vituperation

September 14, 2002

I submitted the bottom picture from a couple of days ago to Hot or Not last night, because as I’ve mentioned before, my vanity knows no limits. This morning, with 15 votes, I am officially a 9.8 (out of 10). According to the site, I’m hotter than 97% of the men there. Good, yet sad because I know that it can only go down from here.

I still need to submit a before picture, though, just to see how it does.

Just like the last time I put a picture up on that site, I don’t want to give out a direct link here, because if I sent a bunch of readers over there, the true results would get skewed. I want to see what strangers think. I need the ego boost, you know.

I dreamed that I killed Tubby last night.

I didn’t mean to kill Tubby, honestly, I was just playing around. Robyn and I were sitting at the edge of a nasty swimming pool covered with green algae. Miz Poo was running around the edge of the pool to see Robyn, and fell in. The algae wrapped around her like The Blob, and she started to sink. I reached out and scooped Miz Poo and the algae blanket around her out of the water and handed them to Robyn, for kitty cleaning.

With the algae gone from the surface, the pool was now not only clean, but magically lit from beneath. It was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that I thought Tubby would like to play in the water, so I picked him up and tossed him in.

Tubby sank like Leo DiCaprio to the bottom, paws flailing wildly as he tried in vain to swim, and stayed there.

After several seconds I dove in and swam to the bottom, which was deceptively further than it looked from the surface. The worst part about the dream is that when I got to the bottom, Tubby was laying there drifting with the water, and his mouth was hanging open. That’s the part that sticks with me the most, seeing him dead with his mouth hanging open like that. I grabbed him, and started to swim to the surface to try and revive him.

But he was too heavy, and I couldn’t swim up. As I sank back toward the bottom of the pool holding my dead cat, I woke up.

Analyze that, Dr. Freud.

Tubby is fine, of course. Here’s a picture of him, getting some love from the spud, from about three minutes before I wrote this:

He sure does look bitchy. Like he needs drowning.

After I wrote my letter to the credit card company yesterday, I needed to mail it. A simple task for most people, but if you don’t know by now, I’m not like most people. I printed the letter and the envelope, then went up to my office manager’s office to buy a stamp.

"You just missed the postman," she said as she tore the stamp off the roll and handed it to me, "but he’s probably only a couple of doors down." My office is in a long building with several suites, one of many such buildings forming an office complex. I ran out the door, stamp in one hand and letter in the other, and looked around for the postman’s Jeep. He was, just as my office manager said, just a couple of doors down, near the end of my building.

I licked the back of the stamp but it didn’t seem to get sticky. I licked it again, and again I had no luck with making it sticky. Looking closely at the stamp, I realized it was a self-adhesive stamp and therefore wouldn’t get sticky no matter how many times I licked it. Grinning at my own foolishness, I started to try to peel the backing off the stamp but just as I did, the postman walked out of the office he’d been in, climbed into the Jeep, and drove out of our parking lot and into the next one.

I forgot the stamp and jogged over until I was about thirty feet from the Jeep. Tucking the letter under my arm, I began to work on the stamp while simultaneously keeping an eye out for the postman. I fiddled and fumbled with the stamp, with no luck at all. My office manager had torn the stamp perfectly so there was no overhang at all. I grumbled to myself about having such big fumblefingers and continued to try and unstick the stamp to no avail.

After a couple of minutes, the postman came out, got in his Jeep, and drove another hundred yards away, give or take. I jogged to catch him again, starting to sweat because it was pushing 90 out. The stamp remained stuck to the backing through my run.

Once again I stopped behind him, closer this time, and when he got out I told him I had a letter, but was having trouble getting the stamp on it. In retrospect, given the look he gave me, I supposed saying "I’m having trouble getting the stamp on my letter" wasn’t the best choice of words. He told me that when I did get the stamp on the letter, I could just leave it on the seat of his Jeep. I thanked him and he wandered off with an armload of mail.

I fought the stamp. I cursed. I stomped. I fingered it, folded it, and fiddled with it, getting ready to throw a tantrum and cry like a little child because it was defying me so well. Unsticking this stamp was like trying to open a Chinese puzzle box. I was seriously concerned I was going to tear it. Briefly, I debated firing my office manager for saddling me with this stamp, then thought better of it.

Then suddenly, without warning, I got the corner of the backing away from the stamp, just like that. Peeling the entire backing off was simple then, and I did just that, leaving the corner of the stamp stuck to the end of my index finger. When I was wadding up the little piece of backing to stick it into my pocket, the wind gusted and the part of the stamp not stuck to my finger lifted up and threatened to pull the stuck part free.

In my mind’s eye I saw, with perfect clarity and in extreme slow motion, the stamp flying off my finger. I saw it spinning lazily through the air and landing faceup on the asphalt, sticking instantly and becoming completely useless. Fortunately, that all only happened in my head, because I would have snapped - gone postal, as it were - and would most likely have needed to be incarcerated.

Instead, I put the stamp on the letter and left it in the front seat of the Jeep.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a big day planned, including getting a haircut, taking the spud to buy band clothes, and meeting with the volunteer lady at the animal shelter for an interview, so I need to get my ass up out of this chair.

Have a great day.