A hunger for knowledge

Every day on my way to work I walk past the local public school. I can't hold it in any longer! I want the world to know that their school logo really disturbs me.



It consists of three baby birds sitting in a nest, their beaks turned skyward. Presumably they are waiting for the mother bird to swoop overhead and regurgitate the contents of her stomach into their hungry, waiting mouths.

Is this supposed to be a bizarre metaphor for the transfer of knowledge? Ewww.

Feral Geral(d), part deux

Oh my God, you guys. How the plot with Gerald has thickened.

One of the higher-ups at work has finally cottoned on that Gerald has way too much time on his hands, and is essentially being paid quite well to perv on his female colleagues. The result is that Gerald has been made redundant (i.e. there is no demand for lecherous old guys - the market is saturated.)

He's going to be kept on for a few more weeks, but from October 10 I'm going to be free!

Gerald came down to my desk to break the news to me, and was lamenting how technology had made his clerking services nearly obsolete. In the course of my phony commiseration, I made some offhand comment about the business my parents once owned, foolishly mentioning it by name. Well, I could have slapped myself as soon as Gerald's beady little eyes lit up. It turns out that I'm a second-generation Gerald victim; he knew my parents through their company and evidently hassled my mum over the course of the 20+ years while she and my dad were in business together. I'm surprised it took him this long to make the connection.

The redundancy was quickly forgotten and Gerald was positively giddy as he made multiple trips to my desk, each time saying "It's a small world!" (and me mentally replying: "Evidently not small enough! (Good one, me. High five.)").

Then he wondered aloud, "What happened to the business? Did Mary and Steve split up?"
"Yeah, they divorced," I replied
Then, in the most obnoxious, infuriating move EVER, he cocked his head to the side and said doubtfully, "Did they?"
YES, THEY DID. DAMN IT, GERALD. They're my parents, I think I'd know. But thank you for invalidating my painful childhood memories!

I scampered home to tell my mum, and we sat around swapping Gerald stories. Here are some of my favorite anecdotes from her collection:

• Gerald used to live with his mother, whom he referred to in conversation as "Mother". Yeah, that's right. "Mother" as in, "Mother isn't feeling well today".
  
  Say no more.
  
  
• Gerald committed to memory the first and middle names of my siblings and I, and used to ask my mum about us every time he ran into her, in this format:
  G: "How is David Bryan?"
  Mum: "Fine."
  G: "And how is Jennifer Maree?"
  ... and so on.
  
  I'll just mention that this is the exact same conversational angle that was once used by a violent felon who was trying to scare the bejeesus out of my mum back when she practiced criminal law. The same one who had the tires on our family car slashed.
  
  Of course, intimidation was not Gerald's intent, but I'm not sure why he went to the trouble of memorizing all our names. I'm one of four kids, all of us dull and unremarkable children. Certainly not worth inquiring about collectively (let alone individually) several times a week.
  
  
• Gerald obtained our home telephone number from the phone book and would occasionally call in the wee hours of the AM with a flimsy excuse to chitchat with my mum. This continued for some time until my dad told him to get stuffed.
  

Evidently he was very sweet on my mother, probably because she is incapable of acting with overt impatience or unkindness towards lonely old geezers.

And so we have come full circle.

They had it coming

I went to high school with a girl (let's call her 'Jane') whose mother was a very prominent politician. Jane and I both played basketball, though on different teams. One Wednesday night after my game had finished, I was bullied into refereeing Jane's game. I'd never refereed before and I tried desperately to beg off, because although I had been playing for four seasons, I didn't exactly understand the rules of basketball. Also, I'm afraid of whistles.

My pleas were ignored and I was practically shoved onto the court. It was a disaster from start to finish, and my bumbling and total incompetence as a referee wasn't helped by the abuse being hurled at me from the sidelines by the coaches and players' parents, with Jane's mother being the ringleader.

By the time second quarter rolled around, someone had located a more capable ref and I was thankfully demoted to scoreboard operator. Unfortunately, the verbal abuse didn't abate there and shrill Mrs Jane continued to repeatedly heckle and berate me at volume for not getting the scores up on the board quickly enough.

I spent the remainder of my high school career loathing the vile woman for her role in my public humiliation. It was something I expressed in my own passive aggressive way -- I would often scowl enthusiastically at her portrait which hung amongst pictures of other notable alumni in the school hallway. And that seemed satisfying enough, because I had no idea that something else was out there exacting my revenge for me.

About a year after I graduated high school, I was in my car listening to the radio when I heard on the news that Mrs Jane had been very abruptly ousted from her political position in an embarrassing landslide defeat.
I'm not proud of it now, but I may have yelled, "Yes! In your face!" at the radio. I also may have clasped my hands together and pumped them above my head in a primal display of victory. Justice truly had been served.

In the (admittedly small) portion of my brain that is rational, I knew that my short lived stint as a referee and her political downfall were two completely separate, unrelated events. In the larger, more fanciful portion of my brain, the latter was a direct result of the former and I for one was delighted that the universe had my back and karma was out there kicking ass for me.

Although my sense of justice is definitely disproportionate, I'm not a complete asshole. My schadenfreude for Mrs Jane fizzled out during her messy public divorce some years later. When I recently read in the newspaper that she had lost a bit of money in something resembling a Nigerian scam, I just felt pity. But how do you tell karma, "It's cool, I'm not mad anymore, find someone else to pick on,"?

* * *

This morning, I was walking to work on a narrow footpath. I sped up and drifted to the right to overtake the person walking in front of me, when a jogger came up behind me and barked "MOVE!" before elbowing me out of the way.

He's going down.

"I bumped my lip on a biscuit. It's not a cold sore!"

On Friday night I was dismayed to find that one of my many* gentleman callers has left his calling card in the form of a disfiguring cold sore on my bottom lip.

I'm not the type of person to let a ragin' case of the herpes ruin my weekend, so I decided to go online to seek advice from the internet doctor.

The first site I stumbled upon was this one, a collection of user-submitted home remedies for cold sores. You guys, there is a reason why laypeople are not allowed to dispense medical advice and this site is it.

Among the various cold sore cures that this site suggests, the one that comes up time and time again is ear wax. Ear wax! So I suppose one should just swivel their pinky around in there for a while and smear the results on their lips? Eww! How am I supposed to kiss my (*)husband with those nasty wax encrusted lips? That's gross.

Another contributor to the site offered a ten-step plan to getting rid of a cold sore overnight. I have to admit that I skimmed most of it, until step 7 which gave instructions for applying nail polish remover to the cold sore as follows:

"Imagine that you are an archeologist and you are using some acid to clear some stubborn fossilised mud off a priceless gold medallion."

WHAT? Why?

"This makes the process quite fun."

But it stings!

"I don't care if it stings, just think about how much money you'll make once you sell that medallion to the museum of natural history!"

I think it's fair to say that this is the point that I left that website.

Spent the entire weekend indoors as a social pariah so I could ride out the cold sore. Woke up for work today and it still hasn't diminished. On the plus side, it gave Gerald something new to stare at at work this morning (as he stared, I could practically hear him thinking that I must be one of those Bad Women With Loose Morals, the type that his mother warned him about).

So I just wrote an entire entry about a cold sore. Sorry, you guys. I'm at rock bottom for material. Maybe that ear wax isn't such a bad idea...



*nonexistent

The luck of the Lola

Let me start this entry by explaining that I have no fashion sense whatsoever. Part of the problem is that I wore a school uniform for 13 years and got used to not having to think about what to wear on a day to day basis.

As a result, I dislike fashion and clothing. You know how some girls have certain fashion aspirations - for example, to own a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes? My single fashion-related wish is for a Great Depression style economic meltdown so that it might again become socially acceptable for one to kick around town wearing a hessian sack. Those really were the good old days.

When I started my new job, I needed to buy some new clothes. For me, clothes shopping involves going to the nearest department store, spending 15 minutes picking out the most unadventurous and inoffensive clothing that I can find, and paying for it without trying it on. Afterwards, I reward myself for having to endure the whole boring experience by buying myself a donut (or 3).

I wore one of my newer shirts to work today. Sometime around midday I was chatting with one of the paralegals when he snickered and said:

"What’s that on your shirt?"

I looked down, thinking I had spilled food without realizing it. And then… I saw it.

You guys, look at what some sick freak at the sweatshop put on my shirt. I guess the design is so small that I never noticed it when buying the stupid thing.



A friggin' shamrock? The hell? WHY?

So word got around about my Shamrock Shirt and for the rest of the day, I had to endure "Top o' the morning!", "Where's me lucky charm - ooh, 'tis on your shirt", etc from my comedian co-workers. Hilarious!

You can bet that tonight I’m going to riverdance myself on down to the store that sold the offending article to ask for a refund. And from now on I'm going to scrutinize all future shirt purchases for renegade shamrocks. To be sure, to be sure.

Epiphany

Spent this weekend looking through some family photo albums and had a bit of a breakthrough.

I'm pretty sure that my various character flaws and general failure at adult life can be attributed to the fact that my mother used to dress me up like Prince.



Twenty years later and I still can't listen to Purple Rain without screaming and clawing at the invisible lace cravat around my neck.

Any psychologists care to weigh in?

Going for gold

My little sister is applying to work as a summer camp counselor after she finishes high school. I've been helping her fill out a ton of forms and organise her references, which got me to thinking about some of the babysitters I had growing up.

Both of our parents worked full time, so my brother, sisters and I have had our fair share of babysitters. During the school holidays, we were usually left with Enza, our next door neighbour. Enza was dull and responsible -- the type of person who made us wash our hands before eating lunch. One summer, Enza got accepted into the police academy and could no longer look after us, so mum decided to hire Katie, the teenager who lived across the road.

Katie was a student at a prestigious performing arts high school, into which she had been accepted on the basis of her acting and singing talents. Katie's brother, Peter, was a musician and had just recorded his first album: "Premature Ejaculation".

Katie's first idea for a summer project was to teach my sister and I the lyrics to all the songs of "Premature Ejaculation". If we learned all the words, Katie said, we might even be hired as backup singers if Peter ever went on tour. Feverish with the possibilities of stardom, my sister and I dutifully wrote the lyrics down in a notebook and religiously practiced singing them every night before bed. I guess my mum overheard us, or found the notebook, or one of us asked 'whats a premature ejaculation' at the dinner table, because one day Katie said we weren't allowed to rehearse Peter's music anymore.

She never had a shortage of fun ideas, though. One morning, Katie told us that we were going for a walk. On the way, she told us that an idea for performance art had appeared in her dreams and she wanted to try it out in public.

We wound up in the food court at Chatswood Chase, the local upscale shopping mall.


It was the school holidays and close to lunch, so the place was pretty crowded. Katie took her bag off and handed it to my sister to hold. Then, she got down on her knees and eased herself flat on the floor so that she lay face down, her nose touching the tiles. A few people stopped and stared, perhaps wondering if the girl was having some kind of seizure.

She lay very still for a few moments, and then, without warning, she launched into what can be best described as a stationary breaststroke. She worked her arms and legs simultaneously in careful coordinated movements, propelling herself through the imaginary water. She ducked her head up and down, as if coming up for air before submerging again.

As more people began to gather around and watch (and laugh), Katie moved through all the strokes. She did freestyle and butterfly and even doggy paddle before rolling over for a few laps of backstroke. She seemed oblivious to the reactions of the crowd, but remained focused on reaching some imaginary finish line.

My brother slunk away, hiding behind his comic book, but I made sure to stand close to Katie. I was nearly hit by her flailing limbs a couple of times, but I wanted to make sure that all bystanders knew that I was associated with this person. The attention was invigorating - not as intense as one might experience as a backup singer on the Premature Ejaculation tour, but intoxicating nonetheless.

Security came and told Katie to 'get out of the pool'. She obediently picked herself up off the food court floor, dusted herself off and my sister handed her back her bag.

Then we went home.