Random Esquire

Pardon my disappearance.  Family emergency.

Back in full swing with a question about personal quirks.  I will start with one of mine.  Deep breath.

I can not sit down to eat a meal if I have even the slightest urge to urinate.   It stresses me out.

There.  Who’s next?

1. It’s official. The first lice outbreak of the year. The parent of said louse-infested kid said that the kid must have gotten it from another kid at school. The reason this is interesting/funny is because the kid is white…in a sea of black kids. Black kids don’t get lice. Did you know that? White people don’t normally know that. But now you do. So,…sort of comical. Unless you’re offended now. Because you’re white and you did know that. In which case….sorry.

Okay, now I sincerely mean that sorry above. Just did a web search. Apparently, black kids can get lice. So, you know…nevermind.

2. I have a Treo 755 and a Blackberry and use Outlook to schedule my meetings. And I sort of hate them all. I use my Treo (my personal phone) for tons of applications so it is a phone worth keeping for me. My difficulty is that I still have not found a really good method for tracking tasks and who has the next action item on a project, etc. I found this website where a guy made a datebook out of a moleskine notebook. But I don’t really need a calendar/agenda notebook – I just need something for tasks/projects. I think I might try this method – the GSD method (getting shit done). This means that I am on a mission to find a Miquelrius notebook. Anyone know where to find one of these?

3. I bought this last weekend. So, I guess I’ll try to figure out how to make banana ice cream (Boss’s favorite) this weekend. I just thought about making a lactose free peanut butter ice cream for Little Filthy but I’m pretty sure Boss would kill me if she caught me putting crumbled up dog biscuits in the ice cream maker.

You’re sitting in a small, dark room in London in late 1888.  Outside is the filthy underbelly of London where prostitutes known as unfortunates have been brutally murdered recently.  You cannot be seen or heard, you cannot move objects.  You move right through them as a ghost but you can move around.  You experience the heat of the room, the smell of the room – all just as if you were there.  Against one wall of the room is a bed where in one hour, Mary Kelly will be murdered by Jack the Ripper.  He will eviserate her, slice her neck, cut off her breasts, place a breast, her uterus and a kidney under her head and he will take her heart.

You are given a choice.  You may leave the room right now you may stay.  If you stay, you will not only witness the murder but will see Jack the Ripper’s face and know his identity.  You will not be harmed and he will not know you are there.  The events that happened that night will proceed just as they did then.

Do you stay to learn Jack the Ripper’s identity or do you leave?

Once the murder is over, you will be right where you are now.  This would occur as an out of body experience or a dream in first person.  Would you stay solely to know his identity?  If your answer is no, would you stay if, upon returning back to your current life, you could somehow (don’t concern yourself with how) be able to prove his identity and thereby gain both fame and fortune?

The heart of the question is this:  Would you witness this murder in exchange for knowing Ripper’s identity?

If you could learn the trutn about any mystery from the past, what would it be?  You would witness the events (or those events surrounding the event).  Would you choose to watch the Egyptians build the pyramids?  See what is at the very bottom of the deepest ocean?  Find out the truth about the JFK assassination?

1.  Boss and I watched The Bridge this weekend.  I think that may be the quietest we’ve been during a movie.   It was…troublesome.  Difficult to watch those people stand on the edge of the Golden Gate Bridge and then climb over and simply jump.  The singlemindedness of it…it was…sort of miserable.  But the film was good and worth watching, in my opinion, for the simple reality of it all.

2.  The Chicago Marathon was today.  We live along the course and heard many, many ambulances go by.  One person died in the heat.  I recall last year as I watched, a woman asked me to tie her shoes for her because her fingers were stiff from the cold.  Welcome to Chicago.

3.   Boss has her first cold of the season.  I casually mentioned making her chicken noodle soup and she responded, optimistically, “with homemade noodles?!”  I’ve never made a noodle before but hell, at 7 this morning, I made some noodles before heading to the grocery store and picked up a baguette.  She’s still sick.  What the hell?  Those were homemade noodles.

With a nod to livejournal user Heatherella from whom I am blatantly copying, below is a blog entry from the distant past:

March, some year in the past:
Never tell a girl that you’ve noticed a correlation between her opening her mouth and you being annoyed. If, however, you do tell a girl that, never follow up her anger by saying, “And that’s another thing – you lack any appreciation for a finely tuned sense of perception.”

****

Yup, get in line, ladies. You can’t just stumble upon this kind of charm.

I admit to being a bit fascinated with how people spend their morning prior to coming to work.  This is because most people have a definitive morning routine, some down to a precise showering process.  My typical morning process is a bit up in the air currently as I am trying to hit the gym first and the shower second – as opposed to my previous routine of showering first and skipping the gym altogether.

However, even on the mornings I hit the gym, I have a basic routine.  I’m in the shower between 6:45 and 6:50, done by 7 so that I can catch the beginning of the Today show.  Admittedly, this is sometimes done from the shower as I look out from the shower, through the open bathroom door at the bedroom television.  This is not so much a function of my immodesty as it is utilitarian – by leaving the door open, the mirror won’t be steamy when Boss comes in to put on makeup.

After that, my routine sort of goes to hell.  I used to be like clockwork but that was when I lived alone.  Now I dance around the morning demands of a kindergarten teacher who inevitably forgets something and runs around a bit crazed.  This goes on until about 7:30 when Boss heads out the door into the hallway, at which point she turns around and leans in to give me a kiss goodbye.  More often than not, I am standing in the doorway in just my underwear.  I don’t like to put my clothes on right away because my damn shirt will get wrinkled.  At some point, coffee has been made and I grab a cup and then get myself ready for work.  Then I check the thermostat, pet Little Filthy until he grunts his satisfaction, and flip off all of the lights and make my way to work.

So!  I’m curious.  What’s your  morning routine? Do you even have a shower routine?

1. Babies are made out of food. I know they don’t come out with a turkey leg and a carrot arm. It’s just that it sometimes strikes me that:

Woman + one sperm + food = baby. What the hell?

2. No one ever says “What?” in books. A book can be totally realistic and still nobody says, “What did you just say? No, before that. No, after that…what did you say?” That bothers me.

3. In books, there are never two people with the same name. I know no less than 3 Roberts and yet, in books, there’s always only one of each name. Only one Robert. That bothers me, too.

You know what would make Desperate Housewives a whole lot more interesting?

If Mary Louise-Parker would move on to Wisteria Lane and start dealing some weed.

As I mentioned, my trainer’s name is Dewayne.  I do not know his last name so when I put his number into my cell phone, I listed his name as Dwayne Trainer.  Obviously, at that time, I did not realize his name was actually De-wayne.  I can’t be bothered with such specifics.  Anyway, when he calls, his name pops up and in my head, I read his name as “Dwayne Twainer.”

The Italian asked me today to request resumes from readers of my blog.  What for?  To be his girlfriend.  He asks that I pass along this fine piece of information:  “Jewish guys are great in bed.”  He does, however, issue a warning that he has a three month expiration date, after which he will begin his Seinfeldian evaluation of your body parts, obsessing over a body oddity until he cracks and must be single again.  Such is the way of The Italian.

I’ve been frequenting a food bar for lunch as it gives me a large option of both hot and cold foods which comply with my stricter eating standards.  In case you were not familiar with my previous eating standard, I will tell you that I had a fairly low bar:  It should be edible.  But I have graduated from that school of thought and am now on to the “it must be relatively good for me or at the very least, not so bad for me” school of food thought.  Today, I made my way up to the counter with a container of chicken and steamed vegetables.  The woman who rang me up peered at me over her glasses.  This is the second time she’s done this.  The previous time she asked me what I did for a living.  I told her I was an attorney.  This time, she eyed me curiously and said, “Are you married?”

I was so surprised, I’m sure I laughed.  That probably isn’t the right answer to that question.