2004-12-09 - 9:56 p.m.
"Satisfy partner with man part enhanced." That's what the spam said. Doesn't that sound vaguely oriental? "Make it oriental, that'll get 'em. They'll think it is exotic, like rhinoceros horn or sea urchin egg." In the midst of all the grotesque spam of "grandma's faces squirted with cum" or "co-eds fucked in the ass", this cute little "man part enhanced" comes tip-toeing in.
Delete!
That's not what I wanted to write about, but I just checked my e-mail and that one struck me as funny. I guess I must be feeling pretty good when I am amused by my spam!
But I want to talk, instead, about my Christmas tie.
A couple of years ago, the person who was my Secret Angel at work that year gave me as one of my gifts a cute Santa Claus tie (I found it hanging from a tree outside near the staff smoking table, the result of a cross-campus treasure hunt). It's got a vertical stack of crazy-eyed reindeer standing in the snow, trying to boost a very fat Santa and his heavy sack of gifts up onto the top of the roof so that he can go down the chimney. It's a once-a-year tie, appropriate for, say, wearing to the office Christmas party.
So I wore it last week and many people complemented me on it. "Hey, that's a really cute tie!" I was happy to hear their good comments and when I got back upstairs to our offices, I said to the person who had given it to me, "See my tie?"
"Yes!" she said, grinning, "very nice...I'm glad you like it!"
"Oh, I do," I said, "and I've gotten nothing but complements on it, too."
"I'm so glad," she said.
"Do you know why I'm wearing it today?" I continued.
"No, why?" she asked.
"Because of the Christmas party after work tonight at the Headmaster's house."
For a split second she looked scared, but then a quick flick of her eyes at her desk calendar calmed her back down. "It's next week," she said.
"No...it's on the ninth," I said, slipping away to go into my office to peek at my own calendar. I heard the echo of her voice, "Yeah, the ninth is next week."
Sure enough it was. Well, that was actually a relief...she had just given me a whole extra week! I really hadn't felt like going to that party that night, anyway, nor did I feel up to the party at the neighbors next block over, which was to be on Saturday. For some reason, I was a whole week ahead of myself.
But really, I have been very "blond" lately. I'm really not blond, but many of the people in the office are, so we collect "blond stories" about ourselves to tell each other. Yesterday, I had one to tell everybody about Monday evening.
After work, I had gone to the parking lot of a Von's grocery store where I remembered that they had a bottle recycling station. I swear, I had had these four cartons of empty glass bottles in my kitchen for over a year. I probably should have just put them out by the garbage dumpster for the bottle scavengers to take and sell, but I figured I ought to do my own recycling and now, finally, I was doing it.
But the place was closed on Mondays and Tuedays. Oh well, I'll try again in a few days.
By now it was pretty dark. I drove a "U" around the edge of the parking lot and came back out toward Laurel Canyon, where I wanted to make a right turn out of the parking lot. I stopped behind a large black SUV and turned on my turn signal blinker. Beyond the SUV, I could see that the traffic on Laurel Canyon was pretty heavy, so I waited patiently for the SUV to find an opening and make his turn. But he just sat there. I continued to wait patiently. But then after a long while, I noticed that the traffic had lightened up some--why wasn't the SUV turning? I looked more closely at the SUV and then noticed that its lights weren't even on. Suddenly it dawned on me, the SUV was parked! There was nobody in it. I was sitting there waiting patiently behind a parked SUV with my right turn signal light blinking!
I was so embarrassed, I looked around to see if anybody had seen me, but it looks like maybe nobody had. I sheepishly turned left and continued on down the line of parked cars until I got to where the exit out of the lot really was. And then when I turned right and drove up Laurel Canyon, I could see that no way was that an exit from the parking lot where that SUV was parked, there were even heavy white-painted posts in the way there and everything.
I need a vacation.
So today was the day I thought it was last week, the day of the Christmas party at the Headmaster's house, so I wore my Santa Claus tie again. And once again, I got lots of complements on it. The Headmaster, himself, especially liked it, telling me that I really had the holiday spirit. (He, too, was wearing a Santa Claus tie, although his was not quite as funny as mine. Still, we were rather matched in that respect.)
The party was great. His house was beautifully decorated for Christmas. My favorite things there were two metal reindeer sculptures on the fireplace mantle with candles on their antlers.
There was food in the oriental mode--sushi, pot stickers, and chicken skewers with peanut and sesame sauce, plus the usual vegetable "cruidites" and then both Christmas and Hanukka cookies (green sugar Christmas tree cookies and blue sugar Star of David cookies). Not much in the way of drinks though...just a choice of Chardonnay or Merlot (I'm not a big wine drinker at parties, I want some hard liquor), or Coke or raspberry punch. I had a plastic cup of Chardonnay, but didn't like it that much and then went for a cup of the punch. I wish it had been punch like our family has at Christmas (a bottle of vodka, a bottle of champagne, half a can of frozen lemonade and half a can of frozen limeade) but then we'd all have to be looking for bed, couch, or floor space, and with 95 employees, that wasn't going to work. So very little alcohol at this party.
People continued to complement me on the tie and then the Headmaster came over with his wife to show it to her. She remarked that we both were wearing Santa Claus ties, so he said, "Well, we've been calling each other in the morning, agreeing on which tie we should wear." Then my boss pointed out his tie (suddenly having a Christmas tie was the vogue) and said, "Well, it's kind of got Christmas bells, I think." I tried to get a closer look at it, but it was a sedate fashionable Brooks Brothers tie of a vaguely magenta color and he didn't stand still long enough for me to Rorschack ink-blot the design into Christmas bells.
Then it was time to leave and as I drove home, I realized I really hadn't had enough of the pot stickers and the chicken skewers to make out a dinner (if you eat it standing up, it doesn't count as a meal in my mind), so I decided to swing by the grocery store to get some stuff for tonight.
There at the grocery store I happened to see shopping a very attractive young couple, you know, sweet, innocent, and "very much in love". The guy, in particular, was very cute and nice-looking, and the sight of the couple's beauty added a spring to my step.
I really had no idea what I wanted to get, so I just grazed. I ended up with six apples, two cartons of new mixes of juice based on mangoes (one was peach, orange, and mango, and the other was mango and lime), two cans of Dinty Moore beef stew (that's my quick take to lunch item if I neglected to prepare anything the night before), a can of spaghetti, a can of tamales (we were almost in junk food mode, obviously), a large hunk of beef to roast in the crockpot tomorrow, and some Weight Watcher's ice cream sundae cones just because they looked good. Oh, and a carton of eggnog. I was looking at the different kinds and moved my hand over to the carton from the organic dairy. I joked to a guy next to me also getting some eggnog, "May as well get the healthy kind when I'm getting something unhealthy." (He also grabbed a carton of the organic dairy kind.) He said, "I agree...I think the low fat is better than the fat, and the Horizon [organic diary] is better than the Alta Dena [regular diary]". It wasn't until he said that that I realized that the organic was also low fat. I didn't want low fat (I wasn't going to go that far with the "healthy" unhealthy drink), but since we had that little conversation, I was too embarrassed to replace the Horizon organic low fat with the Alta Dena not low fat. So now I wish I'd kept my mouth shut instead of trying to make a lame joke. Oh well, if the low fat doesn't taste good, I'll just up the Tom and Jerry mix.
I got to the check-out stand and placed my groceries on the, well, what is it called, anyway? Counter, turnstyle, lazy susan, check-out table, swirly-rubber-circular thing? Anyway, I put my stuff on it and then noticed coming up behind me the cute attractive couple. I saw that they had only a can of Seven-Up and a Vogue Magazine, so I invited them to go ahead of me. I would have done that even if they weren't cute, but the fact that they were cute added to it.
They thanked me and repositioned themselves ahead of me in line. The guy bent down to get a better look at my Santa Claus tie and started laughing, and then said to the girl, "Look at his cute tie, this is so cool," and she bent down to look at it and she laughed too, like they were looking at a cartoon in the New Yorker. They made me feel good, such attractive people enjoying my tie. Gosh, I figured those ties were a dime a dozen, but maybe they're more unusual than I thought. The guy said, "Yeah, we ran into a friend of ours in the store and he said there was somebody here wearing a funny tie, he must have been talking about you."
One little tie with Santa Claus and some reindeer struggling to get up on the roof, making so many people happy, I guess Christmas really is on its way!
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