topotales

This evening on the way to the climbing gym, again the same conversation when we pass the outdoor tennis courts:

me: I keep telling you, we should play tennis sometime!  I’ll be all Whoosh! [I make flailing arm motions with the right arm], Swish! [flailing arm motions with the left arm]

Paolo: Topo, you don’t change hands in tennis.

me: What?  Why?

Paolo: …

….    ….

[AN AIRPLANE FLIES LOW OVERHEAD]

me:  … oooOhhhh.  Well, whatever, we should play tennis!  I’ll kick your ass!  [flailing arm motions with both arms]

Paolo: [following the flailing arm potential ball trajectories with his eyes] Jesus, I just hope there’s an airline strike that day.

Today my job mostly involved a lot of clickity-clicking up and down the office halls in high heels, full of Righteous Indignation. Also it required a lot of being brave, tracking down important people and saying important things that make sense, and trying to change stuff to make it better.  All this I did and more, using technical manager vocabulary like “improvement opportunity” and ”client satisfaction” in the same sentence.  I find the necessity for this kind of semantic pedantry so annoying that it breaks my English major heart in ways that only Grisham or Crichton could match.  “Business-lingo for Dummies” might do the trick, too.  I mean why can’t we just say “you suck” and “they’re pissed”?

But really, with or without the kind of vocabulary that comes out of a twenty dollar yellow preschool primer, some of the guys I work with would have a hard time making a decision even with a hot poker held to their iris.

So as of four pm I have been seriously contemplating one of the following options for tomorrow:

1. Going out on my lunch hour and coming back with dreadlocks and a full face tattoo.
2. Bringing in a special treat in the form of hash-laced brownies (No, I haven’t gone completely mad- I don’t intend to actually bake.  I live 2 hrs from Amsterdam where I can get store-bought.  God bless Amsterdam.)
3. Pulling down my pants and pooing directly onto my keyboard.
4. All of the above.

I asked for pictures,
thought: life would have been so sweet.
If only we knew.