Meat and Vampires

I experienced two things this past weekend that are ordinarily well-liked: Texas de Brazil and “Twilight.” As usual for me, I couldn’t get on the excitement bus.

I have to thank RVAblogs for my trip to Texas de Brazil. Someone else blogged about going to the restaurant's website and entering personal data and getting discount coupons. So I did that, and sure enough, for my birthday the restaurant sent me a free entrée ticket, as long as I arrived with someone who was paying full price. Otherwise, I would never pay this much for a meal. Not without winning the lottery.

Yes, the salad bar is delightful with an unusual assortment of vegetables, breads and cheeses that are not your usual salad bar fare. We both forgot to even try a soup. As for the meat, it almost makes you turn vegetarian. There is something unseemly about guys walking around with long skewers of meat. It was hard not to think about the Amazing Race All-Stars edition where the teams had to eat a bucket of gnarly looking meats in Brazil while whooshing away flies. The clever Rob of Rob and Amber fame figured out a way to pass on it and take the penalty, as long as he could convince a team behind him to do the same. It was almost like I now had to figure out how to get out of this meat-eating competition at Texas de Brazil to save myself.

Instead of a bucket of meat with a side of flies, they slide off one small piece for you as each skewer goes by. This way you don’t get stuck with too much if you don’t like it. There are no doggie bags at Texas de Brazil. You either eat it then or it gets trashed. Our server told us, yes, they waste a lot of food, but the alternative is to be taken advantage of by the evil conniving people among us, and if you don’t believe they exist, read the Check Out Girl’s blog.

The garlic sirloin was very salty, not surprising since everything is cooked in rock salt. The Parmesan chicken was thigh meat, which I find gross. This almost ended the meat-eating competition for me. The flank didn’t have much flavor, and neither did the regular sirloin. None of the other 10 or more meat choices ever came by our table. Garlic sirloin came back three times. After I declined a second piece three times, our server came over to ask, well, what do you want? Like Oliver Twist begging for more gruel, we timidly asked for filet mignon wrapped in bacon? But the next meat man to come by said it’d be five minutes before any was ready, and by that time we were full anyway and just wanted to leave.

But, now that I’ve survived it and know a little better what you have to do (plan to be there a long time waiting to meet the meat of your choice), by the time my anniversary and another coupon rolls around, I might be up for it again.

As for “Twilight,” this silly teenage romance is a metaphor for every teenage romance. At 16 or 17, what does any girl know about choosing a lifelong companion? Nothing. We haven’t even figured out a hairstyle yet. But we are mightily convinced a boy we hardly know is “the one” we want to spend the rest of our lives with, when they’re really not even worth spending the rest of our teens with. We just can’t see beyond the moment. It’s sad and tragic. I know the vampire I met when I was 15 should have been stabbed through the heart right away. Instead I clung to him until I was 20, and he left me with a baby to pursue his Peter Pan existence. What about my Peter Pan existence? Why do I have to be Wendy and the responsible one? You know how hard it is to finish college and launch a career in a demanding field when you’re a single mother? In the 1970s?! It’s hard. It is a game-changer that impacts every job and relationship you have in the future, and usually not for the best. Damn high school vampires.

So I’m watching moody Bella insist that yes, she wants to spend the rest of her life with cold-skinned, deer-sucking vampire boy and his unusually friendly vampire family playing superspeed baseball. Bite me! Bite me at the prom because it’s a prom moment. Vampire boy, on the other hand, is totally entranced with Bella only because he can’t read her mind. The fact that he can’t figure her out makes her special. So he will protect her forever, except if he wasn’t hanging out with her, making the out-of-town vampires jealous for her blood, she wouldn’t need protecting.

Maybe the book is better. I am tempted to put it in my Amazon cart, except I am afraid it will change me somehow. Everyone I have talked to who has read “Twilight” is insanely crazy about it and has read the whole series about this goofy girl and her pasty lover and they talk and talk about it like it's an addiction. I don't want to be one of those women.

Breasts Like Pizza Dough

Who likes mammograms? Nobody. It is a flawed system, in which something round and attached vertically to your body is supposed to become flat and extend horizontally between two pieces of glass. The technician is pulling and tugging on you like she expects your breasts to be pizza dough, which she can twist like bread sticks.

The lady at the registration desk has a collection of photos of her family at her station. And they all face me instead of her. Why does she have them when she can't even see them? Why does she want me to look at her family? Why does she even have to have this many framed family photos at her work station? Is she going to forget she has family if she doesn't have the BACKS OF THE FRAMES looking at her all day? I don't understand this.

This is a change. They put an identity wrist band on me, and I'm only having a mammogram. Is there a chance I won't survive the mammogram and they won't be able to identify my body without this tag? I'll get lost in the jumble of women who were twisted to death that day in the mammogram lab? Or do they think I have a stunt double in the wings who was going to sneak in and take my mammogram instead of me? They want to be sure that it is me attached to my breasts, not some imposter.

The xray technician puts little band-aids on my nipples. They are purple with pink and green flowers on them, and each one has a tiny little pink fake nipple on it. Why do I need this? The technician tells me some women don't have noticeable nipples and it confuses the people reading the xrays. For the past 15 years I've been having mammograms done without artificial nipples. Have the doctors been confused all that time? (Or are they stupider now?) But I have fairly obvious parts. Nursing a baby will do that to you. It is obvious I am obvious, but I get the band-aids anyway. The fake ones are not even as obvious as the real ones. This makes no sense whatsoever.

"What do you do if someone comes in with a pierced nipple?" She doesn't have an answer for it. I speculate that maybe the pierced nipple crowd has not reached the age of mammograms yet.

The wrist band is on my right wrist. I am right-handed and do not handle scissors well with my left hand. I spend the afternoon trying to wrestle this band off my wrist. I don't have the nerve to try to pull the band-aids off.

Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off to Work We Go...Sort of

A forced snow day is a good time to reflect on office work.

I’m not an early person. I tend to be late, not because I can't get it together but because usually it doesn't seem critical. I never seem to get out of the office at the designated time either, so I figure what labor is being lost at the front end is being recouped at the rear end, although some supervisors don’t appreciate the logic of this.

And no one appreciates it if I call attention to the fact that those who come early are not actually working. They’re doing the same things that we who are late are still doing at home on our own time: reading the paper, going to the bathroom, eating breakfast, and -- a major time-killer -- talking about everything they did since the last time they were at work.

For several years I worked at a non-profit office of 30 women divided up into rooms of three or four. After the bathroom, newspapers and breakfasts were taken care of, and the news of the night before shared with their office mates, they would then go to the other rooms to converse with the people there. This took up the entire morning, and then lunch was convened in a lounge where a television played the noontime soap operas.

The hour after lunch would be consumed by discussion groups about the activities of the soap opera people. By this time, school was out and everyone was calling home, checking in with their kids and making plans for after-work and dinner. By now there was about an hour to go to actually do some office work and everyone is complaining how much work they've got and they can't possibly catch up. We're swamped, swamped!

I keep seeing a variation of this same pattern at subsequent jobs, and often it actually results in more people getting hired to catch up with all this work, and yet the same amount of work gets done because the new people fall into the same pattern. It also explains why I watch my email, waiting for replies and information I need to move forward on my projects, and nothing happens -- I get nothing at all -- until 5:05 p.m. Every day. Without fail. For years and years now. The pattern is still in force.

The more people you have in an office, the less work you get done because it increases the number of birthdays, weddings, new babies, house warmings, promotions and transfers. Every one of those events requires, if not a covered dish luncheon, then at least the ubiquitous yellow cake with white icing and pastel roses. During the two years I worked at Signet Bank's operations center, I think I set a new lifetime record for the amount of yellow cake with white icing I consumed. It got to the point where it seemed truly unusual if there wasn’t a cake each day. I couldn’t work. I’d have yellow cake withdrawal pains on no cake days. What, there’s no cake? No where in this building? There’s gotta be cake somewhere.

There's the coffee pot and microwave wars. A cottage industry in any office is the maintenance and supplying of the coffee. This can tie up one or two workers most of the day. Coffee has to be made, then remade, filters dumped -- preferably in the water coolers so there will be the traditional office water cooler clog -- and then pots washed. There’s always someone who will do all this, in lieu of their actual work, and complain the whole time about it, as if they actually wanted to be doing their actual work.

Then there's the who got the microwave all dirty crisis, which can consume hours of time trying to, by power of gossip, guilt the offender into cleaning the microwave.

Another time-killer is the sales force. I don’t mean the salesmen who are selling the product manufactured by the office. I’m talking about the auxiliary sale force. I have never worked anywhere where there wasn’t an Avon lady or women leaving catalogs of stuff on your desk, proceeds to benefit their child's school. I make a forgiving exception for band candy, although I haven't seen one of those long, almond-studded chocolate band bars in a long time.

Finally, there's the Odor Patrol: People have decided they have a civil right not to smell anything, or at least, not anything they don’t want to smell. Cigarettes were the first to go and after that heady victory, with some basis in health considerations, they went berserk with power and started going after everything. Now we have Fragrance Free Zones. You’ve seen the memos.

“There are some employees who are allergic to fragrances, and request other employees to refrain from the use of colognes and hairsprays.” This, of course, is no fun for the Avon Lady. (See The Sales Force above.)

I worked with one woman in a telemarketing sales maze of cubicles who kept requesting a new seat assignment because she couldn’t stand the odor of cough drops or throat lozenges co-workers were using. When I'm trapped in a cubicle waiting for a phone to ring or a 5:01 p.m. email to arrive, I have a bad habit of removing and reapplying nail polish. I’m surprised I haven’t been clubbed to death by the Odor Patrol yet. I like the stench of nail polish remover. Others don’t. What I don’t like, and have often contemplated joining the Odor Patrol to protest are:

Microwave popcorn and Chinese Take-Out. Years ago, a T-D columnist (probably Ray McAllister) wrote about the all-encompassing, breathtaking stink of burnt microwave popcorn that can overtake an office and linger all day. He received so many heartfelt responses, it was apparent this is a common office hazard. (In fact, 90 percent of the fire evacuations in my current job are popcorn-related).

I find successfully nuked popcorn just as disruptive. The seductive odor of hot butter belongs in a movie theater, so it’s distracting to be overwhelmed by it twice a day during mid-morning and mid-afternoon munchy periods. You can’t think of anything else but popcorn, popcorn, popcorn.

But at least it's preferable to the horrible stench of Chinese take-out! Ever wonder why all Chinese restaurants have take-out? Because even the people who work in Chinese restaurants want you to take it out! This food smells worse than it looks, and it looks like regurgitated animals from Dr. Seuss books. There’s always somebody in an office who has Chinese food delivered to their desk several times a week, and you can smell it the rest of the day.