring home with me, but for some of the larger items I had to bring my car down. And that's where the fun began.

You see, my building requires a pass to carry large items out. Not a physical pass, mind you -- that would be super old fashioned -- but a "digital pass" which is essentially just them telling the guys at the front door that you're coming. When I emailed them to get the pass, they offered me assistance in carrying my stuff down to the car, and who would turn that down? Except they showed up ten minutes late, criticized the way I had packed my stuff up for the fifteen minute car ride home, and insisted on repacking it, which involved me standing around in my office sweating through my jacket for ten minutes while they went to get bubble wrap, followed by another ten minutes for the actual bubble wrapping.

"Should I go down and get the car now?" I asked hopefully. "It might take me a little while to get it."

"No," they responded. "We don't want you to have to wait down in the circle drive. They get really crabby about it during rush hour."

When the Greatest American Packing Session was finally completed, they began the process of dropping and tossing my fragile items onto a ridiculously oversized cart, at which point I was finally allowed to retrieve my car. Which took about half an hour to move one block owing to rush hour traffic. So when I finally reached the circle drive, I got to be verbally accosted by both my packing friends and building management, who for some reason were not delighted by having a huge cart sitting in their lobby for half an hour.

But it was all worth it, because now my law school composite photo is resting safely in the corner of my bedroom, where it's bad 2003 fashions can haunt me until it makes the trip to my new office. I'm lucky to have such treasures in my life.

Playlist

One of my favorite things about iTunes is how it forces us all to admit that we really do have terrible taste in music, at least occasionally. I have to face the fact that I found Christina Milian's "AM to PM" worth downloading at some point in my life (okay, it may have been earlier this week). Anyone who examines the contents of my phone will know that I am in possession of not one but two singles recorded by contestants on America's Next Top Model. And I am frankly shouting from the rooftops that Miranda Cosgrove's "Dancing Crazy" is one of the greatest works of musical genius in the last quarter century and ought to have a place in any sensible person's musical library. There's no hiding from it; I like a lot of embarrassing stuff.

Of course, there's always been an aspect of this in a person's music collection. I have long made light of the fact that Former Roommate Liz owned not one but two copies of Alanis Morrissette's Jagged Little Pill. (Thereby making my single copy -- on cassette! -- seem far more sensible.) But since iTunes generally works on a single-by-single basis, as opposed to a full album basis, there's no cover. You can't pretend you just bought that Miley Cyrus album because "Party in the USA" was your jam one summer; you have to own each and every track.

And I think that's wonderful. Now back to OMC's "How Bizarre" from the heady days of 1996. And let's never speak of it again.

Entertainment Weekly

I saw The Avengers on Tuesday and Timon of Athens on Wednesday. They were more similar than you might think. Both oversized, heavily-produced narratives about social misfits dealing with extreme circumstances. Both just over two hours long. And both vehicles for the acting talents of Scarlet Johansson, or at the very least her leather pants. But seriously, they have nothing in common. The Avengers was fun, if lightweight, and seemed to go by pretty quickly, although I wasn't wearing a watch so I didn't really know. Timon of Athens was pretty heavy stuff and I thought the second half was potentially never going to end. Oh, and there was a naked old man at the end of it. It would have been better with Scarlet Johansson.

The Avengers was in 3D, which I think I'm pretty much oficially over now. It always starts out feeling super weird and like you might maybe get a little motion sick and throw up. Then it settles in and there's probably like one or two moments where you think, "oh, that was an interesting effect," but for the most part you don't even notice it. So why would I pay extra for something that, at best, I don't really notice? I actually know the answer to that -- because I keep forgetting that 3D doesn't really add anything for me in between movies. Note to self.

Timon of Athens was also in 3D, because it was, you know, real people performing live. No offense to Shakespeare (who I believe is still dead), but I just don't think it's his best work. There just isn't much in terms of incident in it; I far prefer when there are murders and betrayals and magic and fairies and stuff. Oh well. There can't always be fairies, I suppose. Words to live by.

Evidence of a Sickness
Tonight I had a delightful evening copying my CDs to my iTunes library. I'm not kidding; it was really a lot of fun for me. I wasn't even listening to the music, mind you, just getting it in order. Organization sort of makes me hot.

This weekend I did three loads of laundry and shredded a bunch of my old bank statements. Again, I had a ball. I like things to be clean and in the place where they are supposed to be.

And cleaning up my files at work and sending them to storage these past few weeks? Pure heaven.

How all of this can be reconciled with the two foot stack of papers sitting on the floor in my bedroom right now, I'm not sure. It is on my to do list for after I leave my job, I assure you.

Tooth and Consequences

For those of you following my dental escapades -- which I imagine is everyone -- the progress has been good. I have upgraded myself from soups and puddings to soft wraps and expect to challenge myself with a chip or two before the weekend is over. I have completed all of my medications, which is good, because it turns out people don't find it so charming when you're acting like Paula Abdul in the workplace. And I have religiously attended to my wound cleanings, despite the fact that they're sort of gross. I have it on good authority that my coworkers actually do love watching me swab chemicals all over the inside of my mouth with a q-tip in the bathroom at work.

In other news, I may have to go to Minneapolis on Monday for work. Yes, it turns out that the last-minute travel edicts don't stop simply because you've informed them that you'll be leaving the firm. In a way, I feel as though it might be payback. And why is it that it's never a last-minute trip to Disney World or the French Riviera? You're telling me Mickey Mouse never has emergency legal problems?

Anyway, I do harbor a slight fear that my stitches will explode in my mouth upon takeoff or something. I realize this is ridiculous, as I have repeatedly been assured by medical professionals that there will be no problems, but I have never been one to shy away from the ridiculous. I'm taking extra q-tips, just in case.

Lame Duck
It's been almost two weeks since I gave my notice at work. I have to say that it is a rather surreal experience working at a place after you have already told them you're quitting. People have differing reactions to it. Some of them -- and these are my favorites -- just sort of act like you're not there any more. They drop you off of emails, stop asking you questions or give you assignments. It's like you're already gone. As I say, this I approve of. But others actually accelerate their demands, as though they're going to be able to get a whole year's work out of you in just a few weeks. There's a sort of sad desperation to it. This I am far less fond of.

Of course, my friends keep telling me that it's ridiculous for me to care how people react and that I should just sort of check out now that I know I'm leaving. That does not seem to be in my nature. I still want to leave on "good terms," whatever that means. And so I still found myself doing legal research at 10:30 Tuesday night. And I'm still trying to draft an opposition to a 50 page motion in the two weeks I have left. At the very least that's bound to be a fascinating read. Part of it was composed on painkillers, after all.

The saddest part is that I've barely had any time to plan for my goodbye party. Or my goodbye email. These are key rites of passage, and none of the other kids will like me any more if mine are lame. I'm thinking of asking Whoopi Goldberg to ghost write for me; it just seems like a Whoopi kind of moment.