mystic buddha

My old office has become a Thai spa/beauty salon called "Mystic Buddha."

All I can think is that Buddhists must have some equivalent to the Native American sweet grass ceremony or the Catholic Church's exorcism rite, because there would have been some crazy spirits to evict from that place before anyone could start relaxing and rejuvenating. I imagine people going in for a massage and coming out screaming, like me going to lunch in the old days. (below right: me, in the old days.)

The bosses - a husband and wife team I always thought of as Boris and Natasha - once sent around a list of office regulations. A coworker and I spent a happy hour scoffing (scoffing was a regular pastime at my old office) and rewriting the list to include the regulations they would have added had they any idea what went on the office while they were off in Beijing "not seeing any dissidents" or even sitting in their windowed office (affectionately known as the terrarium):

1. Don't drink vodka out of teacups at your desks during working hours.
2. Don't use the office as a coat check when planning to spend the night at the dance club down the street.
3. Don't have sex on the couch in the waiting area. (Actually, I didn't know this had happened, but my coworker assured me it had and she was from Nova Scotia so I believe her.)
4. Don't root through the CFO's garbage to find out how much certain of your coworkers are paid.
5. Don't tell everyone in the office how much certain of your coworkers are paid and you know it's true because you found it written on a piece of paper in the CFO's garbage.
6. Don't knock over the office Christmas tree during an after-hours chair race.
7. Don't make a bong out of a plastic, two-liter Pepsi bottle for in-office use and store it in the kitchen cupboard next to the herbal teas.
8. Don't scratch "NAZIS" into the metal security door installed (rumor had it) to protect the owners from Hungarian loan sharks.
9. Don't continue to check your email on an office computer for two years after you've been fired.
10. Don't sleep under your desk.

I may have to book a massage, just to see if I come out feeling like a new me or like me circa 1998.

and another thing...

I have so much to say today I'm not sure where to begin. I've been saving things up all week for Saturday, when I could give everything a proper airing.

Words

To begin, I had a realization about my job this week. My part-time job. Have I mentioned I'm part time now? I've suspended work on the tunnel. Rather than escaping, I pinned my job to the mat, made it cry out for mercy, and won some important concessions i.e. I only have to work three days a week. (Non sequitor alert! A woman just walked by my window wearing a white trenchcoat and with her platinum blonde hair pulled back in such a tight ponytail that at first glance I thought she was Truman Capote.)

My realization about my job (remember? that's where this all started, before wrasslin' and Truman Capote got into the mix) was that I care about words, even if they are only filling in the spaces between graphs; even if they are describing very dull things; even if they have been arranged and organized by very dull people with only a passing familiarity with my language; even if they are intended for even duller people.

Even, although this is a stretch and I don't always care about them in this circumstance, when the majority are combinations like enterprise software planning, customer relationship management, and voice over internet protocol - groups that make cameo appearances at the beginning of a text then send their acronyms to represent them for the next 150 pages. Like Bush and Condoleeza Rice.

15 minutes of...

I was reading about the former Mr. Britney Spears this week and it struck me that becoming famous isn't so difficult anymore. (And I know what you're thinking, if it's so easy, why haven't I done it? Well, I've been busy.) I am beginning to think Warhol was wrong, and that, in future, we can all look forward to our 15 minutes of anonymity. (And since I have anonymity to spare, I'd be willing to donate some to people like the afore-mentioned Mr. Britney Spears.)

Salon Blues

Is there any place in the world more intimidating than an expensive hair salon? (Do you know the two places that immediately came into my head? Abu Ghraib and Lubyanka. Prisons. And not just any prisons, not the Cape Breton County Correctional Center, for example, which my grade 12 law teacher assured me was a place of spa-like opulence. No, the prisons of totalitarian regimes.)

I'm not even going to write any more about this because I'm guaranteed to end up sounding like Erma Bombeck, and I don't ever want to sound like Erma Bombeck. Suffice it to say, I got my hair cut in an expensive salon recently and I'm still reeling at my own inadequacy as a woman.

Get this: I went in lugging Harold Bloom's The Western Canon in my bag. I had to wait a bit for my "stylist" (who was in the back with the other off-duty stylists watching us through one-way glass and laughing, don't argue with me on this) and was about to haul out the Bloom when I realized I might as well write "UNKEMPT PSEUDO-INTELLECTUAL" on my forehead. So I flipped through a Vogue with Angelina Jolie on the cover. She might not have as much insight into Shakespeare's Falstaff, but she's got great hair. As a juxtaposition, this works well: Bloom loves Falstaff for his "perpetual gaity." And Falstaff may, indeed, be merry but hair, you must realize, is serious.