Did you read?

Matt:  so how did you discover the article about Dave and Beth?

me:  actually i was looking for articles for the blog and saw the caption "i just remember being really, really happy"

and clicked on it

and hence the discovery

Matt:  because evidently you found it before they even knew it was up

me:  hahahahaha

wow

well i read a lot of news

Matt:  didn't know you were such a Wash. Post fan

i like trashy news like NY Post

me:  hahahah i mean, it's my job

so i read the nyt, wsj, wp

and then for fun, the la times

and of course CQ and all the hill rags

Matt:  http://ww​w.youtube​.com/watc​h?v=P7VgN​QbZdaw   

Matt:  take that, nerd!

Awkward moments that kind of make you either want to cry or laughhysterically.

1. When your headphones aren't plugged in and the entire office hears you start playing Salt & Peppa's "Push It" on blast


2. When you take said iPhone to the Apple Service and the first song that comes up to play is Britney's Hit Me Baby. (Even better when the second is that ridiculous joke song, "I know my calculus, it says you + me = us" )

Not joking.

3. When you admit the more embarrassing additions to your iPod to an entire blogging community.


4. When you take the dogs out wearing a pair of fleece pants, glasses, and bed hair at 3am and the most beautiful man in the world watches you trip over their leashes.


5. When you try to use a q-tip and have your earbuds in (oh wait, that's another post)


6. When you fall off of a pyramid (hahaha, oh right another post :P)


7. When you think a guy is leaning in to kiss you because it may or may not have been a date, and then you lean in too and he doesn't. (Seriously, I'll stop now, I promise)


8. When you receive an email from one of your contractors, not in reference to your work, but with a "your boss said you were single, and so is one of my reps, and we thought you'd really hit it off... Can I give him your number?" and you realize that your office is trying to pimp you out. :P

9. While mobile app text typing this blog post on the metro, you nearly miss the metro doors closing and have to make a beeline to get off, mowing people down so as to not have to take the Greenline into ANACOSTIA.


10. When you get an urgent email FROM YOUR MOTHER with info about the Pfizer birth control recall and the subject line is not, "Does this affect you?" which would be embarrassing enough, but "Do you think you're pregnant??"


Doom.

Signs my future is doomed.

Reasons that I'm convinced I am headed for senility, or Alzheimers, or Huntingtons, or some kind of mad cow disease:

The Famous Last Word's Guide to Small Talk

After I stopped playing softball, my dad helpfully suggested that I start following professional sports, since I was "bad at small talk" and would "need something to talk about."

Look, I'm no wunderkind like Ashton Kutcher Paris Hilton Jenny McCarthy, but I think I can reasonably say that my parents have always underestimated my social skills. 

Now, some of that may be my own fault.  High school Katie didn't play the long game.  Uninterested in explaining who my friends were and where they lived, I would always just tell my parents that I was at one of two people's houses.  They're not illogical people.

They concluded that I had only two friends.

I love you Wilson.

This conclusion had consequences.  The reason they encouraged me to play a sport in college, my brother later told me, was because they thought it would force me to socialize.  "Katie only has two friends," they told him.  "This way she'll be forced out of her room."

Computers: 523891098   Parents: 0

And then I dropped softball, and my dad and I had that talk on the front porch.

His words come back to haunt me all the time.

I was told by one former co-worker, who caught me hiding at an event, that I "don't play the game."

"Baby," I cooed, "I don't play no games."

Baby I bowl but baby that is a sport.

It's true.  I don't play games.  I master them. You can therefore count yourself lucky that I will share my wisdom and help turn you into the social butterfly of every occasion. Just stick to the below topics, and the moment, as they say in France, will be perdu a jamais¹.

Happy Birthday?

One of our esteemed co-contributors celebrated her birthday yesterday. December 7th! Really? Nothing? As none of you probably know, yesterday was also Pearl Harbor day! Being born on a day that one of the greatest Americans in history once described as a "day that will live in infamy" is probably a bit of a downer. Thankfully for her, our terrible education system and a Michael Bay miscarriage have ensured that many people today don't remember Pearl Harbor, or at least can't recall the calendar date when challenged.

The Pilgrims dumped Tea into Pearl Harbor during the Civil War to protest Washington DC's license plates.

Thoughts

Perhaps we're all being a little negative. Maybe Al-Qaeda is growing all those fields of poppies because they look pretty.

Holiday Bits and Pieces

So I haven't been posting much lately, and I apologize for that.  I'm having a hard time shaking off the holiday cobwebs.  However, here's a collection of bits and pieces that I couldn't quite flesh into full posts, but, now that I'm A Blogger, I have a compulsive need to share:

• I've been spending an increasing amount of my time daydreaming about what I would do if I won the lottery.  Won it big-time, like $170 million.  These dreams have gone past the point where I have been planning which friends I would hire as personal assistants, at what salary, and how I would have to get a good tax attorney to review all the scholarships I would create.  This is all well and good, except I just got alarmed thinking that I was really behind on what I had to today and then I realized that I was thinking of my imaginary "buy 5 houses" list and not my real work one.  
• Speaking of winning the lottery, my million dollar idea, which you are not to steal: Congressional Guess Who.  TELL ME THAT WOULDN'T GO OVER BIG WITH THE HILL NERDS.  Think about it: Do you have inappropriate relationships with people outside of your marriage?  Are you from New York?  Is it with your staff?   Do you like to tickle?  YOU'RE ERIC!  Copyright pending.
• Sub-point: I plan on learning to properly use the free Photoshop-type software I downloaded just to try to get that game to happen.  It will be my  holiday gift to you all.
• Speaking of which, this will be David and my first Christmas together, and people have been asking if we're going to get a tree.  "I want to get a Charlie Brown Christmas tree," I always answer, which serves the joint purpose of 1) answering the question and 2) screening the person, because if he doesn't know what I'm talking about, then I know to stay the hell away from that jerk.
•  And for another nice transition, I saw my old D.A.R.E. officer, who was way past inappropriately drunk, out at the bar over Thanksgiving.  I'm not sure what to do with that information (and that is far from the whole story), but I thought you should all know.
• There are two young women in my office who have done nothing for the last two months but talk about the calories they consume each day.  I need to stop this and I do not know how.  Please feel free to leave your ideas, because if I have to listen to one more rendition of "I'm having salad for lunch, just the lettuce, no dressing," I will scream, and this office already thinks I'm awkward.
• Speaking of which, on Monday two women in my office were talking about what to do with leftover turkey.  They were standing in the middle of a narrow hallway, which means I had to basically walk through them to get to my desk.  I felt the need to contribute, so like a 3 year old with Aspberger's, I enthusiastically yelled, "REUBENS!"  There was silence for a good 5 seconds.  
• It's after Thanksgiving, which means I can now troll you all with this little thought: I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes...

Things I Wish I Could Do That Would Make Me Infinitely Cooler

Last weekend I roasted my first turkey. Or rather, I roasted a turkey for the first time. My first turkey was probably something like 25 years ago at this point.

But I digress.

While the turkey is certainly a notch in my cooking belt, and removing the neck and giblets is a notch that I'd prefer not to think about again, it doesn't make me cooler in any real, any cool, sense of the word. 

Not in the way being able to climb a mountain would.  And I'm not talking like this:

Climb every mountain....get it?!

I'm talking like this:

Or even just like this:

I'll settle for not being a Scientologist.

Other things that would make me instantly and infinitely cooler:

A Layman's Guide to Office E-Mail

For those entering an office environment for the first time, I offer a brief introduction to professional e-mail communications.

The Care and Feeding of Your Ellipses

All this grammar nonsense can be a great hullaballoo of rules and procedures. Luckily for you there is a short cut that grammarians don't want the public to know about. The secret is thus:

If you are ever in a situation where you don't know how to punctuate a sentence you can use the special "catch all" punctuation: the ellipsis.

While many people have invested a great deal of energy perpetuating the myth that the ellipsis is intended to designate omitted words, the truth is that the ellipsis can also replace omitted punctuation!   This versatile little guy can represent anything writer wants.

Take this sentence:

"I have a party on Saturday, I'm bringing the cake!"

This can easily be rewritten without changing the meaning as:

"I have a party on Saturday… I'm bringing the cake…"

Exactly the same.

How Not to Reassure a Cynic

As the black Santa Claus who worked at Macy's in December of 1990 can attest, I am an extremely skeptical person.

For the past several months I've been enduring chronic lower back pain. It's nothing close to a demon drilling into my eye, more along the lines of a troublesome imp kicking my lumbar. A gremlin rotating my spinal discs, or perhaps a lesser goblin operating a gondola service through my spinal canal.

The best treatment to chronic lower back pain,  people smarter than me say, is to see a Chiropractor. The cynic inside me was yelling "let me out, I have a family! I'll give you anything!" and also something about chiropractors not being medical doctors. As stubborn of a skeptic as I am, I'm open minded enough to try most anything at least once. Plus my insurance covers it.

A DC Metro User's Guide

This weekend, I sent the following text (verbatim) to my fabulous co-blogger Katie: "On the weekend, pure anarchy descends on the metro. Strollers. On the LEFT side of the escalator! Asdfjkl;"

Remember how your mother always said patience is a virtue? Well, the DC metro between the hours of 7:00 and 9:00 a.m. on weekdays and ANY time on the weekend is like immersion therapy for those of you struggling to compensate for your not-so-virtuous (would we go so far as to say villanous?) natures.

Metro pet peeves have been done to death as a topic, but a series of incidents over the last few days have created a straw-that-broke-the-camels back phenomenon:

• Taking the red line on a Saturday, during the day. (omg did you know the zoo in DC is SO COOL?? You should go. With all your friends. On a Saturday. And stand directly in front of the doors so as not to allow people on OR off. Then definitely act totally shocked when people shove you politely tap you to ask you to move.)
• A ten minute wait for a Shady Grove train yesterday morning at the peak of rush hour (why? Why does more than every other train stop at Grosvenor instead of going all the way to Shady Grove? You don't even just do it at rush hour anymore! DON'T YOU KNOW I WORK AT TWINBROOK?)
• Speaking of Twinbrook - randomly skipping stops during rush hour is super cool (yo, some of us use the train to like, Idk, nap in compensation for the 6.5 hours of sleep we got the night before. Also, it's very difficult for me to ravenously devour gossip pages time my newspaper reading if I don't know when I might need to hop off the train. We need more notice that you're skipping a stop then, say, just as a random example, immediately before the doors close at the previous stop)

So today, in the spirit of the DC DMV's Open Letter welcoming you to our roads, I offer you, DC traveler, the following survival guide to making your ride on the metro the most pleasant it can possibly be:

1. Stand on the left. Especially on the escalators.
2. Don't, under any circumstances, move to the center of the car.
3. Lean on the pole. No-one else needs it, and besides, you look so much more emo that way!
4. Make friends with your neighbor. The "every other" principle, so common with bathroom stalls and bar stools? Doesn't apply to train seats, at least not in DC. It's not friendly!
5. Spread out. Your stuff deserves a seat just as much as you do. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
6. Make yourself at home. The metro is a perfectly appropriate place to apply your makeup, brush your hair, pluck your eyebrows, etc. Though brushing your teeth might be pushing it a little.
7. Eat your food. The whole "this is not a diner" campaign? Totally false. You're a busy man/woman on the go, and the Metro is a perfect place to enjoy a leisurely meal. The more aromatic, the better.
8. Hold the door. Though the conductor tells you "these are not like elevator doors you may be familiar with...," definitely stick your bag in the door to hold it for your travel buddy. Don't worry if they wind up having to offload your car - that's just more time to sight see in the tunnels under Metro Center!
9. Crank the tunes. There is no such thing as a quiet car. Consider it a public service to entertain your fellow passengers with your personal music player. Bonus points if they can hear you more than three seats away.
10. Time your trip. Whenever possible, do ALL of your travel during rush hour. New "peak of peak" time slots preferred. It's totally when the atmosphere is best under there, and when you and your stroller/shopping bags/suitcases will make the most friends.
    

You'll know me when you see me. I'm the short kid giving you the thumbs up.

Suddenly, mobile.

And this year's Halloween costume just creates itself.

I Question My Maturity

ONE
This is currently my office desktop background:

TWO
We just received an email announcing that our normal staff meeting on Monday will be pushed back an hour.  My first thought was, "Hey, that's a perfect time for sticking some Baileys in my coffee."  I can not even currently drink caffeine or alcohol so I do not know where that thought came from.  Or rather, I do, I'd just rather conquer only one demon at a time.

mmmm....Makers.

THREE

Comcast for some reason  insisted on not taking a former roommate's name off of the bill, even though we both repeatedly called in and complained.  When I closed the account, they overbilled me for the final month and actually sent me a check, with the envelope addressed to me and sent to my address, but with the check made out to her.  Real Transcript from online chat as follows:

Interactive Chat with Comcast     
Katie: well, my SSN wasn't on the account, that would be ****  
Ruel: ah, and may I inquire into your relationship with her?  
Katie: well, that seems like a personal question now, doesn't it Ruel?

An Open Letter to My Officemate: I don't like you.

Dear Officemate,

I don't like you.

For a while I thought I just didn't know you.  There you sat, sometimes chatty but mostly quiet. We said good morning to each other and made bland remarks about the office temperature (usually too cold).

But you've worn out my last nerve, officemate.

I hate your stupid polite telephone laugh, exactly three syllables long each time.  Do laughs even have syllables?  The fact that I'm questioning this makes me hate you all the more.

I see you checking my computer screen and judging whether or not it is directly work-related.  And don't think I don't see you checking your Netflix queue.  Your double-screen placement isn't nearly as good as mine.

Officemate, you think you're so superior.  You with your organized  box of work shoes under your desk and your collection of extra umbrellas in case any of the higher-ups need one during a rainy day.  Kiss ass.

And dammit, I can hear you smugly eating your salad at me.  I don't care about your nutritionally-savvy lunch choices, nor does it impress me that I have never seen you buy a lunch.  Ooooh look at you with your organized mornings spent both ironing and getting your lunch together.  Ooooh look at you, getting to work "on time" and then "staying late."  I know your game, officemate, and I'm still leaving at 5. 

Oh, and how about that time I was sick, and you were the only one-- the only one!!-- in the office who didn't ask how I was feeling when I returned.  Like you didn't even know I was gone!  I'll remember that slight the next time you're out sick, officemate, and you'll see how YOU like it.

Not that you're ever out sick. 

I want the book back I lent you.

Most sincerely,
Your Disgruntled Officemate

I have a new angle on this joke that is so adorable, it might just be acute.

I basically have the sense of humor of an 80-year old dork.

Have you heard the one about the chicken?

You hear the cops finally busted Madame Marie for tellin' fortunes better than they do?

Cat and I went to the Asbury Park Oyster Festival this past Saturday.

Not me.

They were charging $3 at the door, and we lied and said we were just walking through, because Cat's cheap and I never saw a requirement I didn't want to get out of.