Ultramundane: It’s Just Not Natural

Standing in the kitchen, eating a piece of bread you made yourself (in the bread machine) with the compound butter you mixed yourself from fresh herbs, while you wait for the baked red-and-wild rice mix and brussels sprouts to finish…at times like that it’s easy to fantasize about being the next great cooking celebrity. Launching my own cookbook…making up credentials for the Food Network…planning my next episode…

Getting take-out for the next several nights afterwards is kind of like a commercial break.

An extended commercial break.

Six thousand pieces of mail in the last 12 hours. All bounce messages and spam notifications from a spammer spoofing my domain in their return address. There is no circle of hell harsh enough for the hate I have for spammers.

I hope my iPhone isn’t trying to download them all.  I may cry.

Probably you should IM me today if you want me to respond.

I was having the hardest time deciding between the two. Did I feel more racist or sexist today? Everything else was pretty easy. Bonds, Casinos, Destroying a Historic Landmark so Hippies can do a Peace Dance on the Remains. But I hesitated on this last vote. The array of choices, printed months ago on the ballot before some of the longshot candidates had dropped out from lack of money or media attention or just because they had to go back and defend their current seats, taunted me. “You had options once,” those graying names said. “Now you have only two, and if you haven’t been paying attention, it feels more like one.”

I gripped my pen and made my mark. But in the moment before, I quietly said, “Sorry, Dennis.”

I hate it when my mood doesn’t match the weather. It’s clear and blue for the first day in a week and I’m simply not interested in cheering up. Of course, I wasn’t much better when it was wet outside either.

My White Whine for the day: for the first time in my life I make too much money to receive the White House’s economic incentive package.

There are far worse things to happen to a person, I realize.

What I thought was a pimple yesterday turned into little raised bumps all over by the end of the evening. Yay for skin rashes! I’ve gotten these before so I’m not apt to panic about them, but it does mean taking the bright pink antihistamines. Which leads to uncontrolled napping. Which is generally frowned on at work.

Of course, the morning I have splotchy, red skin is the day they want to take a photo of the Marketing team. It’s been a bad day. Please don’t take a picture.

But an intellectual query posed by a friend—do white people get hives more often than black people?—lead me to try a simple search for “African-American and hives.” Didn’t find the answer. Mostly I got a lot of results about bees.

So maybe these aren’t hives…maybe it’s yellow fever. Who can say.

Maybe I’ll go home and play Super Mario Galaxy and listen to some indie rock until I pass out.

I have been fighting off the cold that everyone in the office has already had. Naturally I’m convinced that I’m dying.

“I’m sick. I think I’ve got Flesh Eating Bacteria.”

“Where on earth would you get that from?”

“Well…I used a public toilet today!”

“And were you rubbing up against a lot of gay guys there?”

“No. But there was that party on Saturday. It was a narrow hallway. Even if we were all clothed at the time…”

You know you’re fat when you’re diagnosed with flesh eating bacteria and the doctor gives you forty years to live.

Having Natto in the morning guarantees that the worst thing that could happen to you all day already has.

No, I don’t really believe that. I actually rather like the stuff. But I have no idea if it’s possible to eat it without getting strings of sticky fermented soybean all over your face and shirt.

It was a bad morning already; I was late for an 8:30 AM meeting, so I ran, pushing aside old women, and marched into the conference room 5 minutes late, dripping with sweat…to discover that someone had rescheduled the meeting in an email sent at 8:20AM. I figured it was a sign, so I went to Cafe Tomo for the Natto breakfast.

I’ve read that it’s not so popular outside of Tokyo, so I feel vaguely yet appropriately urban ordering it. But while I love to feel metropolitan, there’s no point in subjecting yourself to this if you don’t actually enjoy the flavor.

Or the odor. The fan is on, the to-go container is in the kitchen trash, and I think I should go brush my teeth before the rescheduled meeting. Of course, it’s also their fault that I had natto this morning…

Old houses are a bit unnerving during big storms. There are constant rattles and occasional booms and crashes. It sounds like the upstairs neighbors are jumping on their floor, even though I know they’ve gone off to work. I can see where people would spend a night in the place and think the place is haunted.

I’d make jokes about the Big Bad Wolf outside, but I realize the house is actually made out of wood… 

It’s been a bad week for objects that produce warmth in our house. The pilot light on the water heater went out several times, so we had a plumber come and fix that. Our gas heater makes a horrible noise when you try to light it, so we haven’t been using that. I finally gave up and bought an electric blanket. “You’ve been replaced,” the Boyfriend told me when I climbed into bed last night. “You’re unnecessary now.”

I think he was kidding.

It has separate controls for each side, which is a nice feature since I get a little too warm at night. Of course, the controls aren’t very helpful when your bed partner throws his half of the electric blanket over you so he can cool down. (I suppose this is payback for years of blanket-stealing on my part.)