Healthy recyclables, a boiling hot pastiche, takin’ it in the tail (or not), & physics at the gym…

~Thursday~  Today was trash and recycle day, and when I passed by my recycle bin, which I’d put out last night, someone had added some very healthy recyclables to it: a Honey Nut Cheerios® box, two tubs of low-fat yogurt, and something that contained Flaxseed, which I only know because it was written in big letters across the otherwise nondescript box.

This made me think of two things:

  1. Once before, I’ve added a trash bag to one of my neighbor’s trash bins, because I didn’t feel like dragging my bin out there for just one bag, and I wondered if that was “acceptable.”
  2. Denoting “healthy recyclables” reminds me of my ridiculous thought process of feeling better when I put “healthy” things into my garbage disposal—such as the remnants of things like celery, green peppers, cucumber peels, and things like that when I peel and cut up fresh vegetables—as opposed to junkie things like trimmed fat from meat or leftover spaghetti.

On my very short walk to the bus stop with recycling on my mind (Hey, that sounds like a good candidate for some opening lyrics to a country song.), I looked in the recycle bins in front of every townhouse and made judgments about the people based on their contents. Keeping in mind that are recyclables are collected weekly, I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about this one:

Cans and empty cases of Rolling Rock and Miller Lite

I arrived at my stop at 8:18, and the bus came at 8:26, an outlier in the modal range, as it were.

The Hot Mess Driver (There, I’ve named her.) was in command, and I really did try to make the trip without taking off my jacket, and while suffering I thought of the song I Will Survive and began work on a pastiche of it:

At first I was okay, not too hot or fried,
Kept thinking I could make it with my coat on the whole ride

But then I dripped a bunch of sweat
Feeling trickles down my neck

At every stop, I grew so hot
I was boiled alive, did not survive.


At the Gorman and Sullivan stop, a guy boarded and took the seat in front of me. As the pungent odors of alcohol, immediately followed by body odor, enjoined the swirling heat around me, I threw up. Actually, I didn’t, but I felt like I was going to, and I wondered if there was a market for “ground sickness bags” on buses.


You may or may not remember my mentioning that car alarm going off behind my building as I approached the building. What, you don’t memorize my entries?

When I checked my work e-mail, a guy I work with had sent an e-mail to everyone in the building saying there was damage to his car out back yesterday, and his car computer indicated that the alarm on his car had gone off “some time” during the day, and he was wondering if anyone had heard anything.

I had a one-hour meeting with one of our directors today, and we finished in ten minutes. My kind of meeting.


Prudie, Prudie, Prudie!

Dear Prudence’s column this week is called, “The Bitter End,” and it pretty much refers to the first letter, which is entitled, “My boyfriend demands a type of intimacy that I don’t like. Should I give in or hit the road?

How could you not love a response with excerpts like, “Joan Rivers has a line that she loves anal sex because it frees her up to read a book or check her BlackBerry, but I don’t think that’s going to work for you,” “Surely he’s aware that it’s the kind of thing that could make someone want to turn tail and run,” and “I don’t see that you have much choice except to leave him behind?”


At first I was a little miffed to learn that I’ve been booted from the Libra club (I’m an October 13th baby): Your zodiac sign may have changed, but this 25-second rant of purely delicious vocabulary words put it all in perspective for me:


Jen had dropped by my office late in the work day, and after talking for a while, she gave me a lift home. By the time I had dinner, it was after 7:00, and I had all but talked myself out of going to the gym, when I asked myself that all-compelling question, “What’s the one thing you could do right now, that once it’s done, you’ll feel the better for having done it?”

I arrived at the gym at 8:50, did 300 (15 sets of 20) ab crunches, followed by 40 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine.

The only undergraduate college class that I ever got a “D” in was physics. Perhaps, at some point in that class, the professor explained that where two mirrors meet at an angle, there is an area in front of them that no matter how sexy and smoking hot a guy is, and how desperately you want to see his front in said mirrors, his reflection is just not accessible to you from a particular angle. No wonder I hated physics.


I got home at about 10:10, and after a shower headed down to Flex for Trailer Park Prize Night. I was delighted to find Alex, Bill, and Steven (a.k.a. Esteban) out, and a fun night ensued.

Handing me one of my drinks, that beautiful bartender Matt said to me, “You might want me to add more soda to that one.”

I looked at him in disbelief and said, “You talkin’ to me???” Dilute my drink? Now that would be alcohol abuse, wouldn’t it?

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