I Pity the Foos

At work, one of my big important projects is turning the former CEO's office into an employee lounge. I bought the most fabulous cream vintage sectional, new tables from West Elm, and various other fun things. For a final touch, I'm trying to track down a foosball table on Craigslist. I know absolutely nothing about foosball tables so I asked some of the boys at the office to help.

The following emails went around this morning. Some of the names have been changed to protect the hilarious.

From: Hot Married Boyfriend
Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 11:55 AM
To: Kari, Jay, Adam
Subject: Foosball table on CL $300

Check this one out...worth $300?


From: Adam
Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 11:58 AM
To: Kari, Jay, Hot Married Boyfriend
Subject: Re: Foosball table on CL $300

There are wooden handles missing on some of the pieces.


From: Hot Married Boyfriend
Date: Wednesday, May 31, 2006 12:01 PM
To: Kari, Jay, Adam
Subject: Re: Foosball table on CL $300

Those aren’t missing handles, Einstein ... they are the other side of the poles. Thanks for coming out, though.

Adam's Y chromosome fails him, hard

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If someone does something to piss me off in a dream, I’m usually mad at them in real life for at least a week. Wens, after your crazy surprise hillbilly wedding the other night, you might not want to talk to me for a while.

The Start of Something Good

One year ago today: the first date. A Flaming Lips documentary and pizza at Cleo's. Happy Anniversary, CJ.

"Hit Me Like You Did the First Time" - The Flaming Lips

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What Livvy and I have been doing this week:



A quilt! How crafty!

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Oh crap.

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Bored? Nothing a little vanity photo shoot won't cure!






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It's 11:20 and I just finished my first beer of the day. Now I'm going home.

I love this job.

Our Hollywood Debut

EDITED TO ADD: Want to come? Shoot me an email for directions! tequilared@bust.com

Anger Management

At the risk of sounding like a total hippie, there is entirely too much negativity in my life right now. I complain too much. I spend too much time being angry. Angry at the upstairs neighbors who think it's A-OK to start hammering on the floor at 7 AM on weekends and clomp around in wooden-soled shoes and hog the laundry and leave their dog to bark for hours. Angry at my job for sucking so much out of me. Angry at my daughter for running into the street, coming thisclose to getting hit by a car and then acting like it's no big deal. Angry at the cat, for being a general asshole. Angry at myself for doing and saying stupid shit you can't take back.

I need to learn to let things go, to be able to accept imperfection. From others and from me.

Last night I was painting Olivia's nailsin the living room when Dylan charged in and reported that the toilet was overflowing. I fetched a plunger, dispatched the clog and cleaned up the nasty toilet water that was all over the bathroom, threw the bathmat and towels in the laundry and finally got the kids in bed an hour after their bedtime. I was straightening up the living room when I picked up the bottle of nail polish off the coffee table, forgetting that the lid wasn't screwed on. Silver nail polish splashed down the front of my new sofa.

Instead of having a complete meltdown, I sat on the floor and thought about how glad I was that I did that and not one of the kids. Because you can't yell at yourself. You can't hurt your own feelings and then regret it later. The only thing you can do is go get the nail polish remover and hope for the best. You can say, "Whelp, guess the couch is officially broken in." And in the morning, you can sit your daughter back on the sofa and finish painting her toenails silver.

It's a start.


Hugs not slugs, Michael

What I Have Been Doing This Week

Buying things on Craigslist
Selling things on Craigslist
Dealing with newly massive ego of Booty D
Not smoking
PMSing
Mentally planning Premiere Party for "The Break Up" (Sugar - call me!)
Eating Magnolia cupcakes
Buying things on ebay
Glueing nail caps on cat
Ignoring blog
Ignoring news
Ignoring boyfriend
Happy Dance, now that Veronica is back with Logan
Reading real, actual books
Dodging hail
Working like crazy person
Hiring new writer
Sneaking out early

CANCELLED

And yet "7th Heaven" may come back. What kind of world do we live in?

[UPDATE: Reba has been spared & will be back at midseason. Yay!]

Random Acts of Dryness

One night a few summers back, I was having drinks with some friends at a miscellaneous Lincoln Park bar. The group supply of cigarettes ran out, so my friend Dave and I sprinted through the pouring rain to a gas station down the street. On our way back, we were standing at a corner getting soaked and waiting for the light to change when a car pulled up next to us. "Here, take this!" yelled the driver, thrusting a small gray umbrella through the passenger side window. Then he smiled, waved, and drove off. The spontaneity and kindness of the act left me speechless.

A few weeks later I paid it forward, handing the gray umbrella off to a lady and kid who were getting soaked to the skin in a surprise downpour. She was confused but grateful, and we had a brief Oprah moment before going our separate ways.

It was just a cheap little compact umbrella, and probably she threw it away when she got to whereever she was going, but to this day it's one of the best things anyone's ever given me.

*

Another rainy day, and I am getting drenched waiting for the bus. A taxi stops and the driver hollers for me to get in.

I shake my head. "I don't have any money," I tell him.

"Don't worry about it," he says, waving me into the cab.

When he drops me off, I dig through my bag and come up with a crumpled dollar bill and some loose change. I try to press them into his hand but he refuses. "You stay dry, sweetheart," he says and drives away.

*

In any big city there's an every-man-for-himself attitude that's hard to escape. But weather can serve as the great equalizer. When it's bad (and in Chicago, it is quite bad quite frequently) it sucks the same for everyone out in it. Sometimes this has the effect of making people a little kinder. The bus driver waits a few seconds longer for the person running down the street. The guy with the snowblower clears the sidewalk all the way down the block. And, every once in a while, a complete stranger offers shelter from the storm.

Who Do You Love?

Juan Pierre, that's who.

Ad Nauseum

Dear Governor Rod Blagojevich,

I have an important matter to discuss with you. And no, it's not like that time you were on the Daily Show and got confused because you thought it was the real news. This is serious.

Maybe you politicians don't realize this but the general public views election season with a sense of dread. We know that in the weeks and months leading up to it, we're going to be subjected to a lot of boring/insipid/spiteful political ads right smack in the middle of our favorite TV shows. "My husband would make a great Senator because he loves our kids!" "Too bad about that other guy's massive brain stroke. Vote for me!" Unless you're one of those lucky Tivo people, it's enough to make you want to slit your wrists with the broken shards of TV screen littering your living room rug.

But we suffer through it. And do you know why? Because we know that as soon as the election is over all this nonsense will stop. We will have regular commercials about foot fungus and cell phones to look forward to again. And that's what makes this latest stunt of yours all the more heinous, Gov. We thought we were safe. And you blatantly abused that trust.

You are up for re-election in November. It is now May. May is 6 months before November, at least according to the calendar with all the puppies on it hanging next to my desk. SIX MONTHS. And so maybe you won't mind explaining to me and all the other innocent citizens of Illinois why we have to see those horrible, terrible, ungodly bad "Judy Baar Topinka - what's she THINKING?!" commercials on TV every 5 minutes.

Okay. So Judy B. thinks a rolling pin is an assault weapon. Boy, that's pretty dumb. But you know what's dumber? Annoying an entire state full of voters who may actually agree with you that the woman belongs in a loony bin but could very well walk into that booth and pull the lever with her name on it anyway just because we're sick and damn tired of not being able to watch the damn news without hearing "What's she THINKING?!" literally every five minutes for the past six damn months.

Seriously, G-Rod. Stop the madness. Put those commercials out of their misery at least until October, when we're all mentally prepared for this level of irritation. And maybe take $15 of the money you'll save and pay a little visit to Big Hair on Roscoe. Lily will hook you up.

Your friend,

Tequila Red


What's he thinking?!?

Mmmm, Fungus

Every May for as long as I can remember, my family has traipsed through the woods behind the homestead in search of the elusive morel mushroom. On Saturday, I introduced Concert Josh and the kids to the thrill of the mushroom hunt. And we hit the motherlode.



Sadly, the delicacies of fried morel were wasted on this largely anti-mushroom contingent. Arguments of "But they sell for $30 a pound at the grocery store!" were met with eyerolls and disdain. Clearly these children have also failed to inherit their mother's love of a bargain.


Concert Josh remains skeptical

My Anaconda Don't Want None

When I go out for happy hour with my co-workers (question: is it still happy hour when it goes til midnight?) we always find interesting ways to keep ourselves entertained. Last night it was a Biggest Baddest Badonkadonk Contest. That's right, we were arguing over who had the biggest butt. I forget why.

Anyway, if you had to pick, who would you say has the largest, in-chargest booty of the six below?


Click to enlarge. [Heh.]

Foot Sushi

In almost any other company, team building would mean a corny workship where you do ridiculous exercises like falling blindfolded into each other's arms or making a human pyramid. Here it means a mandatory marathon session of manicures and pedicures at a fancy Gold Coast spa.

Which is fabulous, unless you are the one girl in the entire world who can't stand that crap. I'm sorry, but the idea of someone picking at my feet for an hour is not relaxing, it is skeevy. I've had exactly one manicure in my life and it took all my willpower to let the lady finish. Why on god's earth would I encourage someone to shove a sharp stick under my cuticles and cut off pieces of my skin with tiny little scissors?

Every Tuesday a massuese comes to the office to give nearly-free rubdowns. I do not partake in this either. One girl told me he massaged her butt for half an hour once. "Your body is telling me this area needs special attention," he explained. What? I would have maced him.

So, yesterday's team building session was ... a challenge. We ordered in sushi, which I LOVE, but I took a pass on climbing up in the big pedi chair. Instead I sat in a corner shoveling in sashimi and feeling like the world's biggest ingrate. Here someone was trying to do this nice thing for me and all I could think about was the fact that I'm eating raw fish three feet away from someone who is having her callouses sloughed off. So I did what any team player would do.

I ditched. Grabbed my purse, flagged down a taxi and hauled ass back to the safety of the office.

Hopefully next time we can just do whirlyball.

Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

On Friday the Boyfriend returned from 8 long, boring, quiet days in Las Vegas.

(Ahem.)

After I almost got killed 14 times trying to pick him up from the train (HINT: pulling a U-turn on Irving Park under the Kennedy Expressway in rush hour traffic will NOT make you any friends), we decided to blow off a pal's record release party in favor of a boozy dinner at the Lennox Lounge. Once my life stopped flashing before my eyes, I drank Stella like it was my job and caught him up on every tiny detail from the past week. He tactfully refrained from mentioning all the blow he was doing off hooker's fake titties while I was busy attending children's birthday parties. He's a peach like that.

Saturday he had an extra ticket to see the much-lauded Tapes 'N Tapes open for the Wrens at Schubas, so I tagged along. Let me tell you, the Wrens rocked TNT right off the damn stage. I mean, you KNOW it's gonna be a good show when the bass is being passed to the back of the room on top of the crowd before the second song is over. I'm getting pretty tired of Rock's Next Great Band (changing weekly!), which inevitably turns out to be a bunch of 19 year old kids who picked up guitars like ten minutes ago and play every song off their as-of-yet-unreleased debut album without a drop of imagination to sold out rooms full of nerds who think they know everything because they read it on Gorilla Vs. Bear. Sometimes you just want a bunch of 30something year old dudes who have been playing together since you were in high school and still have more energy than a suburban soccer mom on meth. Holy, were they good.

QUOTE OF THE NIGHT: During a break between bands, one of the girls with us decided that it would be a super idea if all six of us piled into the photobooth together. "But nobody look at my thong!" she ordered. Her boyfriend rolled his eyes. "Like you're wearing a thong. It's not VALENTINE'S DAY."

Post-show we pretended it wasn't actually 2 AM and we aren't actually over 30 and drove up to The Condo to hang with the Sugar Gang for a bit. Miss Elle was in town and she'd brought along her bottle of Absinthe. Dun dun DUN! Surprisingly, no one took off their clothes, threatened to jump off the balcony, or confessed to a crush on the Mayor. Instead we brainstormed ideas for my first book, devised a plot to keep my sister on American soil, and admired Elle's drunken manicure, which covered much of her fingers and some of her nails. I have really missed those girls.

Sunday? Recovery. Vegetarian brunch, naps and the newspaper. All in all, a pretty sweet weekend. I'm glad he's home.