Last night I went to happy hour for Allison’s birthday with some friends and co-workers. Being a birthday celebration and all, it turned into one of our party-all-night and hate-yourself-the-next-day happy hours. I didn’t get home till after midnight, and I’m pretty sure that I stared at my own reflection in the bus window the entire ride home like a crackhead. But that’s beside the point. I realized a long time ago that I hate having a hangover at work. HATE. The headache, the queasiness, the fact that I have to say hello to the director of marketing in the kitchen without puking on his shoes. But yet, at least once a month, I put myself in a situation which results in the Work Hangover. To allow you to get a feel for what the Work Hangover is like for me, I’ve outlined the phases below.

6:00 a.m.: Awakening

I’m jolted into consciousness by the combination of my alarm clock going off and some sort of alcohol-caffeine-adrenaline rush. I’m confused, disoriented: I can’t figure out what I dreamed and what actually happened last night while I was drunk. Reality and hallucination combine into a big convoluted mess.

6:02 a.m.: Realization

Shit. I have to go to work. Why didn’t I think of that last night? Why? WHY?

8:00 a.m.: Preparation

I arrive at work and decide that in order to stay conscious, coffee is necessary. Obtain 1 medium nonfat latte. Try not to move around too much in order for stomach to stay settled.

9:00 a.m.: Production

After morning meeting and coffee run, I settle in at my desk and am able to maintain sub-par level of output…for an hour.

12:00 p.m.: Destruction

Am suddenly ravenously hungry and only for things containing high levels of grease and fat. Drag sorry ass to Jimmy John’s for not entirely unhealthy lunch, avoiding urge to run straight to Ginelli’s Pizza or that greasy burger place in the skyway.  

2:00 p.m.: Dissolution

It’s over. No amount of water consumption or eating of salt and vinegar chips is going to save me now. I can no longer interact with people, and blatantly ignore them when they come to my desk. I delete every email that arrives in my inbox. I throw important documents into my recycling bin, and curse the world, and vodka.

3:45 p.m.: Surrender

I’m lying horizontally in my chair. My hands are on the keyboard but nothing coherent is appearing on the screen. People are asking me if I’m ok. I decide to leave early.

4:30 p.m.: Relief

I’m home now. But instead of going to the gym or making a healthy dinner, I lay down on the couch, pop a Will & Grace DVD into the machine, and fall asleep to the sweet gay sounds of Jack making cracks about Will’s thighs and large vocabulary. I promise to never do this to myself again.

3 weeks later: Memory Block

The co-workers want to go out to Rossi’s again, and I happily agree. We’re there at 4:00 ordering our first drink. Like Pavlov’s dogs, you can shock me repeatedly, but I’ll still go back for more. Maybe I’ll be smarter in my 30’s?

Deep Thoughts with Julie

I’ve never claimed to be an angel, but I believe that I do have a few virtues. For one, I don’t really lie (anymore). I stopped needing to after high school – the days of “no, Mom, I would never smoke a cigarette!” and “Mr. Morrissette, of course I didn’t skip enough classes to get expelled two weeks before graduation. Those teachers just overlooked me during attendance…a lot” are long gone. These days I don’t have any reason to lie.

I’m also not a very envious person. Somehow over the years I subconsciously decided that being me is a pretty good gig, and it’s not worth wishing I had other people’s lives or other people’s things. I’m nice to people, I’m grateful for what I’ve been given, and I’m generally a lover, not a hater. But one quality that I never quite got a handle on is the ability to feel happy for others.

A great man once said, “I’m not really happy for them. I mean, I’m glad they’re happy, but frankly it doesn’t do anything for me.” (Seinfeld, Season 4, Episode 22). This pretty much describes how I usually feel when something great happens to a friend. Um…no offense, friends J. I guess I just never learned how to genuinely feel excited for another person. But that doesn’t stop me from frequently saying things like, “I’m so excited for you!” …which – if what I’m saying is true – I guess would qualify as a lie, come to think of it. Oops. And sometimes I’m even less happy for people if their happiness negatively impacts my happiness. Like when my single friends get married and I don’t see them as much, or when I talk 3 of my co-workers into dropping their grad school classes so they’ll have more time for happy hour. That last example is strictly hypothetical, of course.

The thing is, I can still recognize that something is good and it makes my friend happy. And I do want my friends to be happy; it just doesn’t make me happy. I really only get happier if something good happens that affects me directly, like getting a raise, or reaching my fiber intake for the day. Then the feelings of joy are overwhelming.

So the real question is: am I a bad person for not being happy for others? Or am I just the only honest person who is willing to admit it? And the next question logically then would be: should I be being this honest in an unrestricted blog that my future employer is probably reading right now? (Closed circuit to my future employer: I’m really a good person, I swear). And the final question is, of course: do I care? And the answer to that is, as always, no.

The Holidays: Volume 2007

Remember the old days when I used to write blog entries while I was supposed to be working? Well, due to the incremental maturity that comes with age, I put a stop to that. But that was before I had thirteen solid days of vacation (and subsequently forgot I even had a job), after which it is only fair that you’re allowed at least 48 hours to get back into the habit of actually doing work. So today, instead of responding to emails from internal clients, or reviewing copy that’s been sitting in my inbox for 2 weeks, I’m going to write all about my life as Girl Without Job.

It all started the Thursday before last when I thought it only appropriate to invite out my co-workers and a few friends to down some drinks at The Local. The thing about not having to work is that it leads to excessive drinking (see paragraphs 3 and 4).

There were a few pre-planned events happening over “Christmas Break,” as I call it, because I like to pretend I’m still in high school. One was 80’s Night at the Shouthouse the Wednesday after Christmas. Friends and coworkers showed up to sing along to Bon Jovi and WHAM! while drinking $1 red bull and vodkas. I was fine after sleeping till 10 and eating cookies for breakfast; my coworkers who arrived at work promptly at 8 Thursday morning – not so much.

Friday night we got together at the uptown VFW. More good times were had with lots of friends and lots of cute boys (little known fact: the VFW, whose reputation is based on alcoholic vets drinking scotch at the bar while muttering profanities under their breath is actually a really good place to meet young single men). The evening was a great time, until I realized the next morning that

my car was towed from in front of Dan’s apartment building. Yeah, AGAIN. Kind of like last summer, except for even more full of suck because it was winter and freezing and Lisa doesn’t have a car anymore so we had to wait at Dan’s apartment until he could come home and drive us to the impound lot. Whew…I think that sentence was four lines long. That’s gotta be a record.

Besides drinking, I did spend some quality time with family over the most festive of Christian holidays: Jesus’ Birthday.

For Christmas this year my mom bought me Seinfeld Season 9 and labeled it, “From: Grandma.” I was fairly certain my grandmother, a disabled 81-year-old who lives in a nursing home in MiddleOfNowhere USA, hadn’t jacked the Good Samaritan Center van to drive to the nearest Best Buy 200 miles away and pick up the last season of my favorite sitcom. But, you never know. Whatever the case, I’ve already watched every episode twice (welcome to not having cable), which has resulted in my incessant quoting of or interjecting phrases from Seinfeld into every conversation I have. This is bad, because it’s one of those situations where you know you’re just about to start annoying the shit out of everyone, yet you can’t stop yourself.

I also received the following gifts for Christmas:

·         A little toy Bobcat forklift. Here’s the thing. My uncle works at the Bobcat factory in Gwinner, North Dakota. You know, the one you didn’t know existed. Apparently Bobcat just opened a gift store featuring hundreds of miniature Bobcat toys, and my uncle thought that this would make the perfect gift for his 26-year-old niece. Couldn’t agree more.

·         A pizza cutter with a Bobcat logo on it (see bullet 1).

·         A metal tree decoration made out of recycled oil cans and a reusable grocery bag which can also be used for other purposes (Lisa recently discovered her inner hippie).

·         Three rolls of quarters. My mother is nothing if not practical. She gave the gift of not having to run to the bank in my pajamas minutes before closing next time I get the late-night laundry impulse.

·         Some money to put in my I’m-getting-more-nose-surgery fund. Oops, I wasn’t going to bring that up. Too late. I decided to have an actual plastic surgeon remove the residual bumps that are still on my nose that show up in pictures and occasionally in the mirror. No one else can see this except for me, and some may argue that I’m being too picky (the surgeon included). But it’s my nose and I’ll screw with it some more if I want. Go on…judge me. Just don’t come talking to me when you decide on lipo for your 40^th birthday present. 

Don’t get me wrong – I am more than grateful for the generous gifts from my family. But sometimes you just gotta laugh at a toy forklift.

And now it’s back to reality. The reality where I can’t afford to have a hangover every single day. The reality where people don’t give me presents all the time. And the reality where eating frosted sugar cookies for every meal just isn’t acceptable. How depressing. Good thing my birthday’s in a couple of weeks. More presents…and cookies.

Sometimes to get inspiration for blogging, I read my own blog. This next entry is the result of two hours worth of sifting through the past two years of my life as it appears on the internet. You can decide if it's working or if I should be getting my inspiration elsewhere…

I’ll never forget the day my mom and dad came into my bedroom, shut the door, and had a discussion with me about how they believed I had a “shopping addiction” which had become a “serious problem.”  I was a freshman in college. I made $75 a week and didn’t own a credit card. Apparently they defined “addiction” as spending a third of my paycheck on couple of 2-for-$20 shirts I found on the clearance rack at The Gap. Serious problem? I thought not. But perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss their concern as delusional paranoia, given what years of uninhibited shopping has done to my financial stability.

With each passing year, I become a little more successful. This results in career promotions, which in turn result in my own delusion that I can afford everything from $75 Lacoste polo shirts to $400 Coach bags. Online shopping is simultaneously the best and worst thing to ever happen to me. I remember when I used to flip through the pages of Victoria’s Secret catalogs to get ideas of similar things I could buy at cheaper venues. Now I just boot up, enter my credit card number and click “submit.” I remember when $150 for a pair of jeans seemed outrageous. And I remember when my entire shoe collection could fit in one closet. Ahhh, the good old days.

The truth is that I just really love clothes. They’re kind of like a hobby for me, or a pet. Instead of taking my dog for a walk, I spend Saturday afternoons carefully ironing a stack of dresses and button down shirts. Instead of taking my cat to be groomed, I bring my heels to the shoe guy at Macy’s.

But these are the choices every girl in her 20s makes. Do we spend our money on six pairs of this season’s BCBG heels, or do we put it toward a down payment on a house in the burbs? Do we satiate or need for immediate gratification, or do we steal away our salary for later use on that white picket fence we are supposed to be dreaming of?  I don’t know about you gals, but I’m not the house kinda girl. For now my paychecks are rolling straight to Target National Bank, and I’m not making any apologies.

This is the kind of entry that makes me question my own intelligence

Today my coworker Brook came over to my cube and dropped a printout onto my desk. She proceeded to drop one on Mary’s desk and one on Ginger’s. I picked it up and read the first line aloud: “Award-Winning Chicken Rub Recipe.”

“What’s this for?” I inquired immediately.

“It’s a really good chicken rub recipe,” was her answer.

I got up from my desk and walked over to her and Ginger. “What do you want me to do with this?” I asked. Turns out, Brook was trying to be nice by offering up this fantastic recipe.

I’m sorry, have we met? Do you sit right next to me and listen to me blather on all day everyday about my life and everything related to me? Where from my incessant musings did you get “homemaker?” I mean in order to use chicken rub you’d need to make a chicken, I assume. My idea of dinner is a box of All Bran crackers and an episode of SVU. Sometimes I make a ham and cheese sandwich, and if I’m feeling really adventurous, I heat it up. But I don’t cook. I don’t bake. I don’t even feign interest in cooking or baking or doing anything with food that requires more than 6 minutes of my time.

I guess this is just the process of getting to know your coworkers. I learn that they puke whenever they see dog poop (yet for some reason still own a dog); they learn that I don’t cook – I just assemble.

So I decided that I’m going to start being more open to things that I currently hate, like dogs and Applebee’s and St. Paul. The other day my dad actually said that I’m a Minneapolis snob. This is entirely true. Whenever one of my friends moves to St. Paul, the question that immediately pops into my head is, WHY? I’ve never really understood why someone would want to live in a city that hardly has any nightlife and has streets that don’t go in numerical OR alphabetical order. I guess if you worked in St. Paul, maybe, but who works in St. Paul? Everyone I know who lives there works in Minneapolis or the suburbs, meaning they actually have to go out of their way to live in the more lame of the twin cities. Minneapolis, on the other hand, has loads more restaurants, bars, museums, theaters, coffeehouses, clubs and shops than St. Paul AND they all stay open past 5 p.m. But despite these blatantly valid reasons for disliking SP, I’m going to try not to hate on it anymore. I mean, I like a lot of people who live there, so that’s something. And there must be other good things about it. It’s our capital city. It’s got a lot of Irish bars. The Wild play there. And umm…Cossetta’s is a really good restaurant. Now Applebee’s and dogs, those are going to take some more work. But I’ll keep trying…cause I don’t want to be one of those people who hate stuff.