We're not in New York, anymore...

Over the past 168 hours of my life, I've slept for about 43 of those hours and logged about 103 hours of work. This leaves just over three hours each day where I have had free time; but unfortunately for me, at least an hour or so of said free time was put toward my commute to and from whichever work I happened to be heading to and from.

Which is probably why, when I woke up at the Kansas City airport this evening, I thought my plane was still patiently waiting its turn, grounded on the tarmac at LaGuardia Airport in New York City. Actually, that's a bit of an exaggeration of how tired I was, for I didn't sleep through the entire flight, but bear with me for the truth is quite possibly worse; I woke up with about an hour left to go in the flight and only after 20 minutes had passed did I realize that we were not in fact just "sitting there" and that we were in fact flying. I guess I had lost my sense of kinetic motion.

To my credit, it was pitch black outside and the windows were fogged, and it was also a buttery smooth flight. To my discredit, I couldn't for the life of me figure out why my phone service (up there at 25,000 ft) was so horrendous, so much for not interfering with airline communication signals and such... I'm sure someone up there intercepted the text that I was trying to send my mother: "It is 9:20 and we are STILL on the tarmac. They are trying to appease us by serving us the fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies early. I won't forgive so easily." The text also contained the following photo of my tray table. 

I figured out we were in the air when the flight attendant informed us we were about to begin our descent into Kansas City. A startling revelation to sleepy little me.

I am happy to say that I am in bed now in Kansas City, and without having sustained too much grief from my mother. So far, she has told me to take my vitamins, to not be single at the age of 40, to try to be more photogenic in pictures, and to eat some pie leftover from the Thanksgiving that I missed--apple and pumpkin with some whip cream from a can. Mmmm. 

Being away from work has given me time to look up a couple of things online that I have been meaning to look up. Mostly, they've been vocabulary words that I had run across in my reading renaissance (reading is making a comeback for me... I've basically been illiterate for the past year). But the most important search query was to satisfy a hunch I've had since my commute to work this morning. I was standing next to a guy that resembled the picture that Junot Diaz had provided on the back of his book, The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, which is the most recent book to fatally convince me that I should attempt a career as a sci-fi/fantasy novelist. I observed him typing away on his mobile device, typing something too voluble to be a mere text; plus, it couldn't be a text, because we were underground where there is no service (contrast this to me typing furiously on MY mobile device 25,000 ft in the air, where the girl sitting next to me must have been wondering the same thing). 

Well, after searching for his photos online, I have concluded, without question, that I was in fact standing right next to Junot Diaz this morning for a good five minutes, which in hindsight, I can treat as really inspiring or really depressing. For the difference between writers like him and writers like me is that while Junot Diaz, my new sci-fi idol was covering the face of his mobile device with the blood, sweat and oil from the tips of his fingers, I, idle-handed, stared at the side of his head and just wondered if he was who I thought he was. Well, he was, and now I feel like a fool. Junot Diaz may not think me a fool, but I know that I have made a fool of myself in front of Junot Diaz. 

Time to sleep off the humiliation, here in the heartland, where my mother can entertain me with all sorts of different filial humiliation rites in the morning. It will get all my real concerns and anxieties off my mind, for at least the weekend.

Day Off or Fuck Off?

Saturday. O! epic Saturday, my first day off since I was first afflicted with overemployment. “What about Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving,” you might ask. Well, let me tell you, I was working.

In any case, I'll consider today a day of thanks. I am thankful for the limitless possibilities. What to do with this glorious free time?

How about wake up at 7am and take a train into the city from Astoria. I am walking around the farmer’s market at Union Square when I get a text from Mikki, who is working a morning shift at Café Gypsy: “Don’t be fooled by the bright and sunny morning, it’s freezing outside!” Silly Mikki, it’s my day off, but that doesn’t mean I’m sleeping in! I cannot squander this boon of free time. I buy some lamb shoulder and hop back on the train back to Astoria; it might seem silly since, round-trip, I have racked up an hour’s worth of commute for a mere pound of lamb. But not a moment has been lost, having spent each sedentary moment on the subway bench finishing up the last few chapters of a damn good book.

I get back home, industriously clean up two piles of dog vomit that Prance has just started reingesting. After washing my hands with an excessive amount of antibacterial soap, I throw the lamb shoulder in a pot with some coconut milk and spices, and voila, makeshift, unauthentic, yet delicious lamb curry dinner for three—Mikki, me, and our new Swedish roommate, who I shall, lacking originality, name the Swede. Mind you, this lamb curry dinner will not be eaten for another nine hours because I'm still in the ante meridiem hours here.

(Side note: I looked up “am” on dictionary.com--"am" as in 11am--just so that I could use the full Latin term. Here I discovered that out of the myriad official definitions for “am,” one of the capitalized definitions is “Asian male.” I didn’t know this abbreviation existed on an official level, but maybe I’ve been out of the chat room loop for a while. In case you’re interested, 25/.5AF/qns)

With dinner taken care of, I’m onto the next project. How about… painting the kitchen! I impulsively paint the kitchen a dusky purple gray, using leftover paint from past projects and knowing full well that there’s only enough paint for one coat. I can’t help it though. I gotta accomplish some shit today. I get even more ambitious and attempt creating vertical stripes using a raisin-hued paint. Unfortunately, this ends in a disaster, and I try to salvage the single botched stripe by going over it with a paint roller, thinking this might give it a cool textured effect. Instead, the patch of wall is now feathered with an unprecedented Lisa Frank-esque amalgamation of the two colors.

I’ll get back to that later. I text Mikki about how excited I am to have a day off, how much fucking time there is in a day and how I’m in a state of disbelief over the fact that I’ve forgotten about said fucking time.

So, next project is…

And this is where the music comes to a halt, where my overemployed fate swoops in with cruel, jinxed irony.

I get a text from someone at Funfetti, entreating me to work her shift tonight. She’s sick with the stomach flu. Essentially, help me Obi-Mc Quenobi, you’re my only hope. So what choice do I have? I concede my day off and tell her I’ll work for her.

She promptly texts back, “Oh BTW, it’s the closing shift so you’ll be there til three in the fucking morning which means you’ll be waking up tomorrow at noon, only to be getting ready to come back to work where you’ll be working another closing shift, followed by a bright and early Monday at Badvertiser where you still have not figured out how to discreetly nap at your cubicle.”

Well, she didn’t actually text me that.

Alas, there passed my day off, a fleeting hope dashed to pieces by my overemployed affliction. Someday, days like this will come as to no surprise for me. But as for now, I’m still dreaming of the day that I can do whatever the fuck I want to do. Is that too much to ask?

P.S. I haven’t had time to eat any lamb. Which merely underscores the fact that the answer to the titular question is a resounding "fuck off."

A Flattering Proposition from Bambino

Lenny comes up to me and asks me what I’m doing on December 4th. I’m well aware that December 4th is a Saturday. Is he making a peace offering? Is he personally inviting me to a company dinner? Or is he going to ask me to do him a strange favor that isn’t in my job description (something he does on a regular basis)?

I don’t know what he has up his Louis Vuitton sleeves, but fortunately, I won't be a part of it; I’ll be in Kansas on the 4th, a belated Thanksgiving with my mom so that I can share the holiday workload at Funfetti Café.
Lenny shrugs his shoulders, then circles around to the other row of cubicles and asks Carrie what she is doing on the 4th. Carrie is a nice girl with a pretty face and would presumably look good in a tight dress: this is what Lenny is honing in on, as I hear him spill the details to some big hip-hop concert and party that Badvertiser is hosting. He drops some names of celebrities and musicians. Carrie giggles as he then jokingly but not really jokingly asks her to show him her facebook pictures, so that he can get an idea of what she’d be like at this big event.

Basically, he is scouting the office for pretty, young things so that he can offer a multifarious supply of hoochies to the celebrities and musicians at this event.

Well, sorry, Lenny... I won’t be giving hand-jobs in the green room on your behalf this time. I'm flattered at the proposition though, really. I never thought you could look past your hatred of me, but you have proven me wrong in acknowledging me as an eligible piece of meat.

Eastern European Cyber-Love

Part of Badvertiser’s staff, as you know, is Russian and Eastern European. There are a few of their kind in the office, but most of our foreign tech and design staff is stationed abroad in the Ukraine, Romania, and Russia.

To communicate with these staff members, we use Skype’s instant messaging program. It should come as no surpise that tech guys have a soft spot for cyber-love, especially when it comes to instant messaging programs.

My profile picture on Skype is a sassy, but blurry photo of me that my friend T. Lo took of me during the Daily T. Lo era of my life in Los Angeles; nothing provocative, but fun. My Skype name is just my name—not, for example, a suggestive mccutiepiexxx. In any case, from what little profile information is avialable, I have attracted the likes of both a Romanian and a Ukrainian cyber-suitor.

It all started on the first day I sent Pasha, the Ukranian, a msg about designing business cards for me. “Sure,” he wrote. “BTW, I like ur pict,” which is cyber-Ukrainian for “By the way, I like your photo.” He's interspersed emoticons of smileys throughout each subsequent business card conversation. Today, after he delievered me a file, I responded with a "thx" followed by a smiley with hearts. I've always liked the smiley with hearts. However, I didn’t realize that this particular smiley file was named “in love.” Pasha is usually pretty prompt about msging me back, but two minutes passed before he sent me a blushing smiley; he must've been debating which smiley to use--should he keep it professional and send me a plain smiley? ambiguous with a wink? No, he went balls to the wall and picked the blushing smiley.

I think I just led Pasha on.

Marinas is the Romanian. He also has a predilection for sending me lots of smileys. His cyber-courtship was ambiguous until last weekend, when he msged me on Saturday afternoon while I was on Skype at one of my other jobs. “Hey Kat, how ru? You working on a weekend>?” Silly Marinas, of course I’m working! I always work! He asked me a question about a client of ours, but only as a segue into small talk. Nothing particularly memorable was discussed, but our casual weekend cyber-encounter gave him the courage to call me on Skype today to ask me a work-related question, which was “an emergency.” (It wasn’t.)

Sounds like Marinas wants to take our relationship to the next level: phone-love.

Who’s going to win my emoticon heart? Stay tuned to find out.

The Philosophy of Vomit

Friday night, Badvertiser had a Halloween party—a nice, morale-boosting, co-worker-bonding experience, something I had been looking forward to attending. Especially because I found someone I actually like in the office--a sweet girl named Missouri, my new lunch buddy and confidant.

I had been sending out memos in anticipation of the Halloween party all week. I prepared a nice mix of unpoisoned candy. I even made a roasted garlic dip from scratch, knowing full well that the fastest way to Lenny and friends’s hearts is through their stomachs.

But, fatefully, something came up where I could not attend said party, perpetuating my feeling of being the office slave.

This feeling was underscored by the state of the office Monday morning. There was a spread of vodkas, rums, tequilas, and mixers on the supply counter, and there were Badvertiser logoed squirt water bottles everywhere. One of the squirt bottles was labeled “tequila shot” in permanent marker. Other ones were covered in drunken Cyrillic scribble.

By the time I got into the office, everyone was already hard at work, heads down in their cubicles. Clearly, no one was interested in sharing the responsibility for cleaning up after the part—whatever happened to communism?—which left me, an unattendee, to be the sole janitor of the situation.

I hoped that my acquiescence wasn’t going to be mistaken as initiative by my coworkers. To remedy this misunderstanding, I considered chugging a bottle of vodka, vomiting all over the carpet and all over Lenny’s laptop, and leaving, never to return.

But instead, I cleaned up quickly and quietly, not choosing to make such a scene. For who would be the one to clean up my vomit? It would just contradict the point I would’ve been intending to make by vomiting in the first place.

And thus, the philosophy of vomit.

Unattended Sandwiches

At Café Gypsy, I used to serve sandwiches to customers, eating their leftovers after clearing the table if I deemed the food untouched—or at least sanitarily touched.

Now, making headway in my life and career, I’m a secretary at Badvertiser… where I serve sandwiches to clients at important meetings. And I eat their leftovers too.

There are usually leftovers at these meetings because people are trying to be polite, never taking seconds of their delicious sandwiches that I ordered: smoked turkey BLTs, grilled chicken and avocado melts, roast beef on rye... I’m on both set-up and clean-up duty, so I get the first go at the spoils after the big boys have picked everything over and had their fill.

Early on in the meeting today, there is half a sandwich on the supply counter, with no apparent owner. It seems a bit strange to me, as the meeting is still going and people are still eating; usually, the nice clients don’t offer to help me clear the conference table until the end. So, I sit on my hands, my Pavlovian drool response in high-gear. I resist, waiting out the circumstance of this unattended sandwich.

Ten minutes elapse, and still, there is an unattended sandwich. Well, I conclude, it must be someone trying to clean up early. The supply counter is next to my desk, so the client probably thought he was being helpful by bringing it closer to me.

I claim the sandwich as my own, and begin eating it.

With my mouth full of delicious white-collar sandwich, I am suddenly accosted by Lenny. “Hey McQ, have you seen my sandwich?”

I then realize I’m eating a sandwich that Lenny had set aside for himself. Quickly and slyly, I slide an office memo print-out over the incriminating sandwich. I scoot it alongside the wall of my cubicle.

I’m spitting out seeds of multi-grain as I answer him. “No. What sandwich?”

“It was right… I don’t know, I put it here on the supply counter.”

“I don’t know, if you left it there, maybe someone thought it was trash from a client? There’s still plenty left in the conference room, though.” I'm trying not to chew the strip of bacon in my mouth, packing it to the side of my cheek like a hamster.

Lenny stops asking me questions, not suspecting me in the least. He leaves my desk in a huff and goes to retrieve another sandwich.

There’s a moral to this story: when around McQ, never leave a sandwich unattended.

Take my word for it, because you don’t want to have to learn it the hard way. Lenny had to learn it the hard way.

Bums and Crackheads and their Poop

Working at a restaurant in downtown Manhattan, you’re bound to become acquainted with a few vagrants.

Café Gypsy’s outdoor seating made it a popular venue for hipsters and beggars alike. One guy liked to sing and tell jokes to procure money from customers. Another guy liked to flash his wang. One guy in particular was everybody’s favorite: Crazy Eddie. He likes to lie down on the sidewalk and moan about how his rectum burns when he takes shits after drinking too much alcohol.

Funfetti Café has its own brand of unwelcome guests: crackheads. They aren’t nearly as entertaining as the bums of Café Gypsy. They’re gaunt and unsmiling, probably wielding knives. They slink into the restroom, conspicuous among an early morning crowd of American tourists.

While I’m working brunch, one of the tourists flashes me an inquisitive glance, but at this point, I have not been advised about the crackheads. I must look just as alarmed.

After 1130am, the crackheads dissipate. I ask the other server if this is usually the case, and if there is anything that we should be doing to deter their bathroom dealings.

“No, they’re all fine. Don’t bother them. They mind their own business if we mind ours. Except for this one guy named Keith; we don’t let him in anymore. He shits on the floor of the bathroom. We’re not a big fan of that.”

Good thing Funfetti Café has passed the point of having to ask anyone to make poop signs.