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11 April 2006
Dear Catastrophe Landlord, while I appreciate your cheerful devil-may-care attitude towards providing the utilities I pay for, in the morning hot water is not really an optional commodity.
much as I appreciate you putting a roof over my head whilst I wait for my own place to come through it doesn't give you the right to storm off and not talk to me for 24hrs just because I mentioned that on Saturday I may be in the same frickin' timezone as my ex. - Because when you do that it makes me wish I was doing time in a Turkish prison.
Dear Cat,
I know you already had breakfast. It's no use trying that trick with me. Sometimes it works on the kids, it's true, but this time it was me who fed you, which means I know you already ate. Sometimes I fear your capacity for rational, logical thought is not all it should be.
Love,
Mom
p.s. Thank you for leaving the dead mice outside.
I am leaving the company whether you like it or not. Please commence hiring someone so that I can train them. If you do not hire someone in a timely fashion, I will not be able to train them properly, and then I will bill you $50/hour to sort out the messes.
The kibble in the kitchen? Yours. The dish of salmon? Yours. The succulent chicken-flavoured treats? All yours.
The budgies in the living room? NOT YOURS. They are old and easily frightened; leave them the fuck alone.
Love, The Food Dispenser
Dear You,
You've been an excellent sport about my hopeless crush on you, which I appreciate, and I'm pleased as punch that we're developing a friendship based on something beyond my inexplicable lust.
But when you flirt back, Mr. Nigh-Irresistable Straight Guy with a Post-Grad Degree, that's just unfair, and means my girlfriend is going to tease me for the rest of the night about how red my ears are.
Also, when I bitch about my Rampaging Godzilla Libido and the wholly inappropriate fantasies that seize me on the bus, you and I will both be better off if you don't ask whom I'm fantasizing about. Trust me.
Can you please stop being so hot and crushable? We both know that there are 8 million reasons why nothing will really happen between us. It would only be bad. You're a great friend, though. So please stop being hot & just be interesting.
Why is it that whenever I call you, you have a robot ask me to key in my account number, then when I finally get to an actual person, the very first thing they ask for is my account number, and I can hear them typing it in? I realize that it stretches the very boundaries of Computer Science to imagine building a machine that can remember a 10 digit number, but why ask twice? Why? WHY?!
Dear Tablemate, I really don't care how senseless some of our work is, your constant negative attitude, which includes both numerous gusty sighs and chanting "fuckfuckfuckityfuck" over and over again when any little minor thing goes wrong, does nothing to help me get through the day. Lighten The Hell Up.
[yes, we don't even have our own desks in my office, for this I went to college.]
Hi! How are you? I am fine. Do you mind if I call you 'Slammy' and 'Sloppy'? No? That's wonderful, thanks!
Slammy, you are a mystery to me. How is it that you can slam your door so hard that the pictures in my room - two rooms away in a sturdy early 1900's Victorian - shake on the walls and yet remain catergorically unable to close the front door, the back door, pantry doors, or microwave door? And let's not get started on the lights, the bathroom fan or the gas heater that you would turn on full blast, while leaving the wind tunnel from the open front and back doors in full effect, but slamming your door repeatedly (further nullifying the warming effect of the heater on you) for what I can assume would be shits and giggles.
We know you're here, now pipe down. If you open it, close it - preferrably like a sane and well adjusted adult - and put on a fucking sweater, already.
Ah, Sloppy! Hi there! You're cute and funny and interesting, I really dig you, but can I say something? This eyebrow/moustache wax thing you've got going on...it, uh, yeah. Do you need to leave a trail of it everywhere? Do you really? It's in the microwave, on the microwave, on the utility sink, the washer, the bathroom sink, the sink handle and the floor. Sister, I shudder to think exactly what you're doing with this stuff, but I'm utterly disgusted everytime I find my hand, foot or piece of clothing firmly attached to a surface that was formerly clean and non-stick. I know you're young and French, but I think we can agree that even in France you're expected to clean up after yourself.
So yeah, please grab a bottle of Goo Gone and get this mess taken care of. Now.
Your habit of eating inedible objects has gone from cute, to frustrating, to beyond-the-pale when it means you get anorexic and bulimic for two days and interrupt my wonderful weekend for me to take you to the vet to the tune of $508.00 while you decide to regurgitate plastic bag residue from the depths of your intestine.
Love,
Mom, a.k.a. Food Dispenser (yes, food, that's the stuff you're *supposed* to eat)
It's not that I wish I was over there with you; you have always had your life, and I, mine. Nor is it the case that I wish you were here, though madness has set in for want of your touch.
But I do wish for either of these things over the way things are now. It's been years since I could tell you I love you, for now we are apart and those feelings are too strong to just throw at you out of the blue.
So I don't throw anything, and we drift apart, and then I write and apologize and try to keep up with you, but pretend I don't love you as much as I do, so as not to disrupt our futures apart.
But what does a future apart hold? More of the same, each of us swallowing our feelings so the other doesn't get so overwrought that we drop everything and reunite? Showing a tenderness to your career by my absence that I forbid myself to show to you, your sweet self, by my presence?
What use is this self-denial? I would do anything to see you. And I know you'd do the same to see me. And we'd get together, hold hands, talk, sparkle, grin, make out, and walk around with our hearts beating in our throats until one or the other of us declared that this happiness is too much, that we should be elsewhere doing our individual thing instead of doing the thing that would make us as individuals more happy than we could imagine. We break it off, baby, and sit cold and alone and lonely from each other too long.
And we don't know the words "come back," or "I need you," or "please stay," because we were too proud and we are too habituated to one another's absence to even think them.
These same thoughts come every time I put pen to paper, and I think of you there in cold Berlin, and I refuse to make you cry for our love and our separation, instead taking the chance that you'll cry over my lack of heart (which I know, knowing what you know, you won't; you're doubtless as wistful as I am). And I lift my pen and put away my paper and hope (and know) that your silence, like mine, springs from a love that fills the throat and requires your presence, your beautiful, perfect presence, for us to even speak of it.
While I appreciate the sentiment expressed in your letter most recent, I am afraid that your client is a puny, ill-tempered, despicable little troll of a man. Therefore, I must recommend to my clients that they decline your offer of settlement, paltry as it is. Additionally, please find attached our additional one hundred twenty-seven (127) requests for production.
I am still awaiting my 2003 W-2 form, though by now hope is a pretty shabby thing, and the feathers have dropped off.
After you issue it, I will return it to you, with a gentle reminder that it needs to be amended to reflect the $13,500 that your officers saw fit to withdraw from my bank account in August of that year. Since you kept all of that money, I do not believe generally accepted accouting practice would permit its inclusion under the category "Gross Pay." Perhaps if you started preparing the W-2c now, you could hang it up on your cubicle wall for a few months, enjoying the occasional chuckle at my expense, before forwarding it on to me.
Also, please go fuck a porcupine, and that goes double for the bitch in Payroll.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
