Men in tights

I keep wondering aloud (read: bitching) why they keep remaking superhero movies every few years. I mean, it used to be that you waited the respectable 15 or 20...now not even 10 have to go by.

And today, after watching Man of Steel, and asking Mr. RK, "When does Thor II come out? How about Wolverine?", I answered my own question.

Because idiots like me want to go see them! Show me a movie with a fit man in tights, and I'll drop $10 and go through a bucket of popcorn. Then, chances are, I'll go buy the action figure.*

I'm just a sheep that way, I guess.

I've always liked superhero stuff. As a little kid, I collected action figures instead of dolls. So I played with The Incredible Hulk, Superman, Batman...etc. Stupidly I didn't save the action figures so I bought them again when I grew up.

You're never too old for toys, you know. (And no, that has nothing to do with movies that may have previously been made in my office...)

*Well, let's say a fit man in tights who wants to save the world from hostile aliens/mutants/etc. Otherwise, we just have Richard Simmons.

Adult films and trampolines, all in my office

No, I'm not making it up.

All hell has broken loose, maintenance-wise, in our office (read: we're a nonprofit, it's cheap rent, and you get what you pay for.) This has resulted in several visits from the maintenance man, who has managed to fuck up the plumbing more on each successive occasion.

However, his visit did result in this conversation:

Me: "So are you guys going to get rid of the old paint and stuff the previous tenants left behind (two + years ago?"
Him: "You know the previous tenant got kicked out for making adult films here?"
Me: "WAT!"
Him: "But they aren't as crazy as the people upstairs. They have a trampoline that they jump on, up on the roof."

I've known him for a couple of years, and all of our previous conversations have consisted of things such as, "Hi, how are you?" I have to say, that is a rather clever way not to answer if you are going to clean up.

And now I find out that we, in the mental health agency and the bulk of us with diagnoses, are the "normal" tenants in the building.

But it does leave me to wonder: in what part of the office did they make the films?

Too bad that conversation wasn't over the phone.

About that time with the sheep...

Like many of you (I hope), I am not surprised, but mad as hell that this administration, in a move undistinguished from the last one, feels the need to spy on tens of millions of us.

Don't tell me this is to prevent terrorism. Tens of millions of peoples' calls need to be monitored? Really? Tens of millions of us are a threat?

This is so fucking big brother it's right out of an unwritten Orwellian novel.

Anyhow, like so many other things, I can't fix it, so I have to come up with something funny.
So although my first thought on reading about this program (the existence of which was previously denied) was, "What the fuck!" my second one was, "I need to start coming up with some really appalling and weird stuff in case my calls are ever, say, recorded."

Say, about the time with the sheep...or my strange new fetish involving jelly beans and toe-sucking (OK not really), perhaps.

Do you have any suggestions? Just so we give them a good time.

If they don't actually record the conversations, maybe I'll have to seek out some esoteric phone numbers to appear on the records. I have tons of unused minutes at the end of every billing cycle. The human/sea urchin love society? The joy of befriending fire ants? How to create condoms from Dum-dum wrappers?

Now if you will excuse me, I'm going to go call my new best friends. Let me know if you have other ideas too!

Of spilled mochas and the IRS

This is my rant of the moment. Bear with me. It's nothing life-threatening, and I apologize for being out of sorts, but it's still irritating.

So this is what you do this week if you are me:

1. Pick up your coffee 3/4 of the way to work (11 miles in thick traffic) and find out, the hard way, that the coffee drive through didn't put on the lid all the way. Get mocha all over your beige skirt. Call your boss and tell him you need to go home and change. Hear your boss laugh and say OK, as long as you send pictures of the mess.

2. Spend time agonizing over a letter from the IRS that says they haven't received your tax payment, which you made 2 months ago. Spend lots - and LOTS - of time on hold (total of more than an hour) on multiple calls, after going through literally a dozen menus to get a live person, and on the first of these calls, have your cell phone drop the call after the agent tells you everything is OK and you don't owe and you can disregard the notice. Call back just in case and their computer systems are down. Call back again just in case, and find out that the guy didn't finalize fixing the ridiculous glitch (more on that in a moment) even after he said he did "because the call is lost."

About as helpful as...

And the explanation? "The payment was applied to your husband's account, and you are listed as the main account holder."

Account? Like a drug store? We filed jointly, paid jointly, and then jointly received a bill saying we owed what we had already paid. Both of our names. On. Everything.

Somehow, even though we paid, and his "account" got credited, both of us still officially owed, until they unfucked it. I hope.

Does this sound like bullshit or a computer glitch to you? Or both?

3. Have the database that your national organization uses be about as useful as a condom with holes in it. Call the head of a national program and ask, "Who do I have to screw to get an accurate database?!"

4. Have one of your colleagues refuse to attend your meeting or send her staff because another one is going to be there. I thought we had finished kindergarten?

And it's not even Monday!

I am just tired as fuck after all of this, as ridiculous as that sounds. How's your week going?

Just say thank you

I felt some major gratitute for the permits guy at the city who totally saved my ass from impending doom on our event last week. As a thank you for essentially preventing a big, for-profit corporation from locking our small, nonprofit advocacy group out of the site of our own event earlier this month, I took him to lunch today.

And go ahead and laugh, but I had a small epiphany over my falafel plate.

Backtrack to a week and a half ago. He moved heaven and earth to ensure that we could have smooth (enough) sailing after a traffic engineer made a major snafu and ran a half-marathon route right over the access to our event site. Meetings involving two dozen people were had. They ironed out a new traffic route in one day, which is no small feat for city government (or any government), IMHO.

So I did something simple, that I didn't think about: after thanking him profusely for his help, I asked who I could contact to let them know he had really saved my bacon, and how much our organization appreciated it. And then I emailed his boss and his boss's boss.

Back to today. He said, "I really want to thank you for sending that email. We work things out for so many people, but most of the time, all we get are complaints."

That's true of most of us, I think, so why not go out of the way to say thank you to the powers that be when someone does something special? My dad taught me to do that, and I'm glad he did. I never stopped to think that it made an impression on anyone, but clearly, it can.

So, Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now. That kind person at the coffee shop, the post office, the gift shop, in your company's payroll or human resources department has a boss that would probably love to hear from you.

Of drill sergeants and baby squirrels

Mr. RK never fails to surprise me with trivia. And I love trivia, in the same, guilty pleasure kind of way that I love pigging out on popcorn at a movie: it's not something I'm embarrassed about, but the subject doesn't come up that often.

Anyhow. When I was little, one of the many careers I was sure I was destined to have was that of an artist, specifically a painter. I took my inspiration from Bob Ross. (Mind you, I also wanted to be a ballerina, a superhero, a nurse, and an actress, all by the age of 5.)

Around the age of 8, I realized that not being able to draw a circle round, and getting more paint on the floor than I got on the canvas, that this probably wasn't a good career choice. But that was after many years of Bob.

So, back to the trivia. No doubt if you watched PBS re-runs in the early 1980s you know about Bob Ross and his amazing hair and his happy trees. (You might even say "happy accident"without even knowing that he coined the phrase.)

But did you know that he had been a drill sergeant for 20 years? Mr. RK informed me of this today, right after showing me this video. Somehow, he became an afro-wearing, vegetarian painter who fed baby squirrels on his TV show.

Wouldn't you like to have been inside his head for that one?

Even my phone has a foul mouth

My phone has a mind of its own, and apparently, a mouth worse than mine.

When it does predictive texting, it has come up with some rude stuff that I swear I have never typed.

I type "stupid," it adds "bitch." I type "tight," it adds "ass." As my friend put it, "I had to program my phone to do that!"

For some reason, it won't let me add the word "fuck" to the dictionary, but I suppose Google has to draw the line somewhere.

Today, for the first time, I tried voice to text. What a joke!

I tried to invite a friend to dinner and say, "There is no charge, but they do an ask. The next one is June 5."

My phone wrote: "There is no charge, but they do an ass. The next one is due today."

What do you do when your technology is technologically challenged? Or maybe my phone is more of a pervert than I am?

Pardon the short post. I'm a bit under the weather. At least I can say the word "fuck" here and have it stick.