April, 2013: I decide I will re-watch each Bond film and write an essay on it. Not necessarily a review, not a necessarily a contextualization or analysis, but just an essay. Sort of like those books that are collections of essays on an album that sometimes have nothing to do with the album and sometimes do.

I will start at the beginning, 1962 with “Dr. No.”

Last December, my mom and I took a trip and visited England, Wales and Scotland. In Wales, we went to Cardiff, and in Cardiff we went to the “Doctor Who Experience,” this giant-yet-temporary exhibition/Disney-style interactive bit all about the history and sets and props and things for “Doctor Who,” the popular BBC children’s television drama series.

However, my mother, nearly until the day we got to Cardiff, thought we were going to an exhibition about the movie, “Dr. No.” She confessed later that she was a bit worried about how an entire exhibition space could be filled with just information and memorabilia from one single film (running time: 110 minutes), but she had let me plan the entire trip and wasn’t going to argue. She was doing what I like to call “Napoleon Style,” which just means show up and see what happens.

Inside the “Doctor Who” exhibition (called, officially, the “Doctor Who Experience,” but I refuse to call things like that words like that), there was a fun interactive part (you fly the Tardis, run from weeping angels, Daleks roll at you slowly in a semi-threatening way, sorry if this is spoilers, but I think if you’ve imagined the possibilities for a “Doctor Who” “Experience” these would be sort of necessary bits of it), and then a huge exhibition hall of sets and props and creatures and things. Huge. Thousands of square feet. Because when you have 50 years of a TV show to draw on, there’s going to be warehouses and warehouses worth of stuff, even the really obscure stuff that only the really nutto hardcore fans remember (and they do, because it’s “Doctor Who”).

And how would “Dr. No” have gone about this? Who knows cause it’s one movie and it’s 110 minutes long.

Anyway, on to the movie. “Dr. No” is undoubtedly great. Super 60s style opening credits and if you think about it, a movie that has spawned 24 sequels. But, while some first-of-a-series films, it doesn’t bother with a lengthy background or origin story. Bond is already a double-0, and when we first see him, already in a tuxedo. You know what they say, every epic has to start in the middle.

For a British film, I think what strikes me so much is how colorful it is. Exotic, sun-drenched Jamaica is a whirl of pink, blue and green, of course, but the opening in the Circle Club are all bright technicolor. London in the movies is usually a gray amorphous bore, but not Bond’s London.

The only sense I get of actual London is Bond himself, walking around in Jamaica in a gray suit, and Sean Connery is so old-school he just comes out looking old. He’s only in his early thirties when this was shot, but something about the suits and the hair (it’s a wig) and the just general Britishness of him makes him seem older. And he should be. He’s believable as a guy in his mid-thirties. Enough experience to know what he’s doing but still young enough to be believably quick and charming.

Even though we’re spared the lengthy openings, there’s still plenty of charm in getting to know Bond. He introduces himself, delivers the famous “Bond. James Bond,” totally unaware of how famous it’ll be. We see a room service guy making a martini, “Just like you ordered,” but don’t hear him order it. We get the entire makeup of his and Moneypenny’s relationship in just two lines:

“Moneypenny, what gives?”
“Me, given an ounce of encouragement.”

It’s hard to judge the pioneer of a genre. “Dr. No” set the tone for hundreds of spy movies to follow. So much of what we now consider thematic genre tropes are really just “Dr. No” rehashed. The innuendo, the smoking, the femme fatale with the satin bedspread. It’s all right there. And the unanswered questions inherent to movie-reality. How do men in 1960s movies wear hats in convertibles? How does that CIA agent get away with wearing those terrible women’s sunglasses? Why is that double-crossing secretary’s bath towel cuter than some of my prom dresses?

Outside of the natural Jamaican gorgeousness, there are also some really fantastic sets. Not MI6, which looks like a leftover office set from a not-great TV show. Not the Jamaican hotel, which also, looks like a castoff from something else, or Dick Van Dyke’s living room. But when they get to Crab Key, to Dr. No’s lair, it’s amazing. Another trope-setter for villain-lairs. Lots of concrete, marble, bearskin rugs and Barcelona chairs. I looked it up, and this film was made for $1.1 million. In today’s dollars, that’s just $8.2 million. The budget for “Skyfall” was $150-200 million. My point here is set designers knew how to get a lot for their money back then. (I researched, and the same set designer was hired to do “Dr. Strangelove” by Stanley Kubrick based on what Kubrick saw in “Dr. No.”)

The actual plot, about sabotaging a Mercury launch from Cape Canaveral, is there, but so obviously not the main attraction. It doesn’t matter. Couldn’t matter less, actually. Setting the tone for the entire Bond universe, in “Dr. No,” style is more important than substance. But with style like this, nobody’s complaining.

I’m losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

So last night I started watching the LCD Soundsystem documentary, “Shut Up and Play The Hits,” which is fantastic but in a very specific way that means I’ll probably never finish watching it.

Specifically I am stuck at the part where Chuck Klosterman and James Murphy are talking about the song “Losing My Edge.” Klosterman says:

I don’t know if you’ll take this as a compliment or as a negative thing, but sometimes I do think “Losing My Edge” is the most brilliant thing you’ve done. And that that might stand alone, separately, not because it’s the greatest song you ever made, but it seems like the ideology and the sentiment of that song is not only very timely for what was happening in the world, but I can’t really think of any other songs like that.

And the timing of it was really good because it was … the Internet was causing people to have a different relationship with history, and a young person could suddenly be as fluent and didn’t have to have the life experience, and I feel like that song, which is why it’s so interesting to me, your awareness that this was happening to you, I think, was very unique.

And then James Murphy explains that he was in a club, and somebody played Delta 5, and then Liquid Liquid, and he had this “sad hipster dj” “Revolutionary Road” moment. “Those are my f-ing records,” he says.

I heard that you and your band, you sold your guitars and bought turntables. I heard that you and your band sold your turntables and bought guitars.

And in a way, this is the sickness of my whole life, I think, condensed into one little moment. Am I miserable because the things I know a lot about, and care a lot about, now exist in a super public way that anyone can access? Yeah, I am. There used to be pride in knowing stuff. Pride in acquiring that knowledge. When I was a teenager, if I wanted to listen to “Eric B. is President” by Eric B. and Rakim, I would have to go to a record store in a part of town I probably shouldn’t be going to and dig through crates for either the single or the album “Paid in Full,” and buy it and take it home. (And actually, I’d have to even know it existed in the first place to go looking for it.) Right now, if a teenager wanted a copy of it, it’s available on iTunes for $1.29. And I guess I’m just sad that my experience with finding and discovering music (and books and movies and everything) that I like is entirely different than young people now. And I’m jealous, I guess, because they can find so much more so easy compared to how hard it was for me, and people my age, who didn’t really live in big cities or have a lot of college radio stations around them in middle school years, or have the kind of access to music from all over that now everybody with an internet connection can get, instantly.

Losing my edge? It’s likely I never had one. There’s a bit of the movie “Almost Famous,” where Philip Seymour Hoffman is Lester Bangs and he’s explaining that most likely, if you call him, he’s home, listening to records, because he’s not cool. Inherently uncool. To me, though, when I was fourteen and learning about music and bands and Lester Bangs was possibly the coolest person I’d ever heard of. And to hear even him say he’s uncool, just, devastated me. If he wasn’t cool, how could I ever be cool? So I’m uncool. I mean, I’m not a 1950s square, but I’m not rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t even know how to be rock ‘n’ roll, though the desire to be rock ‘n’ roll has been an all-consuming personal project of mine since I was born, basically. I don’t mean singing or playing an instrument in a band or anything, I mean the actual quest to BE rock ‘n’ roll. To be leather-jacketed and disaffected-cool and just always look like I’m never trying and don’t care about what anybody thinks, but can just BE COOL. BE COOL. But I’m too self-conscious. I care too much. I give and need and worry and take and interact in a totally affected way that is just flat-out not cool. I am 31 and I’m not Julian Casablancas. I don’t think there’s much chance I’ll get cool.

I do not believe I wasted one second though. Not one inkling of a second of my miserable little life looking for songs to love was misspent.

Jason Molina died, a little over a week ago, and I can’t mentally get there because he was my age (he was eight years older, but that’s not too far). I love his music, and Songs: Ohia/Magnolia Electric Company was sort of my gateway drug into that dark, lo-fi, alt-country, haunting blues-type stuff. Older Okkervil River. Pedro the Lion. Wil Oldham. Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Things that were very different from my high-school favorite bands, like The Clash. Things that I needed to know existed, because soon I would be dealing with sad things, and I would need the right music to escape into, to know, and to recognize what I was feeling and make me know I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t the only person to ever feel that way.

I don’t know what to think about Jason. I didn’t know him, I just really liked his music and listened to a lot of it a lot of times. Thinking about it just makes my stomach hurt, in a little-kid way. I am not ready to process this emotionally so I’ll just deal with it physically and it will just ache like a soreness that can’t be rubbed away or forgotten.

I worry about other people I care about who suffer and go through the same things. I don’t know what’s best for them. I don’t know if anybody knows. When people claim rehab or religion or anything as a fix-all for-all, I can’t get behind it. I know rehab helps some people; I have seen it help some people. I know some people find their peace and change themselves through faith, or therapy or wonderdrugs or whatever. But no one thing can help everyone, and finding the thing that will help you is like searching for one slightly-differently-shaped straw of hay in a haystack in a field of 10,000 haystacks.

Music doesn’t fix my problems, but it has always helped me deal with it, and feel like less of a freak about it. A person, who I would never know, reaching out blindly to say, to sing even, this is how I am feeling and how I am dealing with it, and then thousands and thousands of people hearing that, and even though we are all alone, maybe feeling a little less lonely. It takes a lot to talk about your problems, your insecurities, the things that make you sad, and how some people are bold and brave and courageous enough to do that in an immensely public way is humbling. And for my selfish consumption, even. How do you thank someone for that?

Anyway, Graveface records is doing a benefit release, with a print by Will Schaff, and you can go read about it (and buy it) here. Or maybe, if you hurt or feel bad, some little sliver of art or music somewhere will help you feel something better, and maybe this is it, because sometimes it is for me.

March 4-17 is the WFMU pledge-a-thon, which they do one time a year, and because they’re so great, they make all the money they need. Downtown Soulville is on right now, as I write this, and Mr. FineWine is playing “Bad Man from Missouri” by Jimmy Ricks, who I’ve never heard of, and this is exactly why I’m listening to it.

If you don’t know, this is my cause. I wish I could say I was more active in the community, but I do what I can. I advise a college radio station, which is the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. Ever. (And I do this because a very special person believed in me.) This morning, a two-piece band from right here in Atlanta dragged in their gear (which probably weighed more than both musicians combined), set up and played in our tiny studio.

“Sorry, our stuff is kind of everywhere,” one of the guys said to me, as I was tiptoeing around a drum kit and wires. I was going back into the back closet to set up a recording of their show and set.

“It’s totally fine. This is my every day.”

And it is. And that’s so wonderful.

Music is amazing. People are making incredible things, all over the world, all the time, and only a teeny tiny amount are signing to major labels and ending up on your top-40 car stereo. The rest is being played on your local college station and/or public station and/or the amazing WFMU. Listen to those stations, call those DJs, tell people you are fans of their stations, email those stations and more importantly, give them your money. Seriously. Just go do it.

Also, while I was writing this, I called in and won their giveaway for the hour! Incredible!

Seriously, go make a pledge to WFMU. Call 1-800-989-9368. And if not them, one of your local stations, or a college station, or somebody else doing something you like who could really use that money.

Two weeks ago, I bought another car, which has come with a free trial of satellite radio, which I had for five years and loved dearly. Last week I heard a song I haven’t heard in ages, “Up the Junction” by Squeeze, on a channel they call First Wave, which is new wave/classic alternative. Think The Cure, The Police, The Clash, Depeche Mode, Yaz, Pet Shop Boys and Elvis Costello.

So, “Up the Junction” is an anomaly. It’s a new-wave/post-punk song with no chorus that tells a totally depressing story about a young, working-class couple in London. It’s based on a novel, which was also made into a TV movie. The song’s also been covered by a ton of other bands I like (Decemberists, They Might Be Giants, The Shins, etc.). I love a song that tells a story, even if it’s a totally depressing one.

Anyway, after I heard it, I put together a new-wave/post-punk/Britpop episode of my weekly radio show around it. Another song I put on it is “Watching the Detectives” by Elvis Costello, and now I’ve been listening to that song non-stop since Thursday.  It’s another new-wave/reggae sort of song, just two years older than “Up the Junction,” by another London band.

“Watching the Detectives” tells a story too, but more of a film noir story, about film noir. It’s one of those introspective, meta, layery things where every line has three or four different meanings. So far as I can gather, it’s about a guy with a girlfriend who’d rather watch detective movies than sleep with him. You never know if the line is about what’s on TV or what’s real. “Though it nearly took a miracle to get you to stay/It only took my little fingers to blow you away.” Brilliant writing, made even more brilliant by its format and presentation. And so totally right-on about that sort of mashed up reality of how pop culture and things fuse into your life in a way that makes them as real as the reality.

The music is even better. And this is the Big Secret about me talking about music. I can correctly use words like melody, verse and chorus, but then I sort of run out of music theory knowledge. It’s a reggae beat, I know that, but there’s something about the way it’s pieced together that sounds tense, unresolved and obsessive. Neurotic. Anxious.

Anyway, I think now I’m going to start writing about pop music more. Like this.

My favorite, by far, of any of these shows is called “Fatal Attractions.” I love shows about crazy people with exotic pets and I love animal-attack shows. “Fatal Attractions” is about people who are killed by their exotic pets. For example, a dude who has like fifteen monitor lizards in his studio apartment who bit him, he gets an infection and passes out, and then they eat him.

Or the dude in a Harlem apartment building with a 425-pound tiger. (That guy lived though.) At one point, he had roommates who didn’t know there was a tiger (or an alligator) in the apartment. (Add that to my list of “Reasons I have Finished with New York.) That guy lived, but he did go to jail.

Now, “Fatal Attractions” makes me sad, for the people (who usually die) and the animals (who usually die too). I can watch this and “Dance Moms” and “My Strange Addiction” and “Teen Mom,” but I can’t watch any of the hoarding shows. I tried, really hard, to watch them, but instead of making me feel like “Wow, this person sure has a lot of stuff he or she should get rid of,” what I felt was “Wow, this person needs to leave all that shit in that house and go away and get a new, empty apartment someplace and then, “Extreme Home Makeover” style, some dudes come but instead of tearing down your old house and building you a new one, they just burn down the old one. On the show, the person would be allowed to come back to see the cleaned, empty lot where their house-full-of-junk once sat. If he or she wanted to. Just, you know, cut your losses and walk away. You can buy a roll of paper towels for the new apartment. There is no need to pack any of the 12,000 you have in your garage, sir.

That talent for selecting exactly the moment to walk away from something is a talent I don’t have. I took economics in college. I was taught the principles of diminishing returns. There’s a point where if you make the factory one bit bigger, it actually makes it inefficient. Or if you make the product a little bit faster, it isn’t worth as much money. For a factory to be maximally efficient and profitable, it has to get right up to that limit, but not over it.

I think about this a lot lately. I hoard. Not physical stuff (I’m pretty good at getting rid of things I don’t use or like), but ideas. Plans and schemes and plotted-out projects. But I also behave as a hoarder with the things I do. I hoard my job (because I like it, and I’m good at it, and since I don’t have a husband or children or boyfriend to distract me). I want to do it all to the best of my ability. It’s the One Thing I have in my life that is my own. The thing I have that I feel like I actually earned it.

But this hoarding behavior, as I’ve seen on the hoarding shows, is wrong. And if I am, in fact, hoarding myself up in the job, and my hoarding is contributing to a diminishing return on investment of my time there, or student work there, or at the expense of my life being some other way.

And while I don’t think the literal “burn it to the ground” would work on this figurative problem, literally, I just don’t know how long I can hang on. Already this week, I have worked 38 hours. Tomorrow I’ll work 8:30 a.m. – 5:30 p.m. (more like 6 or 7 p.m.), and then Saturday I work part of the afternoon for a special event. It’s not the hours. I’ve always worked crazy hours. That’s all the same, and there’s no problem with that. The things that have changed are the problems. Mostly, I, myself, am the problem. I changed.

And I’ve walked away before. I walked away from towns and cities I’d lived in profitably or with lots of friends because I was unhappy with living in them. I walked away from prestigious opportunities that weren’t a good fit for me. I have cut my losses and walked away more than I can count. If something doesn’t work for you, sell it, drop it, give it away, or you can always set it on fire and visit that empty hole later in life.

I see all these bits and parts lining up like plot points in a thick Russian novel. But I never finish reading those. I expect Anna Karenina works it all out for herself and finds the perfect balance of work/home life for herself, and is happy. Or, she walked away from a bad situation and started something new over from scratch, new, just things to make her happy.

Oh, yeah, I remember. I did read that one. She throws herself in front of a train and dies. Never mind.

My mom called me and asked me if she could do something for me, so I said sure, she could go to the pharmacy and pick up my prescription. I explained to her how to get to the Target by my work, where my prescriptions are, and then how to get from there back to my house.

It took … a few hours.

My mom has like shopping highway amnesia. She can enter a store, then time passes, then she leaves, but has no concept of the time that has passed.

She bought me a ton of stuff I’d never buy myself, but that she knows I like. Things that I just can’t justify buying since I don’t make a lot of money. Things like mini DiGiorno pizzas and a HUGE box of Junior Mints and chocolate cream cheese and chocolate milk and fancy orange juice and break-and-bake brownie cookies. A ton of junk food, just to make me feel better.

In rush-hour traffic on a Friday.

Everybody has problems with their parents. Everybody has days when their parents really bug them. Who’d know how to push your buttons better than the person who made those buttons? But sometimes they’re really really nice.

And now I have the flu.

My doctor says to believe the hype. And next year I should get a flu shot.

So, I went to the pharmacy for five-days worth of fancy anti-viral drugs, and I had to wait so I got some Oreos also, and then I came home and wanted to sleep but couldn’t, so I had the Best Idea Ever.

I really wanted to watch “Point Break.” That was my idea.*

Obviously, “Point Break” must be on the large DVD mail order/movie streaming service I subscribe to. I searched. I was let down. So I posted my dismay on my social networks.

Within a few short hours, I was notified by friends from various parts of this great nation that I could watch a weird video about guns on the internet called “Point Break,” that if I couldn’t find “Point Break,” I could also watch this weird Italian/Scottish zombie movie called “Do Not Profane the Sleep of the Dead,” and that “Point Break” was available on HBO GO.

So now I’m watching “Point Break” and eating these Oreos from earlier.

The moral of the story: If you have great friends, anything is possible.

Last year they went to Grand Cayman. This year they went to Aruba.

More than a year ago, on their trip to Grand Cayman, the first night there, my mom got very sick.

Some people will want to stop reading right here.

Very violently sick. Sick enough that at one point, she bent over to throw up and diarrhea … began.

Now, many of us have been in the situation of diarrhea-while-throwing up, and probably the most likely position you find yourself in,  hopefully, is sitting on the toilet and holding a small trash can in your lap. This is probably the most preferable position.  If there were an Olympics of uncontrollably pooping and barfing simultaneously, judges would probably choose this position as the most desired.

My mom was … in the opposite of that position.

So, that happened. And apparently it happened … all over the hotel bathroom. All over.

She told me today, TODAY, literally more than a year later, that after she cleaned up most of the bathroom, she realized the shower curtain was a total loss. So, she took it down, and wrapped the ruined, disgusting cloth part of the shower curtain in the clean(er) plastic part. And then she carried this plastic-wrapped disaster down to the front desk of the hotel to alert them so they could get a new set of shower curtains.

And what she said to the desk clerk, when she handed over this wad of heinousness, was “My baby had an accident.”

My baby had an accident.

MY. BABY. HAD AN. ACCIDENT.

My mom is in her mid-fifties. It would be biologically … challenging for her to have a baby. My mom was staying in a hotel suite with my aunt and cousin, and they had not checked in with a baby with them. They had not requested a crib from the hotel. They did not have a baby in any way.

Second concern: what could you be doing with a baby to make it poop all over a hanging shower curtain? Something that is bad parenting probably. Holding it perpendicular to the curtain and … squeezing it maybe? Sounds pretty irresponsible.

Next concern: what is an accident in the context of a baby anyway? It’s like when people say “Oh, my dog had an accident,” which means, really, my dog on purpose pooped on the floor, or by accident, I mean, who knows, cause it’s a dog and I don’t know how their conscious decision-making works. A baby poops without regard to its location or wearing or not wearing a poop-catching apparatus, or anything. A baby doesn’t have “accidents.”

Also, I’ve worked in a hotel, and the second, the absolute second, somebody ever handed me a large amount of human excrement wrapped in a shower curtain and then obviously lied about it in a way that was totally unbelievable, I think I would quit. Hand in my nametag and say absolutely no more.

So, final concern (well, not really, because there are other concerns I have but I don’t really have THE REST OF MY LIFE to list them all because that’s how long it would take): at one point, I was her baby, so I am, by association, wrongfully accused of this … incident.

Mostly, I’m disappointed she couldn’t come up with any excuse, any excuse at ALL better than “My baby had an accident.” Like, she had time, the better part of a day, plus just the walk down to the front desk CARRYING THE SHOWER CURTAIN.

This happened more than a year ago, and I know that she JUST NOW TOLD ME because she knew it would be … disappointing to me. And I think she also knew how that would turn out. Which is I laughed so hard I actually threw up. Like, the laughing and using my stomach muscles and crying from the laughing and the tears and snot from the laughing just all combined meant, oh, I gotta go throw up in the sink. (The sink being closer to where I physically was standing at the time my stomach decided I needed to go throw up immediately.)

So I think now I’m going to try and use that ridiculous, obvious lie of an excuse for things. Oh, I parked too close to your car? My baby had an accident. I said your girlfriend was looking fat lately? My baby had an accident. I’m late for work? My baby had an accident. And then I’ll hand over a plastic shower curtain wrapped around a cloth fabric curtain and liquid feces to whomever I need to be excused by. And before they can say, what? you don’t even have a baby? and what kind of “accident” can a baby have that results in vertical, projectile pooping? I can just walk away while they realize what they’re holding, and that I never had a baby to begin with.

• I spent two hours debating if I should go get lunch or not. (I always feel bad leaving work, even for the half hour it takes to go pick something up and come back.)
• I finally decided I was lunch-worthy, and got in the car to go get nachos. (Well, Korean BBQ Taquiera “nachos” that are called nachos but aren’t really even nachos.)

Sub-list of things that happened earlier than today that are necessary at this point for context:

• Five months ago my 2007, just-paid-off, fancy Volkswagen GTI got totaled (through absolutely no fault of my own) when I was rear-ended by an SUV (which was going about 50 mph and I was going about 2 mph making a right-hand turn into the parking lot of the building where I work). This car had everything: satellite radio, cupholders, everything worked and was well-maintained and awesome.
• Last year, I titled and registered in my name my (no longer living) grandfather’s 1989 Porsche 928. This car has a broken radio, no cupholders, and barely anything works and/or was well-maintained. Also, the seats are so buckety that if you spill anything, it just stays there, like a lake, in the deepest butt-part of the seat, presumably forever. This car is also not easy to drive, since what it does have in brute speed, it seriously lacks in subtlety and agility.
• Last weekend, I went to see my mom, and left my normal-person car (a 2002 Volkswagen with 170k miles on it) in her garage, and am driving aforementioned Porsche because the battery was dying and it needs to be driven.

Rejoining the list of today’s events:

• I’m driving back to the office, and a woman in a big sedan makes a left turn out in front of me. She had a stop sign, and I didn’t, but it didn’t really matter since she didn’t stop. I slam on the brakes to avoid hitting her, or having her hit me (that’s how close she pulled out), and my plastic container of nachos inside a plastic bag became a bag of nacho goop on the floor of the passenger seat of aforementioned Porsche.
• The woman then decides she’s made a mistake and tries to make a U turn, and can’t, because the car is too big, so stops four lanes of traffic while she three-points it. I watch the goop bag ooze, and can do nothing about it, because the car is so low-slung I’d need an 8-foot-long arm to reach the floorboard of the passenger seat from the driver’s seat.
• I go back to work and eat what I can salvage from the goop bag.
• I get home tonight and go to take my recycling and check my mail, and realize oh, I have Netflix movies to put in the mail, and then remember I last saw them on my desk at work.
• After an hour of debating, pacing, searching my car and bag and coming up empty, I get dressed (I’d already taken off my work clothes and put on my “house clothes” which are basically pajamas with a sweatshirt), get in the car, drive all the way back up to work and search my office. Then I search the radio studio. Then I search the recording studio. Then I re-search every inch of the building I remember going into today.
• Then I remember the last time I saw the Netflix envelope it was on the edge of my desk before I went to lunch.

Another bit of info necessary:

• I don’t have a trash can inside my office, because the door locks itself, and the cleaning staff come at night, and then my garbage would never get emptied, and people would leave chicken sandwiches in it at night and they’d never go away. So I just pile up things on the edge of my desk to throw out when I get up, on my way out or whatever.

Back to the main list of events:

• After not finding the Netflix envelope, I realize I have to look in the garbage can. And what’s on top of all the regular daily office trash? (Which is basically dry papers.) Right. The nacho-goop-bag.

And now I’ll be polite, and skip a few disgusting steps.

• Under the nacho-goop-bag, I did find my Netflix envelope. And wiped it off. And went ahead and put it in the outgoing mail at work, which is why I’d originally taken it to work this morning in the first place. And then I washed my hands thoroughly. And I may never eat salsa again.

So, on the one hand, yay for not giving up and yay for finding things and yay for tenacity and not having to pay the exorbitant replacement fees for rental dvds. But also, gross. And also, ugh.

It’s moments like this that make me absolutely certain that in the movie version of my life, I’m not going to be played by someone of the adorably-quirky-problem-haver-girl type. Not an Amy Poehler or a Tina Fey or a Zooey Deschanel. It’s going to have to be somebody who can go past that, into the area where a girl’s neroticism and problems are just real and gross and not cute or endearing at all.