Straight No Chaser

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god fucking ass damn it. they put me next to jim again.

fifth floor is cold, a good twenty degrees lower than it was down on four. skirt, no sweater. i'm going to catch pneumonia and die. the guys with the cart came down and got me an hour ago, no warning, "come with us, chuck wants you up on five so you can have your own printer," which sounded like a good thing, so i followed (not that i was really given a choice). and they plopped me down by this mysterious four-walled cubicle (unusual because, contrary to all logic, office cubes have not six faces but three--plus floor) with no visible door and this vaguely familiar but muffled voice floating out from inside, and the second i sat down and swiveled the chair around, once, just to see what the view was like, this fat red head popped up over the adjacent wall, grinning wildly the way i imagine spiders grin when they feel that telltale tug on the end of a strand of web. "shannon!!!!" most gleefully i've ever heard my name pronounced, ever, and i almost felt bad for feeling so wronged. and yet. so here we are again. other observations about the fifth floor: there are men up here, almost exclusively; me and one other woman and then a giant swarm of men men men. it's fourteen degrees. it's dirty. the lights are too bright. i am again without window.

i die. i die.

no, really, i daydream about nicer things, like the fact that marcus has finally committed to an arrival date. now i just have to make it till then, flying mainly solo because he will be out of commission till day of. i wrote the entire laurel section of the melinda story today. then wanted to take a crossbow to my computer screen, but when doesn't that happen. i called my grandmother, who lives a few minutes up the street from the office, and tried to hint that maybe she'd like me to take her out to lunch, but she was too busy rushing from bridge club to jazzercise to make time even for her favorite little tea restaurant, where we get these iced blueberry teas, sweetened, and where i pick the capers out of an otherwise spectacular grilled turkey pannini. i'm really hungry. i brought a bag of cholesterol-lowering cereal in a ziploc for a snack, and then spilled it as i was sitting down at what is now my old desk.

melanie the ugly interrupts me every so often, like just now, to drop off a box of shit that needs shredding. grumble.

shredtastic. i return to field a remark about, appropriately enough, my rear end. this skirt was a bad idea but i got desperate. i'm always desperate, when it comes to clothes. still, "that's sexual harassment and i don't have to take it." remember that unbelievably assertive woman from those mid-nineties public service announcements? that was sexual harassment, and she didn't have to take it. except that she did, over and over and over, for our viewing pleasure.

yeah, i'm going to freeze to death if i don't leave now. they will find me in several centuries, frozen into a block of ice, hands eternally poised to type on a keyboard long since turned to dust, with one little frozen tear in my lifeless brown eye. dead, a popsicle, perhaps impaled on one of these pointed light fixtures.

too many virgin suicides tumbling through my head. did i mention i'm hooked on that book now? may sound incredible, since i'm currently reading at the unimpressive rate of about twenty-three words per day, but seriously. i'm even considering the idea of renting the movie, just to find out how they got away with casting kirsten dunst as a pretty girl, or a preteen.

the answer to today's hangman, by the way, is "shit."