Monthly Archives: July 2005

Still Still Not Faustus.

Once a phone conversation includes the phrase “Oh! Her! No, I know who you mean, I think she shares a mutual LJ friend with my freshman roommate’s best friend’s ex-girlfriend,” there is really no place left for the conversation to go.

Still not Faustus.

This is the first time in some years that I’ve gotten the 4th of July as a holiday. Am not used to this. Am used to working various Manhattan foodservice jobs where one not only works on July 4th, one works an 11-hour shift with a half-hour break and gets paid in cash.

Specifically, am used to working at places with customers who ask you earnestly, over and over again, is that soy? That’s soy milk, in the latte, right? You’re sure that’s soy? Are you sure? And the espresso, that’s decaf, right? Decaf espresso? You’re sure it’s decaf? Are you sure? Oh, and do I happen to know if the salads are organic? They’re all organic, right? You wouldn’t sell salads made with non-organic vegetables, would you? Oh, and I know you don’t open for another hour, but can you please unlock the door and let me in to buy two dozen cupcakes, because my fashion magazine is having a meeting in half an hour and my boss said I needed to get these and the world will end if I show up to this meeting without cupcakes.

You want to take these people aside and explain things to them: No, nothing is organic, the owner just tells people everything is organic. No, we don’t even carry decaf espresso, just a plastic container full of excess espresso grounds that fell onto the counter that we sweep up and save and tell people is decaf. Hey, instead of worrying about how you’re going to get two dozen cupcakes before we’re open, maybe you should be worrying about our massive vermin infestation, because if we threw out every cupcake on every tray the mice got into overnight, we’d have nothing left to sell.

You want to say, Oh, one of the kitchen guys got his hand caught in the electric slicer last night and nearly lost a finger and there were bloodstains all over the back room. So I hope they did a really good job cleaning it out, and I hope you enjoy that sandwich.

Now I work for a company where people write letters to the suggestion box complaining that the workers in the employee cafeteria don’t smile at them, and I have the fourth of July off.

The point of this story is that I really miss being able to sabotage the food of people wearing Bush ’04 buttons.

That is all.

Still not Faustus.

…okay, so now we know why one should never try to post to someone else’s blog while a different person is ranting to them about Batman smut over instant messenger. Which is also not 19th century, and therefore tragic.

I read through the Drama-Generating Techniques section on the Encyclopedia Dramatica looking for ways to further mess with this blog, but got distracted by making a checklist of all the techniques I’ve already used in the past on my own blog. And on instant messenger. And in everyday life.

Hmm.

This is not Faustus, this is Lauren.

Twenty increasingly drunk psychiatrists singing the song from Titanic is much less frightening than one sober psychiatrist deciding that applying leeches to the vulva is a good way to cure female nymphomania. (See also: “Dr. Wigan puts the matter in a way that may seem more extravagant than it really is when he says: I firmly believe that I have more than once changed the moral character of a boy by leeches to the inside of the nose.”

N.B.: This is my second post today.

Surely there are things more likely to make you doubt the existence of a rational universe than spending an evening in a private room in a Japanese restaurant cum karaoke bar with twenty increasingly drunk psychiatrists singing the song from Titanic.

But I can’t think of any of them at the moment.

In other news, I am leaving town tomorrow for three weeks. I will be in parts of the country where internet access will be spotty at best and dial-up at worst. For two weeks I’ll be in Connecticut at the National Music Theater Conference. Check the schedule for Blood Drive if you’re interested in coming to a public presentation of what I’ll be working on. After that’s over, I’ll be on a top-secret mission below the Mason-Dixon line for a week.

In my absence, you will be in the hands of three supremely capable guest bloggers; the unifying thread is that I wish I could sleep with each one of them. (The unifying thread was going to be that I wish I had slept with each one of them, since I knew them all when I was single, but as one of them is a girl I ended up having to adjust.) Let me hasten to assure you that, if you’re not guest blogging, I probably wish I could sleep with you all the same. The set of guest bloggers for the next three weeks is simply a proper subset of the set of bloggers I wish I could sleep with.

You’ll be in very good hands, I promise.

Can anybody help me figure out how to restore the lovely font I used to have in these blog posts? It’s still there in the archives, but the main page seems to have mutinied. I am a computer mongoloid but still a look at the template indicates that nothing should be out of order–that is to say, the style section contains this:

p { font-family: georgia, verdana, arial; font-size:12px; color:#666666; line-height:18px; text-align:justify; }

and the section that defines how posts are done seems to put them between p tags.

This will all soon be moot anyway, as this whole enterprise will be moving elsewhere shortly. But still: why allow ugliness to exist in the world for even the briefest of brief moments?