Category Archives: nonsense

get off my lawn

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This morning my husband told me a story from his childhood. He talked about how, when he was a kid, he lived in a place that didn’t have a lot of green spaces for the neighborhood kids to play and so they played stuff like rugby and football (soccer if you’re American) in the streets between homes, and in peoples’ driveways. He said there was an old lady across the way who didn’t like them doing this and would stick her head out the door or window yelling something like “take that ball away” repeatedly in an effort to try and get the kids to clear off. Then he said, “when you yell at the squirrels on the bird feeders, that’s what it makes me think of”. Like, literally his whole point of telling me about this formative memory of his childhood was to draw a comparison between that crotchety old lady…and me.

And I suppose he’s not entirely wrong.

You might remember last winter, when I was complaining about how the grey squirrels would launch themselves off the railing or the snowbank, trying to get up to the small bird feeder I had suction-cupped to my actual window, and how hearing them bodily hit the exterior wall over and over again was driving both me and the dog kind of bat-shit. Back at the start of THIS winter, determined to be a problem solver as always, I got two bird feeders and hung them up across from my office window. Obviously I wouldn’t be able to see the birds as up-close as with the window feeder, but at least I wouldn’t be listening to the dog scream-bark about the squirrels thudding and scrabbling against the wall all day every day.

I set the feeders up once the danger of bears had pretty much passed, and immediately had a flock of juncos (the birds, not the pants…you have to be of a certain age to get that reference) visit. The chickadees came shortly after, as well as the sparrows. Everything was pretty copacetic for a while. Then one day, I noticed a red squirrel at one of the feeders. It seemed very polite, sitting nicely on the edge of the feeder eating one seed at a time and dropping the empty hulls down on the ground while it quietly took in the scenery. I have no beef with that type of behavior and so I let it snack in peace. We went a couple more weeks with no issues, but the calm was clearly too good to last…

…because then came the grey squirrels.

Grey squirrels are cute, but they’re absolute birdseed hoovers. And worse, they’re destructive. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t get at the bird feeder directly, then bringing it down is their next most direct route to stuffing their faces. Within two days of the grey squirrels showing up, I went out to find the roof of one of my feeders pulled apart – the squirrels had been hanging upside down from the edge of it to get at the seeds because they couldn’t fit their fat asses onto the perches at the sides, and had ended up pulling the roof halves right off the nails of the piece holding them together.

I fixed the roof and decided the squirrels no longer got a free pass going forward. I might not be able to keep them out of the feeders entirely, but I could at least make them have to work harder for their ill-gotten gains, and be really fucking annoying to them in the process.

I have this crow call I bought a couple years ago, thinking that I’d bring crows to the yard with it and finally get to live the Crazy Bird Hag In The Woods With Pet Crows life of my dreams. As it happens, that didn’t pan out because crow calls are actually quite difficult to master. If you don’t have the right technique, the thing basically just ends up sounding like you’re blowing through a glorified kazoo…but it’s a loud, sharp sound that is very startling if you’re not expecting it, so I started using it to scare the squirrels off.

Again, I will give credit where it’s due: grey squirrels are smart. The first maybe 20 times I blew the crow call at them, they dove for cover and would stay away for a few hours at a time. Eventually they got used to it, though. Not so used to it that they completely ignored it, but used enough to it that they’d just retreat to a nearby tree branch and sit there staring over at me like, “Bitch, please. The second you move away from the window, we’re going right back to that feeder”. Which they did. Repeatedly. I switched it up on them and started either banging on the window or opening the window and hissing or yelling at them when I caught them on the feeders and again, that worked for a few days, but now they just hop off a little ways and wait for me to go back to my desk. My next plan is to try Slinkies on the shepherd’s crook that the feeders hang off of, but that will have to wait another couple days because said Slinkies haven’t arrived yet.

I’m fairly sure it’s all for naught at this point, as the feeders are close enough to the propane tank that I believe the squirrels could just jump from the top of the tank on to the feeders if they wanted to, and the ground is frozen with a bunch of snow on the ground at this point so I can’t easily move them until spring. But I have to keep trying, just out of principle.

Plus, you know, at least I’m yelling at rodents and not actual kids, so I’m not QUITE as bad as that old lady my husband (rather un-generously, I feel) compared me to. In theory. I’m sticking with that.

“You know you don’t even sound like a crow, right? Like, you don’t even sound like a BIRD. You sound like a middle aged woman with a little bit of disposable income, an internet connection, and too much time on her hands. I’m just saying.” – that squirrel, probably.

what have I done, part 2: 15 pound boogaloo

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Remember yesterday how I was telling you the mild panic attack I had over the fact that I somehow ended up purchasing what amounted to 15 pounds of crocus bulbs, and I was contemplating how many holes I’d have to dig (which will always be too many holes because I don’t like digging holes or really yard work of any kind) in order to plant 15 pounds of bulbs, and I was pointing out that I likely wouldn’t get them all in the ground before snow fell, because what kind of fucking idiot buys anything to plant in mid to late October in the mountains of New Hampshire (I’m not a Swiftie, but it’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me)?

Welp, few things to follow up on:

1. It snowed last night. Not a lot, only a dusting, and we were frankly lucky to get all the way through October without snowfall, as that’s not the norm around here. But still.

2. The bulbs got delivered today, and you guys, something has gone awry in this process somewhere. The UPS tracking had said 15lbs, as established. I was figuring it would be a fairly good sized box, at that weight. My dog’s food comes in 12lb bags, for instance, and those are…good sized boxes. So I had a concept in my head of what to expect. However, the box that showed up is…well, it’s small. It’s not tiny, but it’s like maybe only a little bigger than a 5lb sack of flour. So that was weird.

3. What was weirder was that, when I looked at the label on the box, it actually says 16 lbs:

Exhibit A

4. What’s even weirder than that, is that when I picked the box up, it was most definitely not 16lbs. Not even remotely close. It was in fact so far off of 16lbs that I immediately pulled out the kitchen scale to weigh it:

Exhibit 2

That’s 2lbs 11.4oz, for the record. That’s 13lbs and whatever whatever ounces short of the reported 16 pounds.

I don’t understand. Like, how did they get it THAT wrong? A pound or two, sure, I can see that…but 13 pounds? That seems like ‘thumb firmly on the scale’ territory to me.

I mean, it was a flat shipping fee so it literally doesn’t matter even one bit, but this is the kind of shit that mystifies me.

Anyway. There may or may not be more updates about this situation as it unfolds.

snoozeberries

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I bought some weed gummies last weekend. They’re called Snoozeberries and they’re a 5mg 1:1 THC:CBD situation that’s supposed to promote restful sleep. Yes, I am the boring person who buys cannabis products not to get high, but just to try and sleep better.

Look, I’m no stranger to weed. It was often easier to get than alcohol when we were in high school, especially since I grew up in backwoods Vermont and basically every third classmate’s dad had a plant or two growing in their basement or garage or back behind the barn at any given time. It wasn’t fancy weed – there was no like, Apple Pie Gonzo Balls or Purple Hazy Headwrecker, or any of the other stuff you can get now. All the weed we got ahold of came in crumpled plastic baggies and usually looked a lot like dried oregano (side note: we smoked actual oregano once by mistake. Very much do not recommend). There was just one flavor profile available in our backwoods weed: an unholy mixture of roadkill skunk, gasoline, and those pine tree air fresheners everyone had in their car in the 90s. It was pretty weak stuff for the most part, which suited me fine because I am generally not one who enjoys the feeling of loss of control. I would go from “oh, this is a nice floaty feeling” to “SWEET FANCY MOSES, I CAN’T FEEL MY LEGS, THIS IS THE END BEAUTIFUL FRIENDS, TELL MY CAT I’LL MISS HIM” very, very quickly. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I have been Too High, and those all involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol in addition to the weed I smoked.

Point being: I’m not a total n00b, but I also was never a heavy user to begin with, and I’m not generally looking to get high anymore so much as I am interested in whether cannabis can help some of my chronic issues (no pun intended).

I’ve never slept well, even as a kid. Over the years I’ve learned some things that help: taking a magnesium supplement in the evening, for instance. Eating less refined sugar. Not firing up TikTok after 7pm if I can help it, because otherwise I’ll enter a time warp for three hours and only be able to hear snippets of Doja Cat songs on loop for another two hours while I lay there watching the flashing lights on the insides of my eyelids. However, there’s always room for improvement, and I felt like adding a little THC to my existing CBD regimen (I have taken 25mg of CBD oil daily for years, I find it helpful for some of my pain and anxiety) to see if I could dial the sleep in a little better.

Enter: Snoozeberries.

Vermont has relatively recently allowed the sale of cannabis for recreational use and new dispensaries have been popping up all over as a result. We happened to be near one last weekend so we stopped in. It was nice and the staff were very friendly, which was good because their menu was totally overwhelming. A huge blackboard ran the whole width of the back wall of the shop, listing all sorts of different flower, edibles, and other cannabis products. I stood there blinking at the board for a couple minutes before the large jovial man behind the counter asked if I needed help. I told him I wanted something edible to help me sleep and he said, “ok, you want Snoozeberries then”. He handed me a jar with a cute little sheep on it, fully of little bitty purple cubes. I handed over my $55 (which, I’m sorry, but $55 for 20 5mg gummies seems like A LOT, doesn’t it? *shakes cane*), and went on my merry way.

When I was ready to test the gummies out that night, I cut one in half to start with. They’re only 5mg each, but I fully subscribe to the “start low, go slow” doctrine, especially since edibles are absorbed differently than smoking. I don’t want to end up one of those “I ate too many gummies and ended up plastered to the bed for six hours having hallucinations of emerging from my own womb over and over” cautionary tales. So, half a Snoozeberry went down the hatch. I sat around watching TV for a bit, then went to bed and read for a while. I was maybe a little more yawn-y than usual, but otherwise felt no noticable effects. My sleep tracker didn’t indicate that I had slept any better the next morning, either.

I did the same thing the next night, and the night after that, to the same result. Tuesday night I finally bucked up and decided to take a whole dose. Tuesday night is game night at our house, and that’s not a euphemism for anything, you perverts. We literally play a board game or card game most Tuesday nights. I took the full Snoozeberry right before we commenced with game night. We played 4 or 5 rounds of Exploding Kittens and then it was time to get ready for bed since we had to be up stupidly early the next day. Mark took Keppo out for the last walk of the evening and, as usual, I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

That was just about the time my brain entered the Snoozeberry Zone apparently, because I…could not brush my teeth. Like, I COULD, and I DID, but I had to think so, so hard about how to hold the toothbrush and move it around in my mouth the whole time. I kept having to stop and adjust my grip on the toothbrush to try and get a different angle because it would start to feel all wrong. And just to show you a little slice of how my brain works, I stood there wondering if I was having some kind of stroke or seizure for like 30 seconds before I realized it was probably the gummy. It was so weird though, because I truly didn’t feel the least bit high otherwise. I felt totally normal, except that my fine motor skills had apparently fucking left the building. I had the same issue with my water-flosser after brushing, and it’s a genuine wonder that I didn’t end up blasting myself in the face with that thing, I swear.

I sort of just shook my head at the whole situation and headed to bed. I checked the CPAP tank, fluffed my pillow the way I like, got my little battery-powered candle turned on and shut the light off, and laid down. At that point I did notice that I felt markedly more relaxed than I usually do when first laying down. I sort of just melted into the mattress, in a good way. I laid there enjoying that for a couple minutes before I cracked my book open, when suddenly the whole “struggle-bus tooth brushing due to weed gummy consumption” thing actually hit my brain and it. was. HILARIOUS to me. I mean, I laid there laughing like a fucking loon for probably like three minutes straight. I will admit that I did feel a tiny bit high at that point, but it really didn’t last long. And, again, no discernable difference in actual sleep quality or duration.

So in summation, I believe I paid $55 for some cutesy-named weed gummies, a brief lapse in my dental hygiene, and yet another confirmation that I may now officially be too old to hang…but it was a weirdly good time in its own way, I suppose.

On closer inspection, that sheep does actually look kinda high…

lemon aid

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Life with ADHD provides endless opportunities for self-inquiry and self-discovery. Every day I find new things that make me wonder about myself and how my brain works. For example:

What is this semi-desiccated half of a lemon doing on my kitchen counter at 11 in the morning, when the last time I used lemon for anything was while making salad dressing at dinner last night? Nothing else from the dinner-making process is still on the counter. Why did this half of a lemon, in particular, get left out? It’s not even the squeezed half. I could have put this in a container, stashed it in the fridge, and gotten another salad’s worth of dressing out of it. If there were any part of this lemon that it might make SENSE to have left on the counter, surely it would be the squeezed half. But, no. I wasted a perfectly good half of a lemon by inexplicably deciding to not put it away last night.

The really funny part is, I made breakfast this morning right next to this lemon half. I made my husband’s lunch right next to the lemon half. I stood at the counter taking my vitamins and the lemon half didn’t register. I went back to the counter an hour later to make a cup of coffee, which involves standing around waiting for the kettle to boil, which is certifiably the most boring thing ever and I had plenty of time to become aware of my surroundings in that two minutes that I stared off into space probably thinking about bears doing an interpretive dance to Billie Eilish’s song, ‘Bad Guy’, or some shit…and I DID NOT NOTICE THAT LEMON. The lemon did not reenter my realm of consciousness until just now when I went to the kitchen again for a handful of crackers. And why did getting some crackers trigger the realization that the lemon existed, you might ask? Good question! I have no fucking idea. The crackers were nowhere near the lemon. I could have just as easily gotten a handful of crackers and wandered right back to my desk again without ever clocking the lemon. But for some reason, some scientific mystery that will forever be unsolved because who the fuck would ever want to look that deeply into the percolating pile of rot that is my brain, 11:00 AM was apparently Counter Lemons Exist Again time.

Oh my god.

What if we really ARE all just brains in jars lined up on a shelf somewhere, and whatever entity that’s keeping the collection decided that my brain-in-a-jar needed some freshening up so it dropped a lemon into the jar? Maybe the lemon is meant to be enrichment for my enclosure. Maybe it’s an experiment to see if something as benign as half a random lemon could make a brain short-circuit and self-destruct.

I need to make some calls…

…OR DO I?

long weekends (a hypotenuse)

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I have a theory about long weekends. I developed it just now while standing by the microwave waiting for my burrito to cook. I guess technically it’s not actually a theory but rather a hypothesis. Also, full disclosure, I DID just have to Google ‘scientific method steps’ to come up with the word hypothesis because I knew it started with ‘hyp’ but all my trash brain could come up with to fill in the rest of that blank was ‘hypotenuse’, for like the full 60 seconds that I was able to devote to trying to remember that word. Also I definitely just Googled ‘hypotenuse’ to make sure I spelled it correctly. My brain may be trash but I still have standards.

Anyway.

So, my hypotenuse is this:

Long weekends that involve a Friday off are FAR SUPERIOR to ones that involve a Monday off.

Think about it. What’s better, a normal week that converts to weekend a day early, or a weird week that doesn’t start when it should so you spend the whole week slightly out of whack? A week where the routine is already basically set and you just have to adjust to get stuff done one day earlier, or a week where you can’t wrap your brain around what fucking day it is because everything that SHOULD have gone on YESTERDAY is happening TODAY along with all the TODAY stuff and it’s all just very confusing?

Mondays get so much hate, but Tuesdays are already worse than Mondays to begin with, and then a long weekend like the one we just had essentially converts Tuesday to Monday, and that seems like too much shittery to pile into one workday. As much as I dislike Tuesdays, I don’t want them to have to bear that burden.

So that’s my hypoalgesia. My hippodrome. My hypotenuse. Now I’m off to try and figure out what work I can get away with putting off until later in the week when my brain finally catches up to my body in time and I know what day it is again.

Me bailing on today

six degrees

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There’s a route I drive twice a day, pretty much every weekday. I drove it regularly many years ago, then I switched jobs and didn’t have to drive it for like ten years. Then my husband switched jobs and we had to drive it occasionally but usually went a different route. THEN we bought a house south of the towns he and I work in and we started driving the route literally every day. Then the pandemic hit and I started working from home but my husband is still learning to drive so he doesn’t take the car by himself, so I am still driving (or riding, if he’s driving) this route twice a day, pretty much every weekday.

It just occurred to me right now as I type that this information would probably be stalking GOLD if someone were motivated to hunt me down. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not going to become an issue. If I somehow end up getting famous and stalk-worthy at some point, I’m going to need one of the six of you that actually read my posts to remind me to come take this one down, ok? Ok.

So, on this route that I drive twice a day, pretty much every weekday, there’s several traffic lights. One stops at a highway off/on ramp, one stops at the entrance to a local high school, one stops near a bunch of sprawling manufacturing type buildings, and one stops at a cross-street that comes down from between the high school and a big medical clinic. That street passes in between two financial institutions on its way to the intersection. Those two financial institutions are where our story takes place. Sort of. Mostly it takes place in my head, but…you know.

One of the financial institutions is a credit union. The other is a small branch of a big regional bank. Both these places have big light-up signs with digital read-outs that flash back and forth between the time and the temperature. As an aside, why is this a service that banks specifically feel is important to provide? You never see a gas station or a McDonalds or a chiropractor’s sign flashing up the time and temperature in 2-foot-tall digital characters. Why have financial institutions taken up that mantle? Was it some sort of package deal that came along with the mini calendars banks give out every winter? Was the sales pitch to early bankers something like “here’s the thing: you give them a calendar to take home so they know what day it is, but if they wanna know the time or what the temperature is, they’re gonna have to come to…you guessed it! YOUR BANK!” These are fully rhetorical questions, by the way. I very much do not want you to email me the history of American banking. I know that of the six of you reading, at least three are unrelenting pedants, so I just want to make sure I’m very clear on that.

Get to the fucking point, Shelby. Jesus.

So these banks are right across from each other, separated by just a narrow two-lane side street. They both have the digital signs. The clocks on both digital signs are always the same.

But the temperature is not.

And it’s not just a degree or two of difference. You know, something you could attribute to maybe a passing breeze or a rogue shadow. No. The temperatures are a full SIX DEGREES different. And it’s not just an occasional thing. The one on the south side of the street is always six degrees colder than the one on the north side. I have driven by these banks, on average, 500 times a year (twice a day X 5 days a week X 50 weeks per year to account for vacations and whatever), for at least the last two years. That’s at least 1000 trips past these signs just in the last two years. Do I notice them every single time we drive through there? No. But every time I DO notice them, which is at least several times a week, they are ALWAYS six degrees apart.

And it bothers me. Clearly.

Now, rationally I know that it’s probably just due to difference in the sensitivity and/or location of the sensors. I have a rough grasp of science and I can accept that. What I have a harder time accepting is that likely the people who work in both of those buildings simply don’t care about this difference. They have probably noticed and just accepted the fact that one thermometer, less than 50 yards away from another, is reading a FULL SIX DEGREES different. I bet it doesn’t make their teeth itchy. They may, in fact…not even notice! I am mystified by this.

Instead of letting it gnaw at me that the temperatures are six degrees different for no good reason other than human ambivalence and/or possible electronic malfunction, I’ve made a decision: I am choosing to believe that the six degree difference is due in fact to a small furry rodent that has found its way into the space that holds the temperature sensor, and made itself a lovely cozy home there. Maybe it’s a clever red squirrel with bright eyes and a nice big cache of acorns. Maybe it’s a whole big family of tiny voles who each raise the temperature near the sensor just part of one single degree because they’re so wee. Maybe a possum squeezed its trash-smelling, tick-eating, screaming-at-their-own-ass heart of gold in next to the sensor for a long winter’s nap. Who knows.

All I’m saying is, this is how I’m coping with it. Things feel a little easier to handle if you can come up with a reason for them. Which is how we ended up with religion, of course, and look how THAT turned out. Hey, maybe my calling in life is to start a possum cult. Our central rituals could be going around to local banks to calibrate the thermometers on their digital signs, and screaming at our own asses because we exist.

why do my neighbors yell so much?

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– They are trying to compete with my dog for the coveted title of Yappiest Yapface of 2019.

– Their apartment is filled with spiders and they react to spiders the same way I do: yelling until someone comes and rescues me the spider.

– They believe that he who prays loudest gets the most attention from Imaginary Sky Daddy.

– They’re actually a bunch of Siamese cats inhabiting human bodies, and it’s always ten minutes past feeding time.

– They were brought up in a cave behind a giant, roaring waterfall and had to yell everything just to be heard. The habit stuck.

– They have Fatal Ear Freezing Syndrome and have to wear ear protection at all times to keep from dying of the dreaded Freeze-Ear.

– They’re professional yodelers. Really bad ones.

– Their family hobby is acting out that popular meme of the Orange County Choppers guys yelling at each other.

– They all have terrible spatial awareness and keep stubbing their toes on every corner and piece of furniture they come near.

– Their carpet is full of tacks.

– They’re from Massachusetts and they’re also drunk a lot (not that people from Massachusetts are any more predisposed to getting drunk than anyone from anywhere else in New England (there’s not much to do here). But, in my experience, many people from Massachusetts DO seem predisposed to high levels of…personal loudness. NOT ALL, but many).

ocmeme

I didn’t make this meme, but I have lived this too many times to count.

victory

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This one time, I got up from my desk to take a bathroom break after many (ok, one-ish) hours of soul-crushing data entry and left my headphones in because a good song was playing. I wandered down the hall and ducked into the bathroom. Turned around, unzipped my jeans, dropped trou for to get on with the peeing…and gasped in sudden shock as gravity, cruel mistress that she is, not only yanked the headphones right out of my ears, but also disconnected said headphones as my phone clattered from my pocket to the floor between my feet. There I was, hovering over the toilet with pants half down, panicking that everyone in the office next door would hear as Lorde’s ‘Royals’ blared its stirring crescendo in the echo-chamber that is the restroom. Instead of just turning the phone screen on and hitting pause to make the music stop, my brain decided the best course of action was to fumble around trying to reconnect the headphones that were now in a spaghetti pile of wires around one pant leg as my ass hung in the proverbial breeze. With a full bladder. Halfway sitting down onto the toilet.

That time was today, by the way. Like ten minutes ago.

No one ended up with pee on them and no one has yet come into my office asking why I was blaring Lorde in the bathroom, so I’m going to chalk that up as a victory. Gotta take ’em where we can get ’em.

 

trophy

Rhubarb Swank, winner of today’s Didn’t Pee Inappropriately Olympics.

seesaw

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The company I work for moved offices last week. It had been in an old converted farm house in a tiny rural town for at least 25 years. A year or so ago, the rumblings about perhaps moving closer to civilization (such as we know it here in darkest New England, anyway) started getting louder. Then the building we were in had some pretty serious structural issues and that kind of sealed the deal, as no one really wanted to be around when the front wall of the place finally collapsed. Funny how that works.

Anyway.

So, the new office is pretty swish in a lot of ways. It’s in a big town / small city, and it’s near a bunch of restaurants, shops, and other businesses. The old place was near…a hardware store. The new place was built less than 25 years ago so it has modern windows that actually open and, even better, actually close. The windows in the old place were hit and miss on both those points. We have central air conditioning in the new building, so no more struggling to hear people on the phone over the roar of the nearest window A/C unit! Gone is the tiny, grotty, galley kitchenette that had barely enough room for the coffee makers and the sink. Now we have a big, bright, break room with two full sized counters…and cupboards! So many cupboards. There’s tons of storage everywhere in this place as well – we have closets, utility rooms, little knee-wall cubby spaces…so many spots to cram junk (that’s what she said). All the storage in the old place was in the basement, and let me just tell you in case you’ve never been in the basement of an early 1800’s farmhouse: they are, generally, fucking terrifying. There were spiders the size of my hand in that basement. I don’t even do small spiders, friends…so ones the size of my hand are nuke-from-orbit territory.  Having storage areas where I don’t feel like I’m about to be pounced on and dragged away by outsize arachnids gets a big A+ in my book.

Another fun feature of the new office is the bright, modern bathrooms. The bathrooms at the old place were tiny and terribly lit – one of them was dubbed “the coffin” because it was so narrow and dark. The bathrooms were also all very close to the kitchenette, so you could stand there making a cup of coffee and hear pretty much everything going on in the bathrooms. Even our bathroom upstairs by my old office, which was a little bit bigger than the downstairs ones, suffered from a distinct lack of soundproofing. I’m pretty sure my office mate was privy to at least a few of my louder sobbing breakdowns in the can. These new bathrooms, though! They’re down the hall, pretty much equidistant from all the offices and the break room, they’re single occupancy, and they don’t seem to share any walls with any of the work spaces. As someone who not only has regular bathroom-based crying jags but also an intermittent inflammatory bowel condition, I appreciate this feature perhaps more than most.

The new bathrooms do indeed have a lot going for them but there’s also something weird that I’ve noticed going on in them:

The toilets seesaw.

seesaw

Does anybody else see a slightly sinister raccoon face in this image? Just me? Paging Dr. Rorshach…Dr. Rorschach to the accounting office, STAT…

The bathrooms are situated back to back with a closet in between. I’m not sure, but I suspect the cause of the seesaw effect is that a sewer pipe that comes up through the wall branches off in a T shape to connect to the back of the toilets, which then drain down to the bigger pipe at ground level. Regardless of how, I’m quite positive that the stools are connected, and the WAY I’m sure of this is that I was sitting on one when I heard someone enter the adjacent bathroom, sit on that toilet, and I subsequently felt my throne rise a rather alarming inch or so.

Now, it wasn’t enough to pick my feet up off the ground or anything. I’m almost six feet tall so that would take some doing. But it was a very noticeable shift upward. I sat there looking slightly panicked, not knowing quite how to proceed. If I got up, would the person on the other side go down? Gravity dictates that in seesaw, the heavier end always goes down. But I’m the heaviest person in the office by some distance…easily twice the weight of all but a few of my coworkers…so why was MY side of the toilet see-saw going UP when someone lighter than me was sitting on it? I am entirely certain that they were not already on the stool when I first sat down, because I heard them enter the neighboring bathroom after I was already sitting.

I ended up just staying put, waiting out the other person so I could see what happened. After a short moment (clearly this was one of my older coworkers who doesn’t understand the importance of mid-day Instagram breaks. THIS IS HOW I SELF SOOTHE JANET, DEAL WITH IT), there was a distinct downward shift of my toilet and the sound of my neighbor flushing. The see-saw had come full…circle? No, that would be bad. The eagle had landed. That sounds bad in a toilet context too, actually. Whatever. You know what I mean.

After that initial seesaw experience my interest was piqued. Was it just a freak thing? Did I hallucinate it? Not that I normally hallucinate (at least, not that I know of. Oh god, we’re all just brains in vats aren’t we?!), but I believe in SCIENCE and SCIENCE says that if your hypothesis produces reliably repeatable results then something something quarks and neutrinos, and then you get the Nobel Prize. And since pretty much the last thing I’m interested in doing at my place of work most days is my actual job, I figured I might as well try to gather more data.

If that makes it sound kind of like I staked out the bathrooms for the next few hours,  trying to rush in to sit on the toilet of the opposite one every time someone went in to use the john, well…that’s not especially inaccurate. It wasn’t full on surveillance, though. I just kept finding excuses to wander up and down the hall, visiting the bathrooms all afternoon. Once I was in one, I’d sit around for a while waiting to see if someone would visit the neighboring one and seesaw me. So it differed little from a normal work day, to be fair.

Anyway.

I tallied three confirmed instances of toilet seesawing yesterday afternoon, and I’ve tallied a further one so far today. I really think I’m on to something here, friends.

In fact, I’m so confident about my impending Nobel Prize that I’ve started drafting a list of names for all the goats I’m going to acquire once I get that sweet million bucks and am able to buy my dream farm…

goats

We’ll start with Newton and Tesla. 

well, since you asked…

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A coworker passed by my office on her way to get her lunch from the conference room fridge this afternoon. On her way back downstairs she veered left into my office. She leaned against the edge of my desk, balancing a plate of chain-restaurant Mexican leftovers on one palm, picking bites of food up and popping them in her mouth with the other hand as she spoke.

“What have YOU been up to lately? I haven’t seen you in FOREVER.”

I dug deep, didn’t mention the pointless hyperbole, and made what felt like appropriate noises in response…but I’ve been sitting here thinking of other things I’d like to have responded with ever since.

So, without further ado, I give you:

 

List Of Responses To Coworker’s Inquiry of What I’ve Been Up To Lately

I’ve been teaching myself Nepali so that I can negotiate better pricing with the Sherpas when I start putting together my Everest expedition.

I’ve been whittling a dildo out of teak wood.

I’ve been conducting interviews with the giant stinkbug that emerges from behind the filing cabinet every spring. Its name is Ferdinand and it has never left this office. I’ve not yet had the courage to ask what it eats.

I’ve been forcing myself to find new creative outlets in the hopes that they will help me better deal with this nagging feeling that I’ve wasted almost 11 years of my life doing a job I don’t like for money that I’m addicted to.

I’ve been teaching my dog to bark Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Jabberwocky’. We’ve been stuck on the word “vorpal” for a while now.

I’ve been knitting weasel traps.

I’ve been watching everyone downstairs work, which I have been achieving through an elaborate system of mirrors attached to the backs of my own private army of mice trained in the art of ninjutsu.

I’ve been hiding in the bathroom and crying. Or hiding in the bathroom surfing Instagram. Or hiding in the bathroom napping. Also, I had an inflammatory bowel issue a few weeks back, so for a while there I was doing actual bathroom stuff in the bathroom at least 75% of the times I went in there.

I just got back from a ten day trip to Mongolia, where I attended workshops on yurt design, innovations in yak-milk cheese making, and falconry. I settled for falconry because they told me I was too fat to ride the ponies. The Mongols are a harsh but fair people.

I’ve been lurking right behind you, lo these many weeks. My shallow breathing skills and lack of a reflection may have made it hard for you to notice.

I’ve been avoiding everyone because I’m terrible at small talk. You’ve been here like 7 years. I’m surprised you still ask.

I’ve been counting the tacks in all the bulletin boards in the office every day, just to make sure.

I’ve been memorizing a Swedish translation of the Gettysburg Address.

I’ve been setting fire to small pieces of paper with your name written on them, and chanting incantations to Kassogtha. Sorry in advance. Well, not really.

I’ve been mapping the capybara genome.

 

capy

“No you may NOT swab my cheek, you impudent rube. Good day to you, madam. I SAID GOOD DAY.”