29 July, 2005

Omens

I'm not sure if this bodes well for the day or not: I walked into work, sat down at my desk, and almost immediately had something thrown at me. I heard, "Palmer! Here's some lotion for you!" and, next thing I know, a little sampler packet hoolie was making its way towards my head. This, coupled with the ongoing routine about Ed's nuts (in this case, chipotle almonds & steakhouse cashews), made for an abrupt start of my work day. I never knew just how much homoeroticism pervaded this joint until I moved to my current desk a couple weeks ago.

I received an email from The Dulcinea yesterday. No words, just a song attached. For a Mac user, I found it odd that she would send me a .wma file. I highly suspect that it was intentionally done as a minor act of revenge. She obviously knew that I mistaken have WinAmp as my default player for wma files but don't have the codecs installed. So I have to play it with WMP which conventiently tells me that I don't have the proper license. Sooo I got to try and download it using my trusty Firefox browser which, of course, doesn't have some fucking Active X control installed which allows me to grab licenses from Microsoft. So I finally use IE to get the license and play it in WMP. Sheesh! All this trouble just to have a guilt trip laid on me. Why do I beg for such punishment?

The song she sent me was "Blue Light" by Bloc Party. I'd never heard of them. This isn't particularly surprising as she is a thousand times more hip than I could ever hope to be. (For instance, I'm listening to "Deadwing" by Porcupine Tree and trying to mime the guitar solo by Adrian Belew. Lots of air tremelo. And I presume I look very silly tapping imaginary strings ahead of the nut while making funny faces.) I looked up the lyrics to try to decipher her message. The first line to catch my attention was, "if that’s the way it is, then that’s the way it is”. Resignation? Then I read a part of the next verse: "I still feel you and the taste of cigarettes." Longing? In return I sent her an mp3 - a nice cross-platform, license-free file. While the song didn't perfectly sum up things between us, I felt it addressed a couple of them in addition to sort of expressing the zeitgeist of my mind. Luckily her next e-mail explained "Blue Light". We exchanged a few more messages about matters of heart and matters avian. Sometimes I suspect that I express myself better via mix CDs than verbally.

As an aside on music, has anyone else noticed that some restaurant now has commercials featuring "Eat Steak" by the Reverend Horton Heat. Yeah, yeah, it's an appropriate song and all, but I wanna see a Viagra commercial featuring "Love Whip".

Last night was fun despite having a fuck of a time finding Sussie's place. Street names, people!! After much cursing and aimless driving around Janesville, I found it. Miss Rosie, The Pollack, Sussie, and his son, Tony, were out in the backyard chillin' over c-tails. We drank, ate, and shot the bull. Sussie made some quesadillas on the grill followed by some croppie. All very tasty. And Tony did a superb job as our Padawan bartender. The minute an empty glass hit the table, he grabbed it and was off to pour a refill. That little bastard started taking it easy on the sour with only the second drink. The convo was lively and not 5 minutes after I had arrived, the conversation turned towards toes. The Pollack has this thing about toes, apparently. He can't sleep with a woman whose big toes are shorter than the ones next to them. He looked to me for an amen but couldn only say, "Who gives a fuck? If the toes freak you out, then move up." He replied in typical food service-speak, "If the appetizer's no good, why would you wanna order a main course?" We then theorized about methods to get a woman with such feet to just wear socks - in the bathtub. Then somehow the conversation got to the point where I made the determination that The Pollack is a metrosexual. He explained that trusted the skin around his eyes to Oil of Olay and used the SPF15 version for when he knows he'll be outside for an extended period of time. Tony and I were the only ones who knew what a metrosexual is so it was up to him and me to explain it. And explain it we did.

Soon enough, dinner was served. The smoked chicken quesadillas were very tasty as was the blackened croppie. It's rather nice having friends that are or were cooks. The bourbon continued to flow and I decided to try to fix The Pollack's laptop. Outlook Express kept crashing as it downloaded the second message. Basically, msimn.exe died and nary a trace of its demise was recorded in the Event Log. I did the usual OE troubleshooting - .dbx files, the identity - yet nothing. Since I didn't have a Winders CD with me, I couldn't run the System File Checker. My plan is to meet up with him again next week and just hack the registry so I can reinstall OE over the slowest Internet connection ever. Fucking computers.

My little bout of computing over, I returned to the conversation which had migrated to The Pollack holding court and pontificating on how to land chickies.

IF YOU ARE A MADISON-AREA WOMEN BETWEEN THE AGES OF 27-37 20-50 AND GROCERY SHOP, PLEASE STOP READING NOW

He sang the praises of the produce aisle. "I'll take a produce aisle over a bar anyday," he proclaimed. He went on to explain, "See, you look for the hottie with the basket instead of the cart. She's got her quart of milk, her one banana, a can of soup - then you know she's single. So you go up to her, 'Excuse me, are these grapes good? How can I tell if this cantaloupe is ripe?' You've gotta play the stupid bachelor." This sent me into fits of laughter as The Pollack was a produce broker and head chef of the restaurant he used to own to boot. Apparently he had great success at the Piggly Wiggly in Sun Prairie using this method. And so I'm thinking of giving it a go. The problem is that I'm a terrible liar. I usually go with the basket and zoom around the store because I know what I'm getting and I used to be The Pollack's (and Kias') assistant so I too know about produce. I don't have cause to ask about the ripeness of something.

*Neil from The Young Ones voice* Guys...Guys! I think I'm gonna have to lie!

So I've got my work cut out for me: must practice prevarication.

The Pollack is heading to Lexington next month and I got him to agree to bring me back a bottle of Blanton's. He said that it has supplanted Basil Hayden as his bourbon of choice.

Ooh! Lunch time! I'm off to buy a tent and look at canoes!

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