Omega's Diner

Where's Omega?

2005-03-08T08:30:00.000-06:00

Dealing with some shit. Sit tight for an update.

Vegas. Baby?

2005-02-24T13:33:00.000-06:00

Well, we’re back from what my father refers to as Lost Wages, Nevada (all the lame jokes on this blog are hereditary). You may remember that the original purpose of the trip, aside from getting crazy drunk and pissing away our house fund at the blackjack tables, was to assess our current lifestyle and determine where we are as far as expanding the family goes. Are we mature and responsible enough to remember to poke a baby with a sharp stick before it can crawl all the way to the electrical socket and stick its tongue in? Only after 96 hours of no sleep and overpriced whiskey would we know for sure.

Or so we thought. Going into the trip, I was pretty sure that we’d either have a rockin’ time and decide that we need to save our money and energy for drinking, gambling, and crazy vacations, or that we’d be old tired married people who complained about the smoke, noise, and teeming masses of humanity nonstop before falling into bed at 9:00 PM and ordering pay-per-view movies and room service for the rest of the weekend, thereby resigning ourselves to having advanced to the stage in our lives where, since we can't hang with the kids, we might as well have our own.

As it turns out, we sort of did both. Glen kicked major ass at the poker tables, and although I, ahem, didn’t so much at blackjack, I still had a fantastic time playing. And I managed to win $80 on the slot machines as well. We handled the crazy-time thing like pros: ate when we were hungry (even if it was 5:00 AM), slept when we were tired, drank when we were awake, and successfully made it through the marathon final day of our trip (checked out of the hotel at 11:00 AM; flew home at 1:00 AM). By the end of that day, though, we could barely summon the energy to eat or have a conversation. We were definitely cranky from the lack of sleep, we couldn’t seem to catch a decent buzz from the watered-down casino drinks (and I couldn’t help thinking that I could get much drunker, much faster, and much cheaper at home), and Glen is coming down with a sinus infection from all the smoke inhalation. The cranky factor was also exponentially increased by somebody’s decision to pack only the ludicrously impractical Pointy Shoes of Uncomfortable Sexiness, which made for some long, whimpering-filled walks around the casino and up and down the strip. (If you guessed that Glen packed the impractical shoes, you’re wrong, although he does look damn cute in a sassy pair of heels.)

So we left Vegas feeling as ambivalent as ever about starting a family. We started talking about it in the airport, waiting to board our redeye home, and we continued to chat about it as we headed onto the airplane. On the way to our seats, we passed a couple and their freaking adorable year-old son, who was happily chowing down on the safety information card while waiting for takeoff. I remarked to his mother that I love it when the airline provides a snack, and she replied that the safety card really is about as good as the airline snacks get these days. As we laughed together at her joke, the baby burst into giggles as well, just as though he had been following the conversation.

Glen and I took our seats and waxed rhapsodic about the cuteness of the baby, but also expressed our private relief that we weren’t responsible for the happiness and well-being of a one-year-old on a three-hour overnight flight. We could barely hold ourselves together by this point because we were so tired and overstimulated. Trying to soothe a screaming child amidst a cranky bunch of post 9/11 passengers who want nothing more than to sleep through the flight and temporarily forget about how much money they’ve lost sounded like sheer torture to us. Suddenly, the answer seemed clear: we’re not ready.

But then, guess who sacked out at takeoff and behaved like an angel through the entire flight? Sure, he fussed a little when the cabin lights came back on in preparation for landing, but sheesh, the snoring old man next to me made more noise. We’d never have known there was a baby on the flight if we hadn’t seen him.

So, parents of the cute baby on Northwest 774: your son is adorable, unbelievably well-behaved, and obviously well cared-for. You should be extremely proud of the job you’re doing as parents. However, you’re making my life decisions very difficult and complicated indeed. I hope you’re happy.

Bitch broke my book club

2005-02-18T11:31:00.000-06:00

When I first decided to join a book club, I thought about a lot of things: widening my social circle, making a point of setting aside time to do something I love on a regular basis, expanding my mind by gathering with other intelligent women and comparing our shared perspectives on what we’d read. What I didn’t think about, but what I definitely should have, was that That Woman would undoubtedly find us and crash the party.

You know That Woman (or perhaps you know her as That Guy). That Woman is also in your book club, or she’s in your writer’s workshop or your improv class or God forbid your master’s program. Or else you work with That Woman, and she attends many of the same meetings and serves on several of the same committees as you, because meetings and committees are her favorite things. That Woman’s opinions and insights are just too darn important to keep to herself.

That Woman can’t stand it when the group’s attention isn’t on her. She’s so brilliant and sensitive and awesome, you understand, and she just has so many things to say and share, and it’s really quite rude of the rest of you idiots to try to keep piping up with your own thoughts because that just distracts the group from all of her ideas. No, we don’t need to ask another group member how she likes her new house, and we don’t need to try to establish our next meeting time, and we certainly don’t need to return to talking about the goddamn matter at hand, because perhaps you didn’t notice, but That Woman has so much to say. Hey, why are you looking at your watch? Ideas over here!

Nothing can ruin an otherwise pleasant gathering of like-minded people faster than one of these needy attention-whore types with nothing even remotely resembling social instincts. I’ve encountered a variety of strategies for monopolizing a discussion over the years, but the one That Woman in my book club is employing is particularly grating: she just hates everything.

The book we’ve read for this month? I guarantee you, she hates it, if she even finished it, which she probably didn’t because she hated it so much, and which she will mention repeatedly throughout the evening. The night we’ve chosen to meet on? She hates it, not that she had anything else going on tonight, because she lives alone and hates that, and she doesn’t have any friends and also hates that. Other things she hates include: any other book that we might tangentially reference, all movies (past and present), whatever the hostess is serving by way of snacks, the state of Minnesota, all the other states where she’s ever lived, and anything else that happens to be going on in her life at the time. Oh, and if the critical and belittling way she treats everyone else in the group is anything to go by, she hates all of us as well.

In a way, I kind of feel for her. The other five regular members of the group have jobs in fairly similar industries, and she works in a very different area. I also suspect that her politics aren’t really in line with the rest of ours, just based on the fact that she’s kept so quiet about her own political leanings so far. I’m sure there are times when she feels left out, but it doesn’t change the fact that after a while her constant complaining just gets old. It’s so easy to identify it as a cry for attention, and since none of us are her mom, our inclination is not to gratify that impulse.

It’s really starting to take a toll on the group. Attendance is spotty, and we haven’t heard from a few of our founding members in months (coincidentally, we lost contact with them right around when That Woman joined us). The conversation has become stilted and awkward, because we’re all just waiting for her to jump in with more complaints and criticism to which we have no idea how to respond. The last straw came right before our last meeting, when she called around and canceled the gathering (because “nobody can come,” she alleged, although later on we established that at least some of us could). She later confessed to me that she hadn’t got around to finishing the book, but that she was actually liking it and wanted to finish before we met again.

When she spoke with me that night, she opined that maybe interest in the club was waning and it might be time to disband. Interest is still there, I wanted to respond, just not for a group with you in it.

The other women in this group and I didn’t know each other before we formed the book club. I think most of us find that refreshing – we all have our own friends and families, and we appreciate having this group of people dedicated exclusively to this one pursuit. I also think, though, that we are pretty much That Woman’s only social outlet, and that’s why she keeps hanging onto this group that clearly doesn’t suit her in any way. A part of me feels sorry for her. A bigger part of me, though, thinks she’s just a total whiny pill and is quite resentful that she’s singlehandedly ruining one of the important little luxuries in my life. I used to look forward to our meetings, but they are quickly becoming more of an obligation than a pleasure, and it’s entirely due to her.

We’re not going to disband the book club, and I’m not even thinking of hunting around for a new one right now, because I’m afraid that there will be somebody like this in any group I find. There’s just enough people like this in the world to ruin it for the rest of us. My hope right now is that she decides to leave on her own – who knows, maybe there’s even a group of people out there that she’s fit in with better.

In the meantime, though: I miss my book club.

And suddenly, I'm old

2005-02-17T12:26:00.000-06:00

Getting ready for work this morning, I found a gray hair. 25 is going great so far.

Here’s a quarter (century); buy a clue

2005-02-16T10:32:00.000-06:00

25 things about me at age 25:

1. My life insurance agent has already called to wish me a happy birthday.
2. When I was a baby, I wouldn’t eat anything unless it was red, so my mother had to douse all of my food in ketchup.
3. I’ve decorated my entire apartment in red.
4. I don’t like ketchup.
5. I’ve already been out of school for three years... and college for five.
6. I have an actual grown-up job and carry a briefcase to work.
7. I am married to the most wonderful person in the history of the universe.
8. When anticipating where I’d be at age 25, I saw numbers 5 & 6 coming, but number 7 has been a very pleasant surprise.
9. By age 26, I hope to be a homeowner and to have been promoted (so I can use the extra money to be a homeowner who can still afford food).
10. When I arrived at work this morning, my desk was entirely wrapped in red paper.
11. I am going to be awake all night, because Bomb brought me a birthday chai and Southside brought me birthday Dr. Pepper and I don’t usually have caffeine.
12. I’m still trying to find a sport or form of physical activity that I like.
13. I read faster than anyone I know.
14. My current hairstylist gives me the best haircuts I’ve ever had.
15. My special celebratory birthday lunch consists, as usual, of rice and beans.
16. Very few people have ever tried the “combination Valentine’s Day/birthday gift” maneuver on me.
17. None of my friends, family (except Glen) or co-workers know about Omega’s Diner.
18. I like to keep it that way so I can write freely and not worry about hurting anyone’s feelings or having uncomfortable conversations later.
19. Obviously, I have no secrets from Glen.
20. My cocktail of choice is a Jameson on the rocks.
21. When I’m nervous, I make jokes. When I’m at ease, I also make jokes. The only difference is the quality of the jokes.
22. Anyone who wants to get on my good side can do so quite efficiently by taking me to Buffalo Joe’s in Evanston, IL.
23. Someday I’d like to compete on Jeopardy!
24. This list took me a lot longer than I thought it would.
25. My 25th year has been the best of my life so far.

Foodgasm

2005-02-15T15:16:00.000-06:00

Glen and I celebrated Valentine's day by attending the seven-course Valentine's Day dinner at La Belle Vie in Stillwater, MN, which we've heard raves about for years but obviously can't afford on a regular basis. It was absolutely sublime, and my mom asked for a detailed description of what we ate. Writing it made me re-live the experience all over again, which was awesome, so I figured I would share it here too. Non-food geeks will want to exit the ride now.

Amuse-bouche
Three breaded and deep-fried Washington State oysters with something resembling a tartar sauce and something resembling a mignonette, only both were much, much tastier than the typical versions. I think the mignonette was made with raspberry vinegar instead of sherry. They were served with some julienned something - Glen thinks apple, I think fennel. They were incredibly tasty - rich and salty and ocean-flavored, but so tender they literally melted in our mouths. We were kicking ourselves afterward because we only tried raw oysters when we were actually in Washington, and clearly cooked is the way to go.

Course 1
Tuna Crudo "Tonnato" with Black Truffle Remoulade
This was two small pieces of sushi-grade tuna tartare garnished with tiny little green radish sprouts, which were delicious - I don't know if they were dressed with anything or not. Served with the tuna was a small piece of veal, just barely seared but still very tender, garnished with julienned radish and a large Spanish caper berry. The whole thing was shaved over with black truffles, and the dipping sauce (the "tonatto") was an aioli with anchovies and capers - very salty and piquant.

With both these courses, we were served a glass of Domaine Collin Blanquette de Limoux, which was a very smooth Brut champagne with a nice tart green apple fragrance.

Course 2
Lobster Bisque served with Avocado, Curry, and Osetra Caviar
This was a fantastic curried lobster bisque with lots of chunky pieces of lobster. Resting in the soup was a smoky-tasting black corn chip (we don't know how it got to be smoky) garnished with a dollop of pureed avocado, a dollop of creme fraiche, and a dollop of the caviar (black eggs, very small and relatively mild in flavor). We each ate the chip separately and then stirred the garnishes into the soup, which worked really well because the soup was warm but not hot, so it didn't pulverize the caviar.

We drank a glass of Domaine Jo Pithon "Pepinieres" Anjou Blanc with this, a light white wine which was very herbal (when I first sniffed it I thought "soap" and the flavor of lavender was very strong). It was strange by itself but worked well with the soup - very cooling after the spicy curry.

Course 3
Pan Roasted Sea Bass in Citrus Butter with Cauliflower and Coriander
We've made sea bass before and it turned out horribly, so we were apprehensive about this course. They did it much better than I did, though--it was seared in a very hot pan, so the fish had a very crispy medium-brown crust and the rest of the flesh was fully cooked (not slimy, which is what happened when I prepared it). It rested on a dollop of pureed cauliflower, and then the fish was surrounded by sauteed cauliflower florets. The florets were tiny and very thoroughly cooked, to the point where they were a dark brown--they looked roasted to me. You could really taste the coriander in the little florets. The citrus butter was flavored with kumquats, which I always see at the grocery store but am scared to buy because I don't know how they taste. Now I know! They're citrusy, but even sweeter than oranges.

We drank a glass of Domaine des Deux Roches Saint-Veran, which was a fruity, sweet white wine that worked well with the dish--we couldn't identify which fruit the wine reminded us of at first, but it may well have been kumquats. If it wasn't, it was some fruit that really resembles kumquats (like a melon or pear).

Course 4
Range Hen Stuffed with Prunes, Armagnac and Walnuts
When we entered the restaurant, the smoke alarm started going off and we could smell smoke coming from the rear dining room. We think this was the dish responsible--the chicken was smoked right there in the kitchen with applewood, and the exhaust system stopped working. So, the applewood smoke flavor in the meat itself was quite pronounced, and we're not sure it was supposed to be that way, but it was delicious. The meat was falling-apart tender, and the stuffing was rich and a wonderful blend of sweet and savory. The meat and stuffing were served over a mound of garlicky wilted escarole, which was fun for me. Drizzled over it was, I think, a plum and red wine reduction.

They switched us to red wine for this course, a Domaine Des Nugues Beaujolais-Villages, which was a lighter red with an earthy "country" flavor--it worked well because the entire dish made me think of the French countryside. Where I've never been, but which I have, you know, read about.

Course 5
Herb Crusted Beef Tenderloin with Porcini Mushroom, Balsamic and Ricotta Gnocchi
Glen still hasn't stopped smiling about this course. It was just about the nicest beef we've ever had--they had warmed it all the way through, but the center was still reddish-purple, and the meat was so buttery and tender that we barely even had to cut it. It was crusted with a crispy mixture of herbs and parmesan cheese and then (I think) quickly broiled to brown the crust. Surrounding it were pearl onions, porcini mushrooms, and the little ricotta dumplings - if you eat a bite of dumpling and beef together, you keel over and die, but you die happy. The whole thing was drizzled with a tasty balsamic vinegar reduction.

They served us a glass of Blue Rock "Alexander" Cabernet Sauvignon, the presence of which our waiter heralded by announcing, "Here comes Big Red." It was simply awesome, and they poured us a bonus glass to go with our seventh course as well.

Course 6
Cava Cocktail with Pink Grapefruit
This course was definitely the most fun. They brought out a plate with a lacy caramel chip (made, I think, just by drizzling very hot sugar onto a cold surface), a little dish of vanilla sabayon with tiny pieces of pink grapefruit hiding inside, and a chilled tall shot glass about a quarter of the way full with blood orange liqueur. Then, they came by our table with a bottle of Cava (Spanish champagne) and filled up our shot glasses the rest of the way. Our waiter recommended that we eat the two desserts and then drink the entire cocktail in one shot to finish off the course, so that's what we did--dipped the caramel chip into the sabayon, then ate the rest of the sabayon with a spoon, then shot the cocktail. I'd never shot anything fizzy before and had a pretty severe case of the giggles at this point, but I managed not to douse myself. And it was extremely refreshing, almost like a palate-cleansing sorbet.

Course 7
Coconut Financier, Roasted Banana, and Cashew
We had some fun with the name "coconut financier," but apparently it's a real pastry. This course was a cold semisweet chocolate soup, surrounded by roasted diced pineapple and strawberry. In the middle of the soup were a coconut pastry and a small piece of banana, both of which had a crispy cashew brittle coating that I think had been deep-fried. The inside of the banana was very soft and liquid, so it must have been cooked at some point, but the banana itself was cold, so it must have been chilled as well. Glen ate the whole thing; I tried but couldn't get past my fundamental dislike of coconut and ate everything else. This was where we had our second glass of Big Red as well.

Then they served us coffee, and then we basically staggered home and passed out in a happy food coma. Best special-occasion meal ever.

Currently bugging the crap out of me

2005-02-15T14:32:00.000-06:00

Like many who foist their writing on the internet community, I'm a big usage snob. But I've also come to terms with the fact that most people don't care about grammar, style, and usage as much as I do, and since I spend my days in a corporate environment, the language will be bitch-slapped repeatedly in front of my helpless eyes on a daily basis. By and large, I'm resigned to it, and I hardly even notice anymore. *twitch*

But.

Nobody who works here understands time. My colleagues and I have a lot of occasion to make appointments and communicate hours in our line of work: "We are in the office from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM," "I am available at 1:30 PM," etc. Since we work with people who live all over the country, we often need to remind people that we're in the Central time zone so they can plan accordingly. So just about every day, I see a communication from a colleague (or, worse, official language on our website) that reads something like this:

"Our hours are from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM CST."

Which is wrong, because CST stands for "Central Standard Time," and "Standard" is as opposed to "Daylight Savings," and I don't recall a memo going out stating that we only work from October to April. So, if your meeting is in Minneapolis at 10:00 AM on February 22, then it's at 10:00 AM CST. If it's on May 22, it's at 10:00 AM CDT, or Central Daylight Time. If you want your description to apply to all seasons of the year, then you just say "Central Time."

I think it bothers me so much because inserting "Standard" is one of those things people do to make themselves sound more important, official, and smart. And, as usually happens, it's backfiring, because to anyone who knows what they're talking about, we sound like a bunch of jackasses. Argh.

Thus endeth my petty rant for the ~~month~~ ~~week~~ ~~day~~ brief moment of time until something else incredibly minor makes me angry.

I don’t think you understand

2005-02-14T11:52:00.000-06:00

Dear Glen,

Do you understand how wonderful you are? You probably don't, over there all reading this and blushing and looking down and to your right and smiling just a little with the corner of your mouth. You don't understand that your particularly cute brand of modesty only serves to make you more wonderful. You don't understand that you get cuter and more modest and more wonderful and on and on because you are caught up in a vicious cycle of wonderfulness, and now you're beet-red and chuckling on top of it.

You don't understand that you could have had any woman you wanted. You don't know about the evenings I spent at bars in Madison, whispering to other girls that I had a life-threatening crush on you and hearing them giggle and whisper back that you were indeed so funny, so smart, so cute with that smile and those eyes and that guitar. You know that I grabbed myself a handful of your left ass cheek on the way home from the bar on one of those nights, but you don't understand that I did it because I had to make sure that thing was real. Because, damn. Sometimes I still can't believe it's real, which is why it takes you five full minutes to swat me away and put on underwear every morning. I don't think you understood that until just now.

You don't understand how terrified I was that night in your apartment, just a month after we'd met, clutching your sheets up to my chin and agonizing over how you wouldn't meet my eyes. And then when you sat gingerly on the edge of the bed and sighed, and stammered that you felt like you had wrought something final and permanent - that you'd never be able to take it back now because you loved me, you don't understand how relieved I was that you'd put my fear into words. It was the first time we ever said it, but we say it fifteen thousand times a day now: every time we email, every time we hang up the phone, getting out of the car and getting back in and sitting on the couch whining for another beer. You don't understand that I only verbalize it one out of every hundred times that I think it.

You don't understand the effect you have on people. It's not just that you make them laugh, or make them think, or make them feel like the most important and fascinating person in the room, although you do. Something about you makes people light up inside - they become better versions of themselves. Around you, suddenly, everyone is more charming and funny and exciting and excited. It's your enthusiasm, your gentleness, your silliness, your fundamental goodness - people can't help but rise to it. Every life you touch, however briefly, is better for having known you. You really don't understand how having the privilege of loving you has changed me into a better person.

I think you do understand that I'm hard to be with, but the thing is, you never act like it. I'm neurotic, weepy, impatient, perfectionistic, stubborn, critical, high-strung, and insecure, and I never, ever, ever stop talking. I don't think you have any illusions about any of that, but to hear you talk, I'm beautiful, smart, funny, ambitious, responsible, loyal, and a great cook. Being married to me is the hardest thing you've ever done, and all you ever have to say about it is how much better it's made your life. You know me so completely and you love me so well; you look at me with your eyes wide open and choose me day after day. You don't understand how lucky this makes me.

You probably won't ever understand just how wonderful you are; it's not in your nature, and the fact that you're unaware of your own wonderfulness is probably a fundamental component of said wonderfulness. You already know everything about how to be the best husband ever in the entire world, and yet you're constantly trying to learn more. I know that probably occupies too much of your mental energy to take on the enormous task of trying to understand how great you are, but don't worry: I know how great you are, and I'll never stop trying to show you. Fortunately, I have a lifetime.

Happy Valentine's Day. I love you.

Happy Hour

2005-02-10T09:57:00.000-06:00

From: Omega
To: Glen
Subject: Vent

So, I'm about ready to retire from the happy-hour-organizing business. I can't send out an email to everybody in the department, because then it takes on the flavor of an "official" event and we already have a "fun committee" that's supposed to take care of things like this, and they're weirdly territorial about it, and I want to keep this informal. So I draw the line in a pretty arbitrary place, and in the wording of the invitation, I always encourage people to spread the word and bring whomever they want.

And yet, every single fucking time, I get a bunch of pissy whining from people who "weren't invited." It's a BAR! It's not by invitation only! You just show up and drink! And anyone who wants to organize their own happy hour is welcome to do so and invite WHOEVER THEY WANT! It is NOT THAT HARD! You just slap a time and a location on an email and send it out--the bad puns are optional! Sweet tapdancing Christ, there's not going to be a bouncer with a clipboard and a velvet rope! If you want to come, JUST COME!
Whew. Thanks.

Kisses,
O

--------------------
From: Glen
To: Omega
Subject: Re: Vent

If you would like, I could check IDs at the door! Like the soup nazi, only for booze. No Booze For YOU!

Kisses,
G

--------------------
From: Omega
To: Glen
Subject RE: Vent

You don't need to check IDs. You just need to be like, "Hi, welcome to the happy hour. Are you a whiny jerk with your head stuck up your ass who enjoys making a big deal out of nothing and thereby sucking all the fun out of every event you partake in? You are? Well then, you are officially NOT INVITED to this VERY EXCLUSIVE happy hour. Get lost, buttmunch!"

Kisses,
O

--------------------
From: Glen
To: Omega
Subject: RE: Vent

What if I prefer the term "asseater," or "dingleberry?" Am I at liberty to make editorial changes that suit my mood?

Kisses,
G

--------------------
From: Omega
To: Glen
Subject: RE: Vent

Oh yes, this position comes with plenty of creative freedom.

Kisses,
O

When I say blog, you better blog, motherfucker!

2005-02-09T15:38:00.000-06:00

Yikes. I’ve been feeling guilty about not updating, but my life is truly, unbelievably, crashingly boring right now, so I figured best to say nothing if I have nothing to say. But it’s also best if Alyssa doesn’t buy a ticket from Boston to Minneapolis and fly out here just to kick me square in the ass, so I guess I should hop to it.

Actually, wait a sec. If I don’t post an update, then perhaps Alyssa will actually fly out here, and after she kicks my ass I can take her to the Bibelot Shop and then we can stop at Surdyk’s to buy a bottle of wine and go home and drink it while we eat bruschetta and black raspberry ice cream and yell at reality television.

For that kind of fun I can put up with an ass-kicking. Asses heal! Do your worst, lady, because I am NOT posting! Ha!

Spawn 2: Spawn of the incredibly annoying

2005-02-07T11:27:00.000-06:00

Dear co-worker,

I'm very, very sorry that your husband won't get you pregnant. I can't imagine why he wouldn't want to, as you are the kind of nurturing and loving person who, when I finally snap after a solid half hour of the Wanna-Get-Knocked-Up Blues and make a sarcastic remark about going off the pill without telling him, looks at me all duh, amateur and whines, "I did that months ago!" Seriously, I have no idea why this dude isn't falling all over himself trying to reproduce with you. However, it's now a moot point, as I've decided that you're not allowed to have children. Or speak. Or be anywhere near me. Or exist.

Have a super day,
Omega

"Sick" day

2005-02-04T13:37:00.000-06:00

I'm taking a sick day, but I'm not so much "sick" as "sick of it." Not sick of my job, per se; I like my job fine. I'm just feeling sort of disgusted and worn out from everything that's been going on in my life lately.

I think a big part of it is me experiencing the same entertainment exhaustion that Glen already wrote about. We had out-of-town guests last weekend, and the thing with out-of-town guests is that the entire weekend becomes devoted to entertaining them and seeing to their comfort. I didn't feel like I could in good conscience say, "Hey, do you guys mind amusing yourselves for a bit while I throw in a load of laundry?" So all the crap that usually gets done on our weekends - grocery shopping, housecleaning, oil changes - just gets put off to Monday. But by Monday, we're both back at work, and since we've been running around all weekend, we don't have the time or the energy to take care of this stuff right away. The same thing happened the weekend before: this big dinner party kind of took all our energy, and eight people create a hell of a mess, and we just haven't had the time or the energy to put everything back together.

So our place is kind of a shambles right now, and it makes me depressed just to look at it. I took today off, in part, to try and put a dent in the overall disgustingness. So far: one load of dishes done, one load of laundry folded, refrigerator cleaned out, general tidying almost complete. Lots more to do.

It's not just that, though. I'm feeling emotionally exhausted and spent as well. I have in mind a blog entry, which I haven't yet written, trying to convey how much of my heart and soul I throw into the process of entertaining. It's not enough for me to know that my guests had a pleasant time; I don't know how to do anything less than knock myself out playing Hostess Extraordinaire. I don't know why that is, and I don't know how to dial it down. It takes a lot out of me, mentally and emotionally and spiritually. I think it's created tension in our house that we haven't yet dealt with, and I'm feeling generally sad and used up in the meantime.

I had really been looking forward to this weekend as a time to relax and decompress and collect myself, but it became clear this morning that I just couldn't drag myself through another day in the meantime. So I made the executive decision that my weekend starts today. I feel kind of guilty about it, in all honesty, but I still think it was smart.

I plan to be completely refreshed and happy by 5:30 PM on Sunday. For now, back to the housecleaning!

Actual conversation from the liquor store

2005-02-03T16:29:00.000-06:00

Guy 1 (in front of a case of Samuel Adams): Get some of that.
Guy 2: Some of what?
Guy 1: That beer, that Sam Jackson.
Guy 2: Oh, yeah, the Sam Jackson.

Me (sotto voce, to Glen): That's the beer that says
BAD MOTHER FUCKER on it.
Both of us: (Wild, uncontrollable laughter)

Guys 1 & 2: (Angry glare)

We have grossly violated the principles of Minnesota Nice. But it was so worth it.

Spawn of Gamblers

2005-02-03T10:15:00.000-06:00

Here’s what happens when you buy a Volvo and start shopping for a house: you start thinking about having kids. This is only exacerbated by the fact that the company I work for is staffed almost entirely by professional types in their 30s, most of whom have reached the first major plateau in their careers and have decided that now’s the time to make with the procreating. Merely taking a stroll around my office would cause myriad “something in the water” jokes to pop into your head. (If you ever do visit my office, I implore you to resist the temptation to make them – believe me, there’s nothing funny left to be said on the subject. Not that it’s stopping me from trying.)

Bomb, Southside, Warrior, and I are among the few stalwarts holding onto our wild irresponsible lifestyle, and we’re pretty much the only entire workgroup who hasn’t at least dispatched a representative to Babyville. You can tell it kind of gets on our colleagues’ nerves, like, what’s wrong with these people? Don’t they know the rules?

We do, actually. Three of us are married and Southside is engaged, and I’m the only one still this side of 30 (an age which seems to have some kind of magical get-knocked-up mojo around here), and I think we’d all like to get there eventually. I just don’t think anyone wants to be first. Inquiries on the subject typically elicit a playground-style “Not it!” in response. Based on that criteria, I think Bomb and his wife are next, simply because Bomb has the slowest reflexes.

(Ew, that could actually be really dirty if you think about it.
Don’t think about it.)

It’s tough to get the pressure at work in addition to at home. Glen’s mom started lobbying before we were even engaged, never mind married, and I think the only reason that Mama and Papa Omega waited until after the wedding to crank it up was that they’re Catholic. (Which, by the way, is a double-edged sword, because although we got to wait longer to experience it, the pressure is now laced with a particularly potent brand of guilt.) Two of my cousins got married within a few months of Glen and me, and one of them now has an eight-month-old and the other is due this month. My entire extended family is looking at us like, “Well???” And on the other side, every time Glen’s mom stops at Target to buy a gift for Scrapper and JB’s dog, she manages to mention that she just happened to cruise through the baby clothes section on her way to the Snausages.

So what of Glen and me, the proud owners of the actual ingredients for a child? Where do we stand on the whole baby-making issue? I tend to go back and forth between two points of view:

“Awww, a baby. We’re so happy together and our house is so filled with love, and I know we’d work so hard at giving this child a wonderful life. It would be such a gift to our family and to the world if we were able to raise a conscientious, productive, compassionate citizen with a keen sense of social justice – who knows what wonderful changes this person might bring about in our lifetime?”

And

“AAAAAAAAAHHH!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA No I have a better idea let’s get drunk and watch Survivor instead by way of a hysterical displacement reaction AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!”

I’ve just always been such a highly responsible person: goal-driven, ambitious, self-sufficient, ahead of my time. Most people aren’t even contemplating this lifestyle when they’re 24 (although I do have some harsh realities to face in a few weeks), but the fact is, it makes sense. Education complete, happy marriage, stable job, house, Volvo... what’s the next logical step? Most of my friends are older than I am and are thinking along those lines, and in a lot of ways, it feels natural to me to do the same.

But then again, there are times when I feel like I should go ahead and be crazy and irresponsible now, while I can. The only other person whose happiness I’m responsible for right now is fully capable of looking out for himself, and that gives me a lot of freedom to be stupid, sad, selfish, angry, annoying, juvenile, or ridiculous whenever the mood strikes me. And frankly, the mood strikes me a lot, and I’m not sure if I’m ready to give that up – to learn to resist the urge to scream FUCK THIS I HATE EVERYBODY and burst into tears, which you have to do, because a child doesn’t necessarily understand the concept of “just blowing off steam.”

Every other decision I’ve made in my life has been revocable. Even if it were incredibly difficult, painful, and time-consuming to reverse, it could theoretically be done if it ever seemed like the best decision. The same is true for Glen. Once we have a child, though, that’s it. Our lives are fundamentally altered forever and there’s no reversing or undoing or changing our minds. It’s a huge, scary leap to make, and if we make it, we don’t even have the luxury of taking our time finding our footing on the other side of the chasm – because suddenly, we have a tiny new life who’s totally dependent on us for happiness and survival. Children don’t tolerate uncertainty or second-guessing. We need to do this so wholeheartedly that our child won’t ever wonder if he or she was really wanted. I don’t know if we’re there yet, which probably means we’re not.

Knowing all this, though, the desire to have children, especially Glen’s children, positively consumes me sometimes. For all the schmooping I do about Glen here on a regular basis, I am not conveying even one percent of the awesomeness of this man. He is going to make the best dad ever in the history of the universe, and not just because any baby that looked like him would shatter the existing world record for adorability. His capacity to love, to support, to find a way, to make it work, to take a thorough psychological beating and sigh and square his shoulders and come back for more because that’s just what you do – he just never stops amazing me. It’s not just that he deserves kids; it’s that these kids deserve him. The part of me that wants to create our family is never silent.

It’s a conundrum, all right. So I’ve chosen to resolve it in a way that I think is sensible, mature, measured, and responsible, and Glen has indulged me because, well, see above: we’re going to stay up for three solid days and drink and gamble and immerse ourselves in a veritable orgy of tawdry irresponsible fun. That’s right: we’re going to Vegas.

I turn 25 in a few weeks and have never been to Vegas, despite cherishing a dream of hitting it big on the pro blackjack circuit. And I want to go. I want to fritter away significant sums of money while the casino comps me enormous fruity umbrella-festooned drinks with a deceptively high alcohol content so I’ll keep throwing my chips into their huge gaping maw, and then when I can barely stand up or see straight from all the fruity drinks, I want to go hit a $2 all-you-can-eat shrimp and steak buffet and then a strip club. And then I want to sleep for four hours and get up and do it again. This is going to be the trashiest, most ridiculous binge of sensory overload that I’ve ever gone on in my life. I’m looking forward to it so much I can hardly even describe it. I think, in a way, it’s a fact-finding mission: will this weekend fling with a more exciting lifestyle give me a taste for it? Or will my sillies be well and truly shaken out afterward, and will it be time to seriously consider taking the next step into adulthood? We shall see.

It’s hard to say, but ultimately, we probably will start thinking seriously about children in the not-too-distant future. It would be a shame to pass from this world without leaving anyone behind to inherit our legacy, our gift to the next generation. That’s right: thousands of dollars in gambling debts. Now who’s keeping whom up all night, Junior?

Compelling arguments for man-bags are the order of the day

2005-01-28T11:49:00.000-06:00

Please allow me to add to the chorus of voices shrieking at you to go out and buy a man-bag already.

Glen, like most guys, keeps all his everyday detritus in his pockets, and Glen is a little more detritus-intensive than most guys. In addition to the standard-issue wallet, he totes around, at minimum: two sets of keys, receipts from the last week's purchases, a river stone, a fake coin of some emotional significance, his cell phone, and enough pocket change to feed an army from a vending machine.

I've given up on trying to make him empty his pockets at night, because, as he's repeatedly pointed out, emptying pockets for him is like changing purses for me. We've acquired a valet stand for him, and he's able to drape his pants over the top every night at such an angle that the pocket contents don't fall out and jeopardize the integrity of his storage system. If he's in a hurry in the morning, he'll just put on the same pair of pants he wore the previous day (since all his pants are either black, khaki, or denim, he can definitely pull this look off), and voilá, he's ready to go.

If he decides to switch up the outfit for the day, though, he needs to devote a minimum of five minutes to the ritual changeover of pocket contents, known in our house as the Pantsfer. Only when his new pants are properly locked and loaded is he prepared to face the day.

This morning, the Pantsfer malfunctioned. He realized it on his way into Starbucks, when he reached for his wallet and found only his right ass cheek. I think he briefly weighed the idea of heading to work walletless, but since it contains his driver's license, we ended up racing back home to retrieve it. I privately questioned whether the Pantsfer system might be to blame, but with Glen already white-knuckling the steering wheel and apologizing profusely for making me late to work (dude, I'm on salary; you're really only hurting yourself), I decided that the discussion could wait until later.

But consider: would this have happened if he had a man-bag? I think we all know the answer to that.

Househunters, Part 2

2005-01-25T13:38:00.000-06:00

Having reached the new year, Glen and I decided to get serious about the house-buying thing. We don’t really need any more compelling reasons than we already have, but on top of everything else we’re just really sick of flushing the rent money. We also threw a dinner party for eight including ourselves this past weekend, and it served to demonstrate very clearly that we need a lot more room.

To appreciate how our home-buying process has gone so far, you need to understand that Glen and I don’t just rush out and buy things. We plan and deliberate and strategize and research until we’re thoroughly sick of even contemplating the purchase in question, and then, when we know more about the product than anyone involved in its manufacturing or sale, we go out and buy it. We don’t go shopping without a grocery list, or without knowing exactly what meal or snack every item on the grocery list will be used to create. We stay at home and figure out exactly what we’re going to purchase for someone when we buy a gift, then we comparison-shop online to find out who has the best price, and then we go out and buy it. It took us two days to buy our new vacuum cleaner (please ask Glen about the new vaccum; he’s very excited) and nine months to buy our new car. We are both cheap and nerdy and we hate shopping. So, needless to say, the decision to buy a home means that we’ve undertaken a research project comparable in scope to my master’s thesis, and at least when I was writing that I had a job that allowed me to show up for work hung over.

The first step was settling on a neighborhood. Glen and I live in the Twin Cities, a great community with a highly varied assortment of neighborhoods to choose from, but also a place that’s rather geographically crackheaded (two downtowns, an airport in the suburbs, and a giant river bisecting the whole shebang). Just to make things even harder, Glen and I work on opposite sides of the river, which sounds totally meaningless unless you live in Minnesota, in which case you realize that this is a huge deal. We’ve each battled a long commute at one point or another in our cohabitation, and we’ve come to the realization that traffic is bad for our marriage in that the traffic-fighting spouse tends to come home with beams of concentrated rage shooting out of his or her eyes. Right now, we’re able to carpool to work, and this has pretty well spoiled us; not only do we get to spend the extra time together, but using the carpool lane shaves a lot of time off our commute.

We’d like to keep doing this, so at first we thought the logical choice was to buy in the same neighborhood where we currently rent. We live in a first-ring suburb with an insanely convenient location, a low crime rate, a lovely park district, and some great grassroots community initiatives to make it a nicer place to live. Overall, it seems like a perfect fit on paper. It turns out, though (who knew?) that neighborhood amenities like this really drive up the asking price of a house. A house in our price range in our current neighborhood is probably going to be smaller than our apartment, not to mention considerably less conveniently located and sorely in need of some expensive and immediate repairs. Our compulsive researching didn’t allow us to maintain any illusions about the possibility of buying in this neighborhood for long; when search after search pulls up listings for tiny little shitboxes located in Outer Bumblefuck, you kind of tend to get the hint.

The more we thought about it, though, the more this didn’t really seem like the right neighborhood for us anyway. We’ve lived here for a year and a half now, and it’s no exaggeration to say we haven’t made a single friend among our neighbors. This is kind of a bedroom community and people really tend to keep to themselves. Everybody drives everywhere—you don’t see many people out for an evening stroll—and the vast majority of the businesses in the area are chains. The average age of the residents is 37 years (I told you: compulsive research), and while we like the idea of living among and learning from a varied population, we are also hoping to meet some people in our new neighborhood who are our age and at our position in life. Right now, we just don’t feel like we have much in common with our current neighbors.

This sent us back to the drawing board, and I’ve been burning up the cable modem trying to figure out where this mythical neighborhood of our dreams might be. Broke and picky is not a combination that makes for easy househunting, let me tell you. We’re looking for a cute, relatively spacious house in decent repair with lots of character but still leeway for us to make it our own, located in a fun neighborhood with local businesses within walking distance, surrounded by cool, friendly people in their 20s and 30s, convenient to both downtowns, and all that reasonably priced to boot. Surprisingly enough, the market isn’t exactly littered with such properties (we know this because of all our compulsive research).

So I’ve been digging through all the articles in City Pages, scouring the neighborhood reports at the NCPR, and even posted a plaintive cry for suggestions on the Minneapolis Metblog. I’ve been researching this for hours at a time over the past few weeks, and I think it’s finally paid off; we’ve found a neighborhood that we’re starting to think might be the one for us.

Northeast Minneapolis (or “Nordeast” if you hail from around these parts and talk like the cast of Fargo), is famous around here for having both a bar and a church on every corner. Glen’s and my affection for drinking is plenty well-known, and we don’t have much of a problem with major deities either, so we figured we’d give it a look. Last week we took a day off, drove around the area getting a geographical feel for it and scoping out nearby shopping and entertainment. We ate lunch at a neighborhood restaurant and did a dry run of our daily commute, and everything impressed us so much that we think we’re ready to kick a search for a house in this area into high gear.

(What, you thought that was high gear? We’re just getting started.)

Bonus Entry: Yet another reason to love Glen

2005-01-21T08:36:00.000-06:00

Cooking responsibilities at our house switch off every other night between the two of us. We try to grocery shop just once a week, so each of us contributes the ingredients for two or three meals to the list. Glen, after initially complaining that he's in a bit of a rut, cooking-wise, came up with his next two meals:

Seared tuna steaks with homemade mango-ginger salsa
Cheddar melt Hamburger Helper^TM

Truly, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Is it even legal to be this cute?

Why did I start a blog?

2005-01-20T14:20:00.000-06:00

I’m not an aspiring writer.

Let me say that again: I’m not an aspiring writer.

Just to be perfectly clear: Omega’s Diner will never feature a little clicky Amazon link with a pop-up reference that says “My book, Blue Plate Special: in stores now!”

Don’t get me wrong; I have nothing but respect for the talented authors who’ve managed to make it work. I simply lack the time, energy, creativity, writing skeelz, and overall ambition to bring such a project to fruition. I went to school for something entirely different and I happily do it for a living now. No, I’m not shoving my inner monologue under your nose and waving it around all, “Look at me! Look at me!” so that some publishing conglomerate will bankroll my attempt to push my thoughts on an even larger segment of the population.

So why did I in fact start a blog? Part of me was tired of having to comment as “Anonymous” every time I just wanted to tell someone where to buy some lentils. A larger part of me has listened to too many people telling me that I’m funny and a good writer. Mama and Papa Omega, in particular, frequently point out in fine doting-parent style that it would be a real shame if I didn’t write for public consumption at some point in my life. (So I started this blog and haven’t told Mama and Papa Omega about it yet, because I use the word “fuck” a lot and because there are some aspects of my life that we’re all much more comfortable with them not knowing about.)

Mostly, though, I was just feeling pent-up and needed an outlet. I started this blog in November 2004, shortly after cresting one year at my current job. This is just about the longest I’ve ever held the same position; I went straight to grad school from college and then spent a few months at my first job, which barely paid a living wage but introduced me to the person who got me the job I have now. I like my job a lot, and I feel very confident doing it—I know I’m highly skilled at it and it suits me very well.

The problem with that, though, is that I’ve spent pretty much the last ten years of my life working toward a goal and taking on new and different challenges as I do so. Finish high school. Finish college. Finish college early! Finish graduate school. Find a job. Find a better job. So now here I am, and I unfortunately feel like I’ve pretty well mastered every nuance this job has to offer. I’m doing plenty of agitating for more responsibilities and, if possible, an elevated job title and an increase in pay, but nothing is on the horizon. So the job, as much as I love it, is incredibly repetitive and not at all challenging.

One thing I’m learning as I spend time in the workplace is that some people find the constant striving for something new exhausting. I work with a number of incredibly smart, talented people who’ve mastered the job just as well as I have, and now that they are completely comfortable in it, they’re happy to keep on doing it for the foreseeable future. I absolutely understand this line of thinking; as long as your job is relatively secure, and you know you can live on the earnings, then there’s a lot to be said for having the freedom to coast. You don’t have to bring 100% of your energy to the job every day, which allows you to focus more of your energy on the other areas of your life.

Maybe I’ll feel differently when I have children or something else that really demands a lot of my focus, but right now, I’m discovering that I’m not content to live like that. There are days, increasingly frequent ones, when my job bores the hell out of me—when I feel like if I perform the same task or answer the same question one more damn time, I’m going to scream. I’m not going to be content until my job challenges me, and one of the things I used to like about this job was the near-constant level of challenge. Not anymore. I’m done with this. What else ya got?

So, in the meantime, since I have all this pent-up energy and ambition, I figured I’d channel it into something I love. I can’t see how improving my writing skills would fail to help me in the long run, and this blog is a wonderful way to connect with awesome people whom I would never have otherwise met and who actually do possess the skeelz to write a book someday, Alyssa. It helps me get through the few interminable days when my life feels like the same damn thing over and over again, because the blog can be different every time I visit. It’s whatever I create.

Of course, once I really got into the groove with Omega’s Diner, my job punished me by getting extremely busy. Even a repetitive series of tasks is its own breed of challenge when said tasks need to be performed hundreds of times in the space of a day. So I’ve had to take a break for a while, but work seems to be settling into a routine now so I think I’ll be around more.

I can’t believe how much happier I’ve been since I started writing.

(Gives the Internet a big sloppy kiss.)

Comics fix

2005-01-20T11:33:00.000-06:00

(I guess the answer is no: I can’t hold myself to an assignment. See, last night’s Project Runway was really... yeah, you know the drill.)

I miss The Norm. I don’t miss it quite enough to pay to read the new strips, as you can do if you visit the website—Glen and I are trying to buy a house this year, and I can’t quite picture myself trying to justify the expense to him while at the same time encouraging him to drink swill for the cause.

I do, however, miss it enough to sigh quietly in a bereft fashion whenever I open the Star Tribune comics page in the morning. My understanding is that The Norm’s creator, Michael Jantze, decided on his own to stop syndicating the strip in a Bill Watterson-esque fit of pique (the strips are too small, they try to regulate our content, blah blah sellout blah our comics are like our CHILDREN, man, etc.).

So anyway, the STrib is now running a series of strips in its spot and we the readers are being asked to weigh in on which one we prefer. So far, in order, they’ve shown us Clear Blue Water, Pearls Before Swine, Elderberries, and, currently, Rose is Rose. According to the editors, the surreal and sadistic humor of Pearls Before Swine is the clear frontrunner so far, and they don’t know how many more they’ll run before they settle on a permanent replacement.

Myself, I like Pearls Before Swine just fine. Actually, I like them all just fine, but they’re not filling the void left by The Norm. What I liked about the Norm was that it was one of the few comic strips that seemed to be written by and for people of my generation. It was about a guy in his twenties, not too far out of college, learning how to be an adult in the world. He dealt with losing touch with his college friends, making new friends, dating, marriage, friends divorcing, job stress, layoffs, and, most recently, finding out that he’s going to be a dad—just life stuff, really, but the perspective that the strip took was one that I could relate to. I know that “Blondie,” for example, deals with job stress too, but the loud-blustery-Scrooge-of-a-boss-who-catches-Dagwood-napping-and-starts-yelling routine is more played than Dark Side of the Moon.

It’s only funny if you can relate to it, and that’s just not how I look at the world. I mean, really—can’t Dagwood’s boss at least bust him for surfing the internet at work? Throw me a bone here. I don’t ask for a lot.

I’ve been scouting around for a similarly written strip about life in your twenties and thirties, preferably not authored by someone in their sixties or seventies (or, worse yet, for fuck’s sake, some second-generation ghostwriter whose lifelong crusade is to preserve the artistic integrity of chucklefests like Hi & Lois), and I’ve discovered that this is harder than I thought it would be. I’d love to be able to recommend that the STrib try to find a strip that might please a similar market, but the best I’ve been able to do is Ted Dawson’s Spooner… which he’s also stopped drawing. It’s enough to make me shrug my shoulders and resign myself to watching Rat pick on Pig every morning, because apparently that’s what the people want.

So now you’re saying, “Omega, if you think there’s a void in the market, why not try to fill it yourself?” I hear ya cluckin’, big chicken, and I’m way ahead of you. Here in this very space on this very day, I’m proud to present the debut strip of “The Adventures of Omega,” appearing just below this post. I’m confident that Universal Features will have picked it up within days, so look for it in your local paper soon. What do you think?

2005-01-20T11:24:00.000-06:00

The Adventures of Omega

Penance

2005-01-18T13:33:00.000-06:00

I know I’ve been terrible about updating. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima you know what? Bite me. I could have put in one of those “twenty questions” email survey dealies as filler, but I have more respect for you than that!

Yeah, OK, so I’ve been really busy, and all that ranting is just a defense mechanism. No kidding, though, I actually have been experiencing feelings of guilt that are typically reserved for other failed obligations like laundry and calling my grandmother. As a peace offering to my faithful readership, therefore, allow me to present:

Omega’s Diner Daily Special: Seven Entries in Seven Days!

Yes, that’s right: for the next week, I’ll be adding one new entry per day (and no, this one doesn’t count). It’s a fire sale on my inner musings, people, and everything must go, and this is in addition to anything I contribute over on the Minneapolis Metroblog. If you’re not terrified of the prospect of so much insight into me, then stick around for my thoughts on the following:

Rice and Beans
Comics Fix
Why did I start a blog?
Househunters, part 2
Christmas Gift Roundup
Spawn of Gamblers
When I Entertain

We’ll see if I can hold myself to an assignment. Rice and Beans appears below. Thanks for reading!

Omega

Rice and Beans

2005-01-18T13:26:00.000-06:00

It’s not entirely accurate to say that I don’t like sandwiches, but I definitely can’t eat them for lunch every day. A sandwich doesn’t seem like a meal to me; it’s cold, it’s mostly starch, and since I’m not a huge fan of any standard sandwich condiment, it’s pretty bland. I can stomach one about once a month, and even then, I tend to go with tuna rather than Sliced Compressed Meatwad.

In order to feel satisfied at midday, I need a hot dinner-esque meal in a smaller portion. I work downtown, so buying lunch every day is ruinously expensive—just a bowl of soup and a drink can run me $7. Plus, eating Taco John’s and sketchy China Buffet for lunch every day produces certain gastrointestinal effects that had Glen threatening to move out of the bedroom. So the upshot is that packing my lunch became mandatory.

The obvious choice is dinner leftovers, but we actually have the art of cooking for two pretty much down pat and rarely have enough leftovers to make a worthwhile lunch. Also, when we do have leftovers, we typically stash them in the fridge until the end of the week. Then we come home on Friday and just raid the fridge for dinner, which enables us to throw down our end-of-the-week unwinding beverages at a suitable pace without distraction. I’d hate to lose that beloved family tradition.

So I’ve solved the dilemma by devoting most Sunday nights to cooking up a big batch of something, portioning it out into five lunch-sized containers, throwing them into the fridge and just grabbing one on my way out the door each day. The Sunday night kitchenfest is a pain, but it’s worth it to pretty much forget about it for the rest of the week.

My major problem is that I’ve come to rely so heavily on one foolproof recipe. I can make it in my sleep because I’ve practiced it so much, and it’s tasty, cheap, filling, and healthy. I’m just getting kind of sick of it, but it works so well that I’m too lazy to think of another lunch food.

Here’s the recipe (which is, incidentally, vegan!) for rice and beans:

Rice and Beans
Rice:
Prepare 1 cup (pre-cooking measurement) of brown rice (no instant, please) according to the instructions on the package. Substitute whatever water is called for with an equal amount of low-sodium vegetable broth; the flavor is much better. I also like to mix in about a teaspoon of olive oil and a pinch of salt while the rice is cooking. Set aside.

Beans:
Mince about half a medium-sized onion. Sauté for 2-3 minutes over medium high heat in 2 Tablespoons olive oil until the onion starts to turn transluscent.
Add one diced green pepper and 2-3 diced celery ribs, and sprinkle with a pinch of salt. Sauté for 5 more minutes or until vegetables are cooked.
Pour in one can of beans of your choice, including the liquid. Turn down the heat to medium. Simmer until the beans are thoroughly heated through and starting to pop out of their skins.
Add 1-2 Tablespoons canned tomato sauce to thicken the bean mixture and give it a nice color.
Season liberally (taste to adjust seasonings, but remember that brown rice is bland and soaks up a lot of flavor – I like a tablespoon of seasoning blend, minimum) with the seasoning blend of your choice.

Divide rice into four or five lunch-sized bowls and pour the bean mixture over the rice. Refrigerate overnight—the rice will soak up the excess liquid. When you are ready to eat, heat in the microwave for about a minute, stir it thoroughly, and then heat for another minute.

I’ve had good luck with red beans and a Cajun seasoning blend, and I’ve had pretty good luck with black beans and a Mexican seasoning blend as well. Less successful: white or fava beans with a blend of Italian seasonings and garlic. I’d like to try lentils with curry but can’t seem to find a good recipe.

Like I said, it’s good, cheap, filling, and not too bad for you. I’m still open to suggestions, though, if anyone knows any other easily mass-produced hot lunches that will keep well for a work week in my fridge.

Problem Patient

2005-01-07T10:49:00.000-06:00

My New Year’s present to myself this year was a nasty drippy cold. I spent New Year’s Eve trying to get drunk and play cards with Glen, JB, and Scrapper while cramming handfuls of Day-Quil into my mouth like roasted peanuts and wiping my nose with 3-ply Kleenex, which, judging by the way my nose looked at the end of the night, may as well have been sandpaper. One bright spot in the whole mess was Zicam nasal spray, which, while extraordinarily unpleasant to use (its primary immediate effect is to make me sneeze – awesome!), actually worked as advertised and shortened the cold considerably. The actual duration of the Creeping Crap was six days, with a day on each end of “Hey, I think I’m getting sick/better.” That’s pretty good for me.

Smack in the middle of the cold, though, I trooped over to my OB/GYN for a blood test. This women’s health practice is conveniently located right near my office, and they’re generally great, aside from an unfortunate tendency to get a little trigger-happy with the old arm-sticker. At my last checkup, though, the CNP I’ve seen on my last few appointments flipped open my chart and gave me a disapproving sneer.

“You’ve gained weight this past year,” she said. “How do you account for that?”

How do I account for it? I mean, I’m aware that I’m working on a little bit of a weight problem these days, but it’s not like I’m planning to claim the extra fat as a dependant on my tax return this year. How on earth am I supposed to answer that question?

I didn’t have time to ponder my options, so I followed my instinct and went with “quiet despair/calculated guilt trip,” to wit: “Well, I don’t really know. I’ve cut refined sugars out of my diet. I exercise almost every day. Almost all of my relatives struggle with their weight. It’s not easy.”

She nodded and moved on. But later that week, I got a call from her suggesting that I come in for a blood test to check whether my thyroid is working properly—apparently one of the primary symptoms of hypothyroidism is weight gain.

I was kind of shocked. I mean, here I had spent all this time and energy getting myself into a mental place where I was admitting that I had created this health condition by not taking good care of myself, and then all of a sudden it might not be my fault? I didn’t really know what to do with that.

I was also plenty freaked out, since I’m a giant baby when it comes to being sick. Without knowing anything about hypothyroidism (or, indeed, whether I suffer from it at all), I was thoroughly convinced that it was going to kill me. I started researching the disease so I could self-diagnose and achieve a proper level of hysteria prior to the blood test, and I found a fairly comprehensive overview at the Mayo Clinic website. This didn’t really serve to clarify things for me, though. Among the symptoms listed: “pale, dry skin” (I live in Minnesota, for Christ’s sweet sake), “a hoarse voice” (well, maybe on Sundays after Vikings games, but how are they going to know whom to hit if I don’t tell them?), and “fatigue and sluggishness” (zzzz… huh?).

Surprisingly not on the list: “failure to floss as often as recommended,” “tendency to eat cereal for breakfast,” and “breathing patterns involving the inhalation of oxygen and the exhalation of carbon dioxide.” Thanks, Mayo Clinic!

Actually, the boys in Rochester did hook me up once I got done being a wiseass. It was here that I also learned that hypothyroidism is fairly non-debilitating and is relatively easily controlled with medication. And I have to admit, the idea of my frustrating and stubborn weight gain as the side effect of a medical condition wasn’t without its appeal. Still, I’d always rather be healthy than sick. So I waited through the holidays for my blood test.

They drew my blood earlier this week, and I got the results yesterday: my thyroid is perfectly normal. Absolutely great news. It was my CNP who called to tell me, and when she gave me the results, I thanked her sincerely and with tremendous relief. It would have been nice to end the call there.

“Yes, I just thought I’d check,” she went on, “because lots of women have trouble with their thyroids and it can be sneaky at first, until the symptoms show up.”

Again, with great sincerity, I thanked her for her thoroughness.

“So,” she concluded, “I guess you can’t blame the weight gain on that.”

That tore it. As I’ve said before, I like this practice very much. They’re conveniently located and very empathetic to the unique health concerns of women—all of the OB/GYNs, CNPs, and administrative staff are female. I don’t want to change, and I really don’t want to get an Elaine Benes-style reputation as a “bad patient.”

But.

Weight is a complicated issue for a lot of people, tied up in emotional associations that go a lot deeper than “just get off your ass and stop eating.” With that in mind, if there is one single person with whom I should be able to have a serious, measured, nonjudgmental conversation about my weight, it is my goddamn health care provider. The sneering, condescending, pejorative attitude she takes toward me (and, most likely, other patients) is absolutely no way to build the awareness and confidence necessary to effect major positive change. It builds shame, fear, and self-hatred. It doesn’t take someone with advanced medical training to know that shame, fear, and self-hatred play a major role in weight gain—all the more reason why she, who does have advanced medical training, should tread more carefully. She was irresponsible and insensitive and had made me feel too small and afraid to discuss health issues in a doctor’s office. Enough.

Imagine the above, only much less concise and with more rambling, and delivered in an angry whisper because I was speaking from my office, and you’ll have basically the breed of flea that I stuck in her ear on that phone call. She apologized and said she would be more sensitive. And then, I haven’t the slightest doubt, she hung up and rolled her eyes and thought to herself that I was a crazy fat chick.

I haven’t been back to the doctor since, and I think that when I do go I’ll request to see somebody else. It’s motivational, in a way—it makes me want to get myself into shape to disprove all the implicit judgments that she’s made about me.

But keep in mind that when I hung up the phone, I still had a really shitty cold. I ask you, where’s the justice in that?

Nothing to say but lots to think about

2004-12-22T14:28:00.000-06:00

What’s on my mind today?

1. The work shitstorm that I can’t go into here.

2. The health issue that I’m not ready to talk about yet (although, knock on wood, I’m still fine no matter what happens, which, I’m very grateful for).

3. Equal parts excitement and dread about the holidays, specifically seeing my family, which I don’t want to write about because it’s not smart to piss off the people whose house you plan to stay at and whose food you plan to consume in large amounts for the next four days.

4. Killer PMS, which I don’t think y’all want to read about.

5. Love, gratitude, and other general smooshy feelings toward Glen, who’s been unwittingly thrust into the position of Basket Case Wrangler for a few weeks now and has risen to the occasion so admirably as to deserve a solid week of hot monkey love, which he won’t get for a while (see #4). I can’t inflict any more “Dear Glen, I love you, sorry I’m such a freak” on any of the two or three fine people who read this journal. You deserve better.

I think a lot of people are feeling crazy and burned out right now, so hopefully it’s reassuring to you to know that a total stranger on the internet feels the same way. Hey, have you played Drunk Santa yet? It always makes me feel better.

God Bless Us Every Bleeeeaaaaaarrrrrgh

2004-12-20T16:24:00.000-06:00

Merry almost-Christmas from Omega's Diner! Now why not go play some Drunk Santa? It's a holiday tradition at the Glen/Omega house.

My Happy Pants

2004-12-17T11:50:00.000-06:00

(There, if that doesn’t bring the Google searchers, nothing will.)

I am overweight. This isn’t a weight-loss diary, and I won’t get into the specifics of how much I weigh and my BMI and the circumference of my left thigh and whatnot. Suffice it to say that it’s not a drastic weight loss that needs to take place; in fact, I think that my overall height and weight would look just fine on a lot of people. It simply doesn’t work on me. I’m a small-framed girl and I can easily span my wrists with my thumb and index finger. The extra weight looks wrong on me because it is wrong on me.

More to the point, I know what my life has been for the past few years: beer and potato chips add calories at a much faster rate than yelling at the TV and reading true crime novels burn them. I don’t enjoy physical activity; never have. I enjoy food, particularly many, many bad foods, on so many levels—reading about, watching on the Food Network, coming up with ideas for, experimenting with, preparing, serving, and oh yes eating; always have. I was borderline diabetic at birth and Type II diabetes in general runs rampant in my family. I know I’m out of shape. I know I’m not healthy. I know it needs to stop.

So I’m trying. Holy hell, am I ever trying. I finally faced up to the fact that I will never voluntarily get up off my perfectly good couch and go out into the rectum-chapping cold or crotch-sweat-cultivating heat and humidity that represent Minnesota’s climate eleven months out of the year and go slog through any sort of physical drudgery that takes up valuable sitting-around time. I’ll mean to do it, but I won’t. So I dragged Glen to The Sharper Image and we bought one of these, and we set it up in front of the TV and I hit it for two to two and a half hours a week. I’ve also dramatically cut down the amount of refined sugars in my diet, to the point where even my sweet, sweet lover Dr. Pepper is no longer quite the temptation he once was because mouthfuls #2-#50 just taste like corn syrup to me now.

I’m not doing any sort of regular weigh-in schedule, and with this being the holidays, my adherence to the regimen (such as it is) has been pretty haphazard. I don’t see much progress and I get discouraged a lot. “Discouraged,” though, looks pretty good when held up against the utter fucking despair I spent most of the summer steeped in, and which I’m thinking a lot about today.

Shopping for summer clothes this year was incredibly unpleasant, accompanied as it was by the realization that my body had burst out of 99% of the women’s clothes on the market while I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t even that the clothes were too small, at least not entirely. It was almost as if I were trying to make my body fit into clothes made for men, or maternity clothes, in that the garments were actually wrong for me. The actual contours, the landscape, the whole construction of my body had changed. I was no longer built—no longer shaped—like a person of average size.

I’ve dealt with going up a size before, and I’ve swallowed my pride, and yes it sucked and hurt and made me question my self-worth and self-discipline and all that. But to me, this represented a crossing over to another side, another realm—through my own little bad habits, through everyday actions, through Taco Bell and rum and ennui, I had wrought a fundamental change on my body. This was, pardon the pun, enormous.

So I had to venture into Lane Bryant for my summer clothes. I like Lane Bryant; I think they do wonderful work. They recognize that women come in a variety of shapes, and that women who happen to be built on a larger scale still like to look stylish. They don’t sell the Hate-Yourself Tent Dress and the You Deserve to Look Ridiculous, You Fat Cow Muumuu. They sell khakis and silk skirts and button-down blouses and sweaters and other things that women—any women, all women—like to wear. I needed clothes; Lane Bryant had them. I appreciate that more than I can say.

But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t jarring for me. Here I was in a place I never thought I’d be, a place where I didn’t really have a right to be. I had to face the fact that I wasn’t shopping here for the body I’d been born with—I was shopping here for the body I’d created. Shopping here because of what I had done to myself. I had gone up six sizes in four years and had managed to push the implications out of my mind. It took a slap-in-the-face rejection from the Gap and Ann Taylor to make me realize how bad this truly was.

So I spent the summer preparing, crying, starting, failing, saying goodbye to a lot of what I loved about my life and realizing what it meant that eating and sitting around were a lot of what I loved about my life. And then I started trying to fix it.

And one day, about a month ago, my favorite pair of Gap jeans fit me again.

Yeah, they were tight. A small roll peeked out over the waistband, and the fabric of the thighs and butt was protesting visibly. But they weren’t rejecting my body like some foreign object. They said “almost there” instead of “hell, no.”

I’m wearing them today and the tightness and the waist roll are visibly reduced. They almost fit again, they really do. For the first time in a long time, I really feel like I can fix the body I broke. For that, with my happy pants on, I can live with “occasionally discouraged.”

Special Non-Crappy Holiday Edition of Omega’s Diner

2004-12-14T11:31:00.000-06:00

Wait, maybe I shouldn’t build it up like that—now there’s no chance it can live up to the hype. Oh well. At least I’m feeling better, if we stretch the definition of “better” to include “functional.”

I’m having some trouble thinking about what to write today because Christmas is coming up, and as I mentioned to Kim recently, I am a huge Christmas dork who totally gets all fired up about everybody’s gift. I finished my shopping over the weekend in between bouts of not feeling so good, and all I can think about now is the pile of happy presents sitting in our spare room waiting to be wrapped. The presents are exceptionally good this year, and I want to brag about them, but I don’t want to give away any surprises since the vast majority of my readership is related to me.

BUT THEY ARE SOOOOOO GOOD! Especially Glen’s gift, which is super awesome, and which he’s going to love, and which I’m not going to say any more about because he is totally trolling this page looking for hints.

Christmas shopping has always been one of my most favorite things in life, right up there with smooching, salt and vinegar potato chips, and yelling at reality TV. But the older I get, the less tolerant I am of crowds and loud noises, and nowhere are those more prevalent than at the Behemoth Orgiastic Retail Festival of This Is Why The Rest Of The World Hates America, which I still can’t quite believe is one of my neighborhood malls. Glen and I make at least one trip there every year to put a sizeable dent in our Christmas shopping, and I look forward to it because it’s festive and fun and allows me the sense of accomplishment that comes with knocking off 60% of our list in one day.

This year, we hit the BORF on the weekend before Thanksgiving, figuring that we’d beat most of the holiday shopping crowds. Our first mistake was venturing anywhere near the BORF on a weekend, because they are almost always staging some trashy tweener event like a Lindsay Lohan autograph session or the regional X-Box competition semifinals or the Little Miss Diva Models International Search For the Next Tarted-up 13-Year-Old Who is Already Dead Inside, and it always requires shrieky music and thudding bass and a loud master of ceremonies who was actually too self-consciously needy to get past the first round of the MTV “I wanna be a veejay” contest, and if you think reading this sentence has made you want to go pound your head against the nearest cool, refreshing, quiet brick wall, then you should try actually being there.

Anyway, we’ve been so successful in avoiding this phenomenon for the last three years that we temporarily forgot it existed and figured we’d sneak in and breeze through our shopping. At the BORF. On a Saturday. Excuse me, I can hardly type through my bitter, hysterical laughter.

So we got to the mall and discovered that “Mall of America” was quite literally correct on this day, because the entire population of America had the same idea we did. The passageways between stores were clogged with large-framed people wearing puffy coats, pushing strollers, stopping to chat, window shopping, getting lost, taking in their surroundings with expressions of childlike wonder, and in some cases, I’m guessing, wearing cement shoes, because there is no other earthly explanation for why they would be walking so fucking incredibly slowly. Any slower, and they would have been traveling backwards. Through time.

We inched our way painfully to the first store after the entrance, a Barnes & Noble, and purchased the novel that my book club read this month. Glen, who usually freaks out when anybody invades his space, was quite calm and cheerful. It’s possible he was lulled into a Zen-like state by the regular, soothing sounds of my hyperventilating, or it’s possible that he looked calmer to me than he actually was because my field of vision had shrunk to the diameter of a dime.

We stepped back into the mall—having accomplished exactly none of our holiday shopping yet—and Glen turned to me all chipper and said, “So! Where do you want to go next?”

You can see, after a crack like that, where my only viable response was to burst into tears.

“Wah go HOOOOOME crowded noisy so loud PLEASE pushing me can’t think PRESENTS WAAAAAAAAAAH…”

Glen’s face looked like Harrison Ford’s in Temple of Doom when Indy realizes that he’s trapped on the rope bridge.

Gamely, though, he joined the ranks of adults shepherding crying youngsters out the doors of the mall and back to their cars. OK, so the age differential in most of the other cases was greater than two years. I had no shame. I was too busy sniffling.

“So sorry… (sssssnnnuuuuuurrrrrrf)… I don’t know what happened… (zzznnnnnkkkkkkxxxxx)… I just couldn’t take it…”

We talked about it later, without the snot and tears, and I still don’t really know why I just snapped like that. It seems like too simple an explanation just to say that I’m losing my tolerance for crowds as I get older—my reaction seemed more extreme than that. But it wasn’t fear, exactly, either, so much as an overwhelming urge to just get away. Anyway, after being such a trooper, Glen definitely deserves an awesome Christmas present. Which is, in fact, what I got him! Online.

Saturday Night

2004-12-11T20:03:00.000-06:00

Sitting: On the couch, wearing a blanket

Eating/Drinking: Saltines/water

Reading: True crime

Feeling: Like crap on a stick

While I'm out of commission, you should be reading: These chicks, who are fucking awesomely funny.

Or, you know, go out. It's Saturday.

The Name’s Omega, Mr. Smith

2004-12-10T15:08:00.000-06:00

And she used to fall down a lot
That girl was always falling
Again and again
And I used to sometimes try to catch her
But never even caught her name

--The Cure, “Catch”

So, I’m clumsy, and my clumsiness goes well beyond the occasional assault on an innocent piece of fruit. The easiest way to tell that I’m tired, for example, is to watch for me to begin overestimating the size of doorways. “Well, I’ll see ya later!” *turn* step step step THWACK right into the molding like I’d planned it that way.

The klutz factor also rears its head whenever I undertake delicate handiwork. The last time my mom came into town, she and I went to one of those places where you paint pre-made pottery. My mom was an art major in college and turned out a piece that you’d expect to see for sale in the Smithsonian catalog. I decided I wanted to paint stripes on a sugar bowl, so I carefully taped them off with masking tape and painstakingly dabbed on the glaze, waiting for each coat to dry thoroughly before the next one so it wouldn’t smudge. After viewing the finished product, I now realize that I could have achieved the same effect by skipping the tape altogether and just throwing back six shots of tequila before starting, then blindfolding myself and using a live squirrel to apply the paint, but my mom isn’t from around here and somebody had to drive us home. It’s really humiliating, though, to hear your mom say “That looks greeeeeeeat, honey!” in the same tone of voice she used to use to praise your finger paintings when you were six.

As a card-carrying klutz I can drop, break, and spill with the best of them, but my undeniable specialty is tumbling spectacularly to the ground without warning. I have a terrible sense of balance, which doesn’t help, particularly since I’m married to an avid skier who might like to get my sorry ass off the bunny hill one of these days. The major problem, however, is my ankles, which are built on some sort of trick construction platform that makes them collapse like Jenga at the slightest provocation.

It’s not that unusual to sprain your ankle during gym class, or falling down the stairs, or trying to walk home after a kegger, right? But how about during the archery unit of gym class, or “falling” from the second stair to the first, or walking home from a kegger sober? All these and more have brought about ankle sprains, one bad enough for a walking cast, at the rate of about one per year since I turned sixteen. So you’d think I’d have been prepared for when I totally racked myself in front of every single employee of my 700-person company, wouldn’t you? But there’s no way to prepare yourself for that, short of wearing a t-shirt that reads, “Caution: big doofus! Likely to fall down and look silly!” And my company has a dress code.

Four times a year, my entire company gathers at our local convention center to hear a report from the higher-ups on how we’ve done that quarter and what our goals are for the coming months. It’s a nice thing they do, trying to keep all of us up to speed, but the spotlight is obviously on the higher-ups, not peons like myself. Anyway, I made the mistake of sitting in the extreme front row right opposite the speaker’s podium at our last meeting a few weeks ago, and about midway through the president’s speech, I had to leave to fix an errant contact lens. I slipped out of my chair and paraded up the aisle toward the exit with stealth and subtlety such as I hadn’t exhibited since my wedding day (but with the added benefit of lasting considerably longer, since I didn’t get married in a convention center).

Thoroughly embarrassed (or so I thought), I opted not to repeat the hey-look-at-me performance when I returned to get back to my original seat. Instead, I parked myself at the far back of the auditorium for the remainder of the presentation, which left me first in line when it came time for to head for the exits.

So I walked out the door and into the atrium of the convention center with literally every single one of my colleagues behind me, watching. The atrium floor wasn’t wet, I was wearing sensible shoes, I walked at a moderate pace, nobody shoved me or anything, but nevertheless, all of a sudden…

Jenga!

My left ankle caved in like a toothpick would if you stood it on its end and then dropped a brick on it. It was as if every muscle, ligament, bone, and tendon in Ankle Local #157 went on strike simultaneously. (“The walking! We hate! We won’t support your weight!”) And smack, I fell over sideways and hit the marble floor like a wrecking-balled building, if we imagine that the building were wearing a skirt and gave everybody a nice flash of underwear on its way down. And now? Now I was thoroughly embarrassed.

It was quickly apparent that nobody in my viewing audience knew what to do, because I popped right back up and limped along looking only mildly injured but hideously embarrassed. They settled for pretending that it hadn’t happened, which was definitely my preference, but it won’t ever be forgotten. In a company this size, a lot of us only know each other by sight, and the sight associated with me will be a difficult one to displace.

So, it became apparent that it was sprained again, and I went home and propped it up on the couch and swallowed ibuprofen and didn’t cook or do dishes or hit my elliptical runner and told the whole story to Glen, who only laughed a little bit because he’s a really nice guy. And then I wrote this account, which has prompted me to toy with the idea of renaming this blog “The Pathetic Adventures of Omega, Who Falls Down and Hurts Herself All the Damn Time,” because believe me, I would have plenty to write about.

*************

On a totally unrelated note, shout-out to whoever ran a Google search on “omega’s diner” and ended up here. I have tasted the elixir of fame, and it is indeed sweet. Oh, and if you were looking for an actual restaurant: sorry, dude.

I'm a Winner!

2004-12-07T13:50:00.000-06:00

My office plays email bingo about every two or three weeks--you buy a bingo card for $1, then the bingo administrator (not her technical title) emails bingo numbers to all the participants once every hour or so until somebody wins. That person takes the cash prize formed by everybody's $1 entry fee. It's well-run in that it takes a while and is fun, but it's not well-run in that I never fucking win.

I always come within an insultingly tiny margin of victory, too. It will get to the point where I'm working on so many potential bingos that literally any one of my remaining spaces will make me a winner, and then somebody else always wins. Always a bridesmaid, never a bingo.

Until today.

In addition to my $16 pot ($1 of which was entirely in dimes--somebody is so hooked on the bingo that they cleaned out their emergency vending machine stash), I got the thrill of treating my co-workers to a victory dance that they will not soon forget, as well as a "special bonus prize."

The special bonus prize? A Lucky Dab^TM Bingo Marker! It's basically a really tall combination of inkpad and stamp that allows you to "dab" a circle onto your bingo numbers instead of using your lame-o pink highlighter to draw a circle around the number like the proletariat do.

My Lucky Dab^TM is awesome in its own right, but the most awesome thing about it is that the label is in both English and French. So, if anyone's curious: the French word for "bingo"? Is bingo.

This is the happiest day of my life.

Broke-Ass Twit and Proud of It

2004-12-03T15:12:00.000-06:00

The Star Tribune has recently added a feature called Pay Dirt (free registration may be required), which is a column that appears every Friday in the Business section and is dedicated to money matters affecting people in their twenties and thirties.

It's a great idea, in theory. There's a market out there for realistic financial advice for people like me who know that they should be investing in a 401(k) and a Roth IRA and building equity and whatever else the financially responsible types do for kicks, but whose portfolios, to borrow from Aaron Sorkin in his better days, are mostly tied up in food and shelter. Retirement is a long way off, and if it's a choice between pitching a few extra dollars into my They Will Have Taken Away Medicare By The Time I'm 65 fund or springing for a round of beers at the Rock Bottom Brewery, well… have I mentioned that beer is tasty?

But I would like to own a house and have children someday, and it's my understanding that these things cost money, sometimes more than you're able to lay your hands on the morning that you wake up and decide that today's the day you're going to acquire them. So, I was very much looking forward to Pay Dirt—it's not that I don't want to save, or agree that I should save. It's that conventional financial planning strategies don't make a lot of sense in my day-to-day life, and I'd love to hear some that do.

So I open up the first Pay Dirt three weeks or so ago, and the article starts off like it was written just for me. Every sentence might as well have ended with "and this means you, Omega!" It was pretty much a clever restatement of what I wrote above—that it's hard to get motivated to save when you're young, particularly when there are things that you want and need to buy immediately. This is great! I thought. I can't wait to read all the awesome, sensible tips for getting a grip on my financial future!

Well, here's the unbelievably profound advice. Are you ready? Hang onto your socks:

Saving is hard. But you should do it anyway.

I mean, they dress it up, but that's the gist. Which is awesome! I should do it ANYWAY! Thank you, Pay Dirt! What's the matter, the STrib wouldn't let you name the column No Shit?

So after that, I kicked Pay Dirt to the curb. Glen still reads it and points out the highlights, though, and it sounds like it's just getting worse. Last week's column was a finger-pointy scoldfest about how you shouldn't spend a lot of money on holiday gifts, followed by innovative suggestions like "buy cheaper gifts" and "handmake gifts if you're crafty." Gee, thanks. The only thing I can conceivably see this waste of space saving me money on is, in a pinch, toilet paper, which brings a whole new meaning to No Shit.

Anyway, Glen glanced at it this morning (topic: paying for your own wedding – did you know that weddings are expensive?), and remarked that he would hate to be this author's friend.

"Why, aside from the ten million obvious reasons?" I asked him.

Glen quoted me the following:

"It took my friends Chris Martin and Patty Herbst months to set the date after their engagement. Why? Money. Approaching 30, they're responsible for footing most of the bill. And since they wanted to start their marriage on the right financial track, they postponed the big day and have been saving ever since.

Or have they? I remember when Patty came over driving a shiny new Jeep Liberty. Then there's the almost-constant stream of new music booming through their recently purchased house. I shouldn't complain. The Franz Ferdinand CD is really good. But this made me wonder how they were affording their celebration on top of all these purchases. Truth is, they weren't."

I read the whole article at work later, and it truly does get worse—it seems her friends have decided to pay for the wedding by taking out a home equity loan, and rather than just taking them out back and shooting them, she's decided to lambaste them in print:

"But home equity is not free money. You do have to pay it back, with interest. Plus this strategy takes financial discipline that, frankly, my friends have yet to demonstrate."

Can you imagine this poor couple reading this today? If a friend of yours asked if she could feature you in a newspaper article about smart money management for young up-and-comers, you'd be all atwitter with your newfound fame, bursting with altruistic pride at the opportunity to share your penny-pinching strategies with your contemporaries. Then you open up the paper on the big day to find out that the entire Twin Cities metro area now knows you as Mr. and Mrs. Irresponsible Broke-Ass Twit. What if you have to go to the grocery store that day? "Chris Martin? Chris Martin from the Star Tribune? Uh, no, I don't think we'll be taking that check from you. Why don't you go home and eat your Franz Ferdinand CD? Broke-ass twit."

I don't know where they found this woman or how they decided that her smug judgypants pandering would somehow be helpful to young professionals who are honestly trying to figure out how to manage money. Most of us have only been on our own for a few years, and most of us are still working in jobs closer to the entry level. We're learning new things every day about how much it costs just to exist in the world—expenses that never even entered our minds before. And yet, we're drawing regular paychecks and have credit cards all of a sudden—we can buy pool tables and furniture and cars, because people will actually sell us these things instead of laughing us out of the store or asking if our parents are home. We feel suddenly rich and poor at the same time. And, as if we didn't have enough to manage and learn and deal with in the present, we need to prepare for the very real possibility that our generation will be stuck taking care of itself after retirement. It's scary and freeing and empowering and belittling, all at once. Smirky, condescending sound bites from a younger version of the worst kind of overbearing busybody mother-in-law are, to say the least, of limited usefulness.

Suck it, Pay Dirt lady. Just to piss you off, I'm sinking my entire discretionary income into beer.

Another Entry About Beer and Marriage

2004-11-30T18:09:00.000-06:00

Me: Hey, new beer?

Glen: Yeah, they were giving out free tastes at the liquor store. I bought a sampler pack.

Me: Oooooh, is that a honey brown?

Glen: Yeah.

Me: What’s it like?

Glen: (sips) (thinks) Kind of like a Newcastle, but not as heavy.

Me: Well, it probably tastes like a Newcastle except more like honey. Because Newcastle is a brown ale but not a honey brown. And it’s a honey brown. Which Newcastle isn’t.

Glen: ... yeah.

Me: That was meant to come out smarter.

Glen: Yeah.

Me: I actually said it trying to make you sound stupid.

Glen: (wild uncontrollable laughter)

Me: It didn’t work that way, did it?

Glen: No.

Too Old for This Shit

2004-11-28T11:38:00.000-06:00

It turns out I’m old at 24. Last night, Glen’s sister Scrapper and her husband JB threw what they referred to as a “cabin party,” an institution familiar to them and most of their friends but totally new to me. JB’s family has a cabin in a remote part of Wisconsin, and although it now boasts important homey features like a water heater and a functional kitchen (Mr. and Mrs. B plan to retire there shortly), it really is quite cabin-y. The place basically consists of one large great room with an open kitchen, a bathroom and a master bedroom (with doors) off to one side, and an open loft with a few beds set up in it on the second floor.

The cabin was always the place to rage for JB, Scrapper, and their high school friends. Until recently, it was so dank inside that nobody could really mess it up, and the furnishings were castoffs of the sort that it doesn’t matter if somebody decorates with recycled Jack and Coke. Scrapper and JB are my age, so high school is long gone for them too, but the old gang still reunites at the cabin about once or twice a year. Cabin parties past come up in conversation with Scrapper and JB quite a bit, and although the stories are many, they’re not varied: basically, somebody gets really drunk at the cabin and fucks some shit up. And it’s so funny that we’re all still laughing about it years later.

Since Mr. and Mrs. B’s permanent move to the cabin is imminent, the cabin parties are soon to become a thing of the past. Scrapper and JB don’t live around here anymore, but they are home for Thanksgiving this weekend, so they decided to throw one last cabin party to end all cabin parties and send the institution off properly with a chorus of “Taps” or a 21-gun salute or a massive sustained group projectile vomit or whatever is appropriate in this situation. I don’t know; I’m new, remember? Glen and I were invited to join the fun.

I tore up my fair share of shit in college and even grad school, but I find that as I get more set in my homebody married-lady ways, I prefer to do my raging in small, quiet venues that allow me to collapse into my own comfy bed or a reasonable facsimile and pass out at a reasonable hour. I would so much rather have a few friends over and get trashed playing Apples to Apples than bust through a series of trendy clubs (where I’m forced to confront the reality that I’m not cool) or a sketchy house party (where I’m forced to confront the reality that house parties were never cool). I don’t like crowds, or smoke, or music so loud that you can’t have a conversation, or drunk strangers who think they’re cute or clever or funny. And I really, really, really don’t like it when I’m not able to go to sleep when I want to.

I had envisioned a small intimate gathering at the cabin, but it mushroomed into almost twenty people right away, none of whom I knew except my husband and in-laws. They cranked up the music and spent the night running around screaming and dry-humping each other in front of their respective significant others. All I could think, sitting there watching, was that I couldn’t believe I had ever thought this was fun. And when Glen and I gave up on the party at 2:00 in the damn morning, we blew up our air mattress and tried to sleep over a booming-voiced drunken debate about, of all things, welfare reform, that went on for two solid hours. I kind of wanted to march up to our fellow guest and stun him with a cleverly worded diatribe about where he could stick his Rush Lame-baugh bullshit about “all the bloody-heart liberals” (sic), but more than that, I just wanted to call it a night and get some rest. And even more than that, I wanted to know when I turned into a cranky old bat who complains about these kids today with their loud music and their baggy pants and why can’t they go to bed at a decent hour and by the way my arthritis is killing me.

Some of these people are older than I am. Most of them have jobs. Some of them are even married. I don’t know when I lost my tolerance for raging all night and sacking out in an uncomfortable place over crazy loud party noise just in time to beat the sunrise. I can’t believe I ever did this, and I can’t believe I can’t do it anymore. But the fact remains that my almost equally curmudgeonly 26-year-old husband and I packed up our stuff at 7:00 AM and drove back to Minneapolis so we could crawl into our own comfy, quiet bed and get some much-needed rest before we go back to work tomorrow. Oh, and of course, we have to oil our walkers and polish our orthopedic shoes to be ready for the earlybird special at Denny’s by 4:30 PM.

*****************

It occurs to me that variants of the word “shit” have appeared in the titles of my last two entries. This is pretty representative of how I speak in real life, but for variety’s sake, let’s pretend I’m not too lazy to re-title this entry “I Went to a Cabin Party and All I Got Were These Lousy Fucking Crankypants.”

Tetanus Sh*t

2004-11-23T19:26:00.000-06:00

Dear Ray Lewis,

Why did you punch my left arm? What did I do to you?

Sincerely,
Omega

At my annual checkup yesterday, the RNP opened up my file and said, "I have a note here that you're due for a tetanus shot this year."

This was startling to me. "How often do I need one?"

"Every ten years."

Well, my last one was right before college... yeah, OK. I rolled up my sleeve without further complaint--I trust medical professionals. Bwahahaha.

I'm OK with shots, but I'd forgotten how badly I react to this particular concoction. Within seconds, it felt like I'd caught the business end of number 52's fist. By the end of the day, I couldn't move my arm without wanting to cry, except crying, somehow, hurt my arm. That night, I started running a fever, but I had no idea, because I was huddled under the comforter shivering. I asked Glen to snuggle up for warmth, and he scooted over to my side of the bed and then shot backwards like he'd been set on fire.

"Jesus!" he said. "You're burning up."

"Maybe it's friction from the shivering," I groused, or tried to grouse around my chattering teeth.

He made a sympathetic noise and sprang up for some ibuprofen. I returned his loving care by attempting to spread the misery, which is the only thing that makes me feel better in these situations. "Aren't you due for a tetanus shot too?"

"No," he said serenely. "You only need one every ten years, and I got my last one before I started college."

"Yeah, me too," I replied. "Wait a second..."

Damn right, wait a second... Glen is two years older than I am.

"I started college in 1997... DAMN it! HorseSHIT!"

Glen started laughing.

"They LIED to me! Those BASTARDS!"

I can't believe they tricked me into a tetanus shot using math. I'm not falling for this shit again next time, no sirree. I assume they'll let me know when next time is.

Feeling Thirteen

2004-11-22T11:52:00.000-06:00

There's a great scene in Welcome to the Dollhouse that shows Dawn, a tormented 13-year-old social misfit, complaining to her nerdy and also unpopular older brother Mark about how hard her life is. She asks him if it gets better once junior high is over, and he reassures her that "High school's better than junior high. They'll call you names, but not as much to your face."

You think adulthood is going to be even better than that—you think you'll stop feeling insecure, that you'll stop worrying about where you fit in. You think that everyone's going to grow out of the obsession with status symbols and pecking order and backbiting and gossip, that it won't be a question of finding someone to exclude so that you can be included, somewhere, anywhere. Now that we all have jobs and houses and college degrees, you think, we'll realize how ridiculous all that crap was. We're adults. We know what really matters now.

It's startling to me how easy it is for someone to make me feel like nothing's changed.

A few years ago, I had occasion to meet someone I'll call CoolGirl. CoolGirl is a relatively prominent presence, both in the Twin Cities community (where everyone seems to know everyone), and nationally. She's someone I admire both professionally and personally, and I think that we struck up a decent rapport the first time we met.

CoolGirl is everything a dork like me aspires to: funny, smart, attractive, down-to-earth, and a tremendous success in her chosen field (which is, of course, cool, particularly when stacked up against my job). She also has an entrouage of Cool Friends, a close-knit group of warm, witty, amazing people of the type most of us don't encounter outside of a well-written novel or an unusually smart sitcom.

CoolGirl probably doesn't remember meeting me years ago, but I'm connected to some of the Cool Friends by one or two degrees of separation, and we do continue to run in the same community (at least, in the sense that Kevin Garnett and a Target Center hot dog vendor run in the same community). Plus, like I said, Twin Cities. Seriously, everybody knows everybody. It's not out of the question that I'd at least be on her radar.

Anyway, I ran into CoolGirl over the weekend. I recognized her immediately, and my first instinct was to stand there like an idiot choking on my own awe and not say anything. It was clear she didn't recognize me, and all my ridiculous ingrained 13-year-old instincts were screaming at me that worker bees don't just bust on up and talk to the Queen. Then I told myself I was being ridiculous. We're adults. We know what really matters now. If we see someone we'd like to talk to, we walk up and introduce ourselves.

"Um," I said. Off to a flying start. "I hope this doesn't sound, uh, stalker-ish, but are you CoolGirl?"

CoolGirl hesitated, and I could tell she was really toying with the idea of saying no. "Yes," she replied after a moment.

I gave her my best I'm-not-scary smile. "I'm (my married name). I was (my maiden name) when we met at the (occasion) a few years ago? You probably don't remember." I held out my hand, which she stared at and then shook briefly, and then we waited out the awkward pause.

"Hi…" she finally said.

The look on her face can probably best be described as freaked out, which is pretty understandable, I suppose—it's not every day that a relative stranger purports to remember you from years ago. Still, it's not like I asked for a lock of her hair or a used glass to sell on eBay or add to my shrine or something. We're adults, right? Isn't it normal to strike up a conversation with someone you recognize?

Anyway, this might be the insecurity talking, but it seemed like there was more going on than just freaked-outedness. She looked startled, yes, but she also looked repulsed. Disgusted. Like a prom queen bumping into Martha Dump Truck in the hallway. Even if I knew you, her expression said, there's no way that I'd like you. You're not worthy.

It seems like presumptive rejection like that shouldn't bother me anymore. I don't feel the need to apologize for my life—I have great friends, a good (yeah, not cool, but still good) job, a wonderful family. More to the point, I'm who I am, and one of the best things about adulthood is the security of knowing the person you are and not feeling like your identity is open to criticism every damn moment of every damn day.

But still. I know that look—I saw it plenty when I was thirteen—and CoolGirl is someone I admire. Popular kids hold sway over the prevailing opinions because everyone looks up to them, wants to be like them, wants to feel important and special in their eyes. CoolGirl isn't exactly a hero or a crush or an idol for me, but she's someone I really think is awesome, in the literal "worthy of awe" sense of the word. It's the reason that a reaction like that from her hurts as much as it did. Probably without meaning to, she touched on insecurities that I manage to keep at bay most of the time. You will never be as cool, as admired, as respected as you think I am. No one will ever feel that way about you. You don't deserve it, and you don't deserve to make friendly chit-chat with me.

Anyway, the terse "hi" and the look of disgust made it pretty clear that she wasn't interested in further conversation. I'd love to say that I took my leave of CoolGirl with dignity—something along the lines of, "Well, it was nice seeing you! That's my limo outside, gotta fly!" But I didn't. I was surprised at how crushed I was by her reaction in the moment, and I thought the last thing I should do was bother her further, even if it was to apologize for bothering her in the first place. I settled for assuming a sheepish expression and slinking rapidly off into a corner.

Reading back over this, I find it unbelievably silly that I've invested so much in a thirty-second exchange that CoolGirl has probably already forgotten. Maybe there are people out there who don't ever struggle with these feelings of unworthiness; who don't worry that they'll never be liked; who aren't so sensitive. But I do, and I suppose that's part of who I am too. I need to accept that part of me, as someone who spent too much time apologizing for who I was when I was thirteen. As someone who doesn't do that anymore. As an adult.

We are Househunters

2004-11-18T16:23:00.000-06:00

I hear the stories from my friends. Bomb, Southside, and Warrior, with whom I spend the majority of my day, are all relatively new homeowners, and every Monday it's the same thing. I ask, "How was your weekend? Do anything fun?"

And they reply, "Put down sod/waited for the gas hookup guy/painted my dining room/spent my vacation fund at Home Depot. How about you?"

And I am embarrassed to admit that I rented Stuck on You, got drunk watching it, and spent an entire day sleeping off the hangover and yelling at a Real World marathon.

I would love to own a house. Renting sucks ass, and I say this even though we live in a relatively nice, clean, well-managed rental property in an extremely safe neighborhood that's conveniently located to both our offices and pretty much everywhere else we need to be. It's mostly the common walls that get to me. We once thought we were going to have to call child protective services on our next door neighbor, because it sounded for all the world like he was repeatedly throwing a screaming toddler against the wall, only to stop by and find out that it was a toddler's birthday party (at which the primary form of entertainment was throwing oneself against the wall and screaming).

Not that it's any better when the shoe is on the other foot; most of the building inhabitants still look at me funny after the Vikings' spectacular collapse at the end of last season, to which Glen reacted by throwing himself down on the floor, pounding the floor repeatedly with his head and arms, and yelling "NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OH GOD WHYYYYYYYY?" I think they're pretty sure that either I come home at the end of a hard day and beat the living crap out of him, or that we're into some seriously freaky shit. Oh yeah, and we usually fetch our morning paper in the nude.

(Not to worry, it's delivered right outside our apartment door. It's just that it's usually the first person to shower who gets the paper, and then brings it back into bed for us both to enjoy. We've developed a routine wherein the fetcher peeks out the peephole, ensures the coast is clear, then opens the door quickly, snatches the Star Tribune, shuts the door and scampers back to bed. It's not a popular time to be roaming the halls of the apartment building, but people are occasionally about and we have had a few near misses. There's a deeply paranoid part of me that is quite sure we're referred to as Mr. and Mrs. Naked in the community at large.)

Anyway, I just think that an apartment building means you know far too much about a bunch of people with whom you probably wouldn't otherwise socialize. It's not just that, though. It's the constant maintenance and upkeep, all of which is taking place on somebody else's schedule. They're always doing something at the most inconvenient times: cleaning out the garage when I want to park there, reshingling the roof when I'm trying to sleep in, repairing our cracked window when Glen is on a ski trip and I don't want a hairy semiliterate non-native English speaking man-beast in my bedroom. No, I don't understand your system of points and grunts to mean "help me move your queen-sized bed out of the way." Oh, and also, I don't want to, because the bed is heavy and I'm in my PJs and you're creepy and shut up and go away.

So I'd love for us to get a house, and I really think we'll have one soon. People treat househunting like it's a huge, difficult, mysterious, cumbersome, frustrating process, but I don't know what the big deal is, because I've learned everything I need to know about it from watching Househunters on HGTV. It seems to me that it's more a question of hanging in there through the necessary plot points and commercial breaks, and then at the end, having Suzanne Whang tell everyone that you diligently kept searching for the home of your dreams, and now you and your (probably) cringe-inducingly ugly wardrobe will live peacefully and happily for the rest of your days in your new abode.

Once we meet our realtor, and our realtor expresses slight reservations about our mercilessly high standards ("They're looking for a home with both walls and a roof, in a neighborhood without a resident serial killer or a demonstrated history of getting flattened by a tornado every spring. That's a lot to ask for"), but also confidence in his or her ability to get the job done on our behalf, then we can move on to the first stage of the process, which I like to call Shitbox.

Shitbox is the first house on the tour, and it's a sad, dilapidated little shack located on the extreme outer corner of our neighborhood of choice (the one that backs right up to the county garbage incinerator). The realtor walks through ahead of us with a determined smile, kicking aside the rat-gnawed skeletons of the former owners and making stilted conversation with us about how it's a "fixer-upper." Meanwhile, we're pointing out that it's "a little small," as we notice that you can only cook dinner comfortably by sitting on the toilet and sticking your feet into the guest room closet. The tour concluded, we stand on the front porch as the rest of the house collapses into rubble behind us and tell the realtor that we were hoping for something with "a little more open feel" and "a few more bathrooms" and "windows that haven't been shot out." Realtor says that "we'll keep looking." Shitbox is the only house in our price range.

Now that we've come to terms with what we can afford, it's time to take us to Fugly Town, stage two. Fugly Town is obviously more expensive than Shitbox, but not by much, as the value has been considerably reduced by the family of LSD-abusing achitectural-school dropouts who used the house as a practice workspace before accepting full-time jobs on Trading Spaces. The tour begins in the foyer, where the previous owners have whimsically closed off all apertures aside from the front door, so we and the realtor have to go back outside and enter through the back. We follow the realtor through the house and mutter, "Well, that might need to be changed," as we encounter the deep-pile carpet in the bathroom and the special custom-designed Saran Wrap curtain that serves as the only separation between the master bedroom and the rest of the house. Oh, and the wallpaper; every available surface in Fugly Town has been pre-wallpapered for your convenience. The walls, yes, but also the ceilings, sinks, avocado-green stove, and place in the wall where the crazy-ass former owners punched a hole in the wall after a bad batch of 'shrooms. The "porthole window," they called it. The realtor stands with us on the front porch constructed entirely out of squirrel hides and asks us what we think, and we tell the realtor that we think it's just "not us."

It's time for a commercial now, but our patience will be rewarded when we return! For now we are on to stage three: Casa de TV Ending. CdTVE is gorgeous, spacious, move-in ready, conveniently located, and available for only double our orignal asking price. We'll walk through it with the realtor, pointing at Jacuzzi tubs and hardwood floors and talking about how incredibly fucking awesome this house will be for the huge swanky parties that we never throw because it would seriously cut into our TV and beer-swilling time. At the end, one of us will look at the other with an elaborately quizzical expression and stage-whisper "Do you think we should go for it?" And the other will smile serenely and say very casually, "Yeah, I think so," because this is how we make all our major decisions. The realtor will help us make an offer of triple—did I say double before? I meant triple!—our original budget, and then there will be a tense moment of extreme suspense. Suzanne will remind us that Glen and Omega love this house! Will they get the house? What if they don't get the house? What if they have to move to Shitbox? It's a slippery slope from there to eating their young!

Commercials.

Silly lady! Shitbox is not the third house, so we can't buy it! You can only buy the third house! All we have to do is engage in a wholesome family activity like playing with our dog (or, in our case, playing with the dog we have borrowed or rented so we can engage in wholesome family activities), and one of us will pretend to take a phone call. The conversation will go like this, without pauses: "Hello hi Realtor we got the house? great thanks bye" *click.* "Hey, honey, guess what?"

"I couldn't begin to, oh love of my life."

"We got the house." (With a level of enthusiasm appropriate for "Hey, they gave me a medium Coke instead of a small.")

"Great." (With a level enthusiasm appropriate for response to same.)

Six weeks later, we're all moved in and have purchased some ugly mass-produced matchy-matchy furniture to clutter up our new dwelling, because heaven forfuckingbid that any space should be left open. People might think we can't afford stuff! We'll pay off the credit cards later! All we have to do is give a brief wrap-up interview and stage a few more shots of ourselves engaged in wholesome family activities, and then Suzanne will wrap it all up for anyone who had trouble following the plot.

Again, I ask: why does everyone think this is so hard?

It's a Gift

2004-11-17T15:25:00.000-06:00

"So," I said to my co-workers Bomb and Warrior today as we rode down in the elevator to the coffee shop, "All the relatives on both sides of my family have asked me for a Christmas gift list. They're sending them to me, too, so I guess this is how we're doing it this year. I don't know how I feel about it. Doesn't it seem like cheating, somehow?"

"Yes!" said Warrior. "I know exactly how you feel. Then again, though, we have my mother-in-law… bless her heart, she has terrible taste… and I'm such a shit-ass actor, I can never pretend to like what she gets me… but yeah."

Bomb begged to differ, but then again, Bomb is a big fan of wishlist.com, so I guess I was barking up the wrong tree. Bomb wishes everyone would do it for every holiday, up to and including housewarming gifts and Flag Day.

I should interject here that Warrior is a girl and Bomb is a guy, and it has occurred to me to wonder whether this has something to do with their respective preferences. Women, it seems to me, take a great deal of pride in divining, researching, or remembering the perfect gift. We will hunt around online, find the local craftsman who will customize it, remember that obscure thing you mentioned in March and haul it out at Christmas, all in search of that elusive, irreplicable "Holy crap, this is JUST what I wanted, HOW on EARTH did you EVER come up with something so AWESOME!?" reaction. Yeah, you can try to fake it, or you can genuinely think something is "nice," but you can't really fool us. We know, and we live for the real thing.

Spare me the hate mail I'd receive if anyone were actually reading this—I know men place value in making their loved ones happy too. This blog isn't brought to you by Tim Allen or The Lockhorns or the RNC or whatever. It just seems to me that a lot of men have set out to find the perfect gift once or twice, run smack into the brick wall of their own obvious cluelessness, and given up instead of pressing on. Bomb, who once bought his mother a (totally unsolicited) Ab-Roller for her birthday, was practically drooling at the thought of someone or something taking the guesswork out of presents. "If you want something," he said, "I'll buy it for you. Just tell me what it is. Don't make me guess, and don't make how well I guess an indication of how well I know you." I don't know too many guys who'd object to a universal agreement to this effect, and I do happen to know a lot of women who, like Warrior and I, would feel as if we were cheating, and furthermore, as if we had been cheated.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I do believe that this is linked to gender. To show that I'm not just generalizing wildly in the dark because I enjoy kicking back with a little prejudice now and then, let me tell this story:

Glen and I met in the fall of 2000, and the first major holiday we celebrated together was Christmas. I was in graduate school and almost literally too po' to afford the other o and the r, but I knew exactly what I wanted to get him. Glen loves sweaters and maintains an enviable collection, but his collection at that time was bereft of anything cashmere. I knew how much he'd love it, and it struck me as the perfect blend of thoughtfulness and impersonality to convey a message appropriate for a new relationship ("I have warm and fuzzy feelings for you and have learned a few things about your preferences, but I am unlikely to go through your garbage, kill your pets, or go off the pill without telling you.") I saved my money for weeks, ordered the snuggliest sweater I could find, wrapped it up, and skipped around town fairly bursting with glee at my own brilliance. I could hardly wait to see his face when he opened it.

We got together to exchange gifts shortly before going home to our families, and when he opened his gift, I got the payoff I had been hoping for. At first he thought it was a nice, fancy sweater, and then he touched it, and his face melted into an altogether new expression—sensually gratified, emotionally touched, with a little avarice and more than a little lust thrown in. I have seen it since, but I had never seen it before.

Riding that high, I tore into my gift from him, and as I removed the paper and lifted the box lid and looked at his eager happy-puppy face, I could hardly wait to see my…

… red wool socks.

Oh, red is my favorite color. And the winters where we lived were colder than I was used to. It was actually a very thoughtful gift, and I would have been tremendously grateful if wool didn't give me hives.

Yes, that's right: I'm allergic to wool. (And I live in Minnesota. It's not easy being me.) But hey, how would he know that? It's not a common allergy. It had never come up in conversation. It's the thought that counts. I agree. He was mortified. I thought it was cute.

Fast forward six weeks to my birthday. By consulting your handy calendar, you can see that my birthday is quite close to a certain candy-coated lace-drenched Hallmark holiday, so the pressure was really on poor Glen, particularly after Sockgate. So he brought me my gift, about which he was very, very excited. And, as I sat in pretty much the same place where I had opened my Christmas socks, I tore into it with equal excitement. Same happy-puppy face, larger box—I lifted the lid to find…

… a sweater.

…a wool sweater.

"It's…" I faltered. "Beautiful." It was, actually—a pretty shade of blue, very flattering, very much my style.

"Do you like it?" He was so cute, beaming with pride. I hated to ruin it for him. Maybe I could wear it anyway! He might not notice the giant red welts!

"It's, um… is it wool?"

"Yes!" Then the realization hit him. "Yeeeeeees. Oh. Oh, shit. Oh."

"No, really, it's—"

"It's just that it was so pretty… I wanted you to have it… oh, shit."

I felt horrible. I did feel slightly less horrible when he told me about two weeks ago that he had actually bought it partially because it was pretty, and partially because it was dramatically marked down. Sweatergate cost him $18, which equates roughly to one dollar for each year he'll be taking shit about it.

This is my point, about the guys, and the guessing, and the hating it. I truly do think he'd have preferred it if I just told him, "Look, I want a blue sweater for my birthday. Don't forget I'm allergic to wool. And don't forget the box of chocolates to be enjoyed after the thank-you sex."

OK, just so poor Glen doesn't sound like a total big clueless dork here, I should share the story of two years later, Christmas of 2002:

Glen is allergic to flowers. So I got him flowers for Christmas. The end.

OK, OK, no, not really. Glen is allergic to flowers, though, and as a result he rarely brings them to me, because he can't stand having them in the house. It's something he knows I miss, but I don't mention it much, because I know it's not his fault. We hadn't been living together long by the time Christmas rolled around, only about four months, so it was something I was just starting to get used to.

So for Christmas, Glen took his father's fancy vintage camera down to the Como Park Conservatory in St. Paul and took six wonderfully artistic photos of individual flowers there (actually, five pictures of flowers and one of a bunch of chili peppers growing upside-down, which remains my favorite). Since one little bunch of roses in an apartment can send the poor boy into sneezing fits, imagine what a few hours in a giant glass house full of plant life must have done to him. I forget what cover story he came up with to explain his red eyes and raw throat when he got home, but I would pretty much only have accepted "spent the day smoking weed."

Anyway, he blew them up, developed them, matted and framed them, and signed them. They hang proudly in our house, more beautiful, more thoughtful, and best of all more permanent than any silly bouquet could ever be.

Oh yeah, and later that same night, he proposed.

Thank you, Glen. Best gift ever.

************

Speaking of, mad props and best wishes to my co-worker Southside, who got engaged last week. Yay for love!

Don't drink and blog

2004-11-15T13:27:00.000-06:00

I was definitely half in the bag when I wrote that last entry--I tend to need a little liquid courage to get through an evening of Grand Theft Auto.

I've never been able to play video games. It might have something to do with my overall lack of hand-eye coordination (see last week's entry re: broken banana), or it might be that I've simply never put in the time to acquire the skill, but I just can't seem to connect the controller with what's happening to my hapless little bundle of pixels on the screen. This is particularly true of driving games--I usually veer wildly off course and then overcorrect, like a 15-year-old learning to drive except with people shooting at me. (In the game, of course, not when I was actually 15. I grew up in the suburbs.)

Glen loves video games, though, and right now is completely immersed in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The plots of the GTA games are quite intricate, and back when he was in the throes of GTA: Vice City, I was having dreams about the game toward the end. He'll be on it just about every night after work for about a month, maybe more.

I'm usually just a spectator at video game time, because I don't know or care enough to take a more active role in the process. Sometimes, though, I'm pressed into service, and this is often the case in GTA games when Glen needs directions read aloud to him while he's navigating through the streets of Pretend Major American City. So I end up spouting File This Under N for "Never Thought I'd Have Occasion to Say..." crap like this: "OK, start at the liquor store and go east past the strip club. Take out the two snipers on the overpass and you may as well shoot the homeless guy while you're at it, because this will earn you a few extra dollars. Circle around back of the dollar store and spray paint your name on the wall."

Is it any wonder I need to drink to get through this?

************

Speaking of things I need to drink to get through, I've decided that after this season's The Apprentice I'm breaking up with the Donald. I'm certain that there will be a third season--Mr. Trump doesn't strike me as an adherent to the "Always leave them wanting more" school of celebrity--but I'm just not having as much fun watching it this season as last.

Last season, the show felt really fresh and different. Miss Alli nailed it when she identified Trump's weird, dorky persona as much of the appeal--he's so thoroughly, unabashedly tacky and obnoxious, and much of the time he seems to be insane, but then he would have these occasional moments of breakthrough rationality where he put into words (and such pithy, no-bullshit words!) exactly what the entire viewing audience was thinking. When he fired Omarosa, I cheered out loud.

I think it was more than that, though. So many reality shows seem to be games of chance (which one of these schlubs will be lucky enough to win the prize?) or alleged games of "skill" that don't replicate real-life situations enough to seem anything other than completely contrived. The would-be apprentices, though, get assignments that are recognizeable to virtually any working stiff who lives in America. Sell lemonade? I haven't done that since I was eight! Awesome! Try to entice tourists to spend their hard-earned vacation fund at Planet Hollywood? Well, I wouldn't venture near Planet Hollywood except to save a kidnapped family member's life, so... awesome! Put on a big, tacky, showboat-y giveaway display at Trump's big, tacky, showboat-y bankrupt casino while Donald and the Hair parade through the slot machines literally begging for adoration? Awesome! There's no chance I'll ever make it over to the islands of wherethehellever Survivor is these days and impress people with my Hawaiian sling skills, but there's at least a decent chance that I'll one day need to pander to ridiculous, power-crazed idiots for the sake of my professional future. Hell, I already have. Watching other people do it? Is awesome.

So why isn't this season doing it for me? The tasks haven't changed much, except that they seem to be more of an excuse for product placement (from Trump? Who'da thunk?). As I was discussing with my co-worker Bomb the other day, though, there is one major problem:

I don't care who wins.

Last season, there were likeable personalities. There were personalities, period! I loved Bill instantly because he's from Chicago, where I grew up, but I loved him for more than that too--his barely restrained control-freakishness, his need to make everything perfect, his obvious silent impatience with some of his teammates. I loved Troy's good ol' boy charm, which he purposely laid on waaaaaaay too thick. I loved Kwame's soft-spoken grace and intelligence. Even Omarosa and Heidi made individual impressions on me, albeit negative ones. This season, the best I'm able to scare up is mild annoyance for some, and more intense annoyance toward others. I have trouble keeping track of who everybody is. Wes and Kelly? Have they ever been on screen together? Are we sure they're not the same guy? I'm supposed to root for insipid girly-girl Sandy or smarmy whippersnapper Andy because they irritate me slightly less than some of the others? The only one who really stood out was Raj, because of his self-consciously Dapper Dan wardrobe--I'm supposed to develop strong feelings one way or the other about Red Pants Guy? I own red pants, and he's still boring. Fuck that.

I don't love anyone, and I don't hate anyone. They're all just there. Since I don't believe in just watching TV to watch TV--I try to maintain a select list of shows and turn on the TV only to watch them in particular--and I don't have strong feelings about this show or anyone on it anymore, I'm thinking that the Donald and his interchangeable minions can take a hike.

After this season, of course. Because it's still kind of awesome.

GTA, Bitches!

2004-11-14T00:06:00.000-06:00

So, if anyone wants to know the inside tips on Grand Theft Auto, they should ask me, who helped Glen find every hidden tag in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas tonight. I also helped him on the other missions, e.g. "Honey! That's a cop! Don't shoot that guy!"

Obviously, if anyone wants to know the definition of a good wife? They should also ask me.

On the Menu

2004-11-11T11:26:00.000-06:00

In the process of packing my lunch this morning, I grabbed the two remaining bananas on our kitchen counter to separate them (one for my husband, Glen, and one for me). As I gleefully yanked them apart, one of the peels split and exposed the banana proper.

I couldn't leave the broken banana for Glen--it's only a little bit his fault that he married a klutz--so I wrapped it tightly in aluminum foil and threw it into my lunchbox, next to a foil-wrapped sandwich. I have no idea if this would have worked, by the way, but I don't know a lot about banana preservation once the citadel is breached and figured it was worth a shot.

It didn't end up mattering, because Glen didn't get a chance to pack a lunch this morning, so I asked him to swap out Good Banana for Bad Banana while I finished getting ready. He opened up my lunchbox and came back into the bedroom, wearing his very best Mien of Gentle and Loving Concern. This was the first he had seen of my innovative banana repair solution and the ensuing all foil-wrapped lunchbox contents, and his reaction to my ingenuity was as follows:

"It looks like you thought aliens were trying to mind-control your lunch."

I laughed. But I think the aliens are working on him.

Why Omega's Diner?

2004-11-11T09:18:00.000-06:00

It's actually named after this place, where I used to tear it up after dress rehearsals and performances with the rest of the high school drama troupe. The family who owned it really didn't like us, though--we were loud, we smoked a lot, and we mostly ordered coffee and demanded that the bread basket be refilled--so I figured I'd better change up the name just a little. It would be just like them to track me down and drag my ass to court.

Anyway, I have such fond memories of the surly owners and lukewarm coffee that I christened myself Omega when I made my way onto the internet, and this seemed like a natural extension. It does sometimes occur to me that high school wasn't that recent, so this is venturing into "Glory Days" territory. Eh, what are you gonna do?

I'll need to do the obligatory "About Me" entry one of these days, but I figured I'd start with "About the Name," because the name is actually far more interesting than I am.