cafe de ass

i'm at work, drinking disgusting coffee that has taught me a very valuable life lesson: powdered coffee creamer tastes like ass. my current task, lest you judge me for posting a blog on company time, is to answer the phones while everyone else important enough to warrant access to a meeting is in a meeting. the phones aren't ringing. i can't talk to b, the front-office secretary whose nickname is actually "b", because she's in the meeting. i can't talk to joey, the salesman, because he's out in the warehouse doing something outside his job description (or so he says). i can't talk to sam because he's back in school and not working with me anymore. so all that's left to do is drink my cafe de ass and write.

shiza and i leave for new york next week. t-minus five days. it's going to be amazing. i've been there briefly once on the way to maine, but we didn't walk around too much or actually see little local things. we were giant tourists and saw only the statue of liberty and ellis island. i guess when you only have seven hours in nyc you have to prioritize. i'm looking forward to exploring, and shopping, and hanging out, and pretending to be a fashionista. we're going to providence to visit zoe at school, and i can't wait to see her in her college element. plus, she's the only one of us going to an ivy league school, so i want to check it out.

today, after work, i'm supposed to go even farther into the valley and have dinner at my great-aunts' house. they are both divorced and hilarious and they live together in the craziest house i've ever been inside. it's beautiful and wallpapered and ivy'd and houses hundreds of little dolls and placards and potpourri dishes filled with dried flowers. it's like insta-cozy. it's where we have every thanksgiving, so even when i go in the middle of the summer, i imagine a fire in the fireplace and tons of family and the all-important coveted cranberry sauce. the house is also designed in a really unique way, so it's almost like a playhouse. and it goes without saying, i hope, that i love hanging out with my aunts, one of whom once called ann coulter a "vile bitch."* i adore them.

i hope they're not firing someone in the big office meeting. my uncle, my boss, has closed the door to his office and put on the ominous red light, meaning, i suppose, that a super secret private meeting is in progress and no one should disturb them. i can just barely hear voices, and i'm curious about what's going on in there. it also makes me feel left out, which is ridiculous because i'm well aware that i have no effect on office politics at all. everyone is in there, though, and it's a little like being a witness to a party i'm not invited to. unless, of course, they are firing someone, and then it's not really a party i'd want to be invited to.




*by the way, i just looked up how to correctly put "vile bitch" in quotation marks, because i've always been a little bit confused as to how a quotation inserted at the end of a sentence works, and apparently, the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks. that makes no sense. all right, maybe it makes a little bit of sense, but that means i've been doing it wrong forever. how upsetting and sad.