2004-02-23 - 11:16 p.m.
i work in an office. working in an office is a lot like being in high school. you go there in the morning, sit at your desk, have lunch in the lunchroom. you get the weekends off. on holidays you have little parties with cupcakes and all that kind of bullshit. sometimes they try to bribe you do extra work with the promise of a pizza party. (you mean i can work tons of overtime and never do anything fun, then, at the end of the month, get to have some lukewarm pizza at my desk? AWESOME, i don't even like pizza!) at least that is what it is like at my job.
a week or so before valentine's day, they put out this flyer saying that we were gonna have a party, and everyone was gonna pass out valentines and they were gonna have a contest for the best valentines mailbox. you know, like the shoebox things from elementary school.
i was real jazzed. i mean, i am not all about "participating". i think it is some kind of leftover thing from when i was some high school asshole. i just don't get into that stuff. but the valentines mailbox was right up my alley. i just love that kind of crafty-ass crap. and i was pretty convinced that i would be able to completely WHOOP ASS. IN YOUR FACE, ACCOUNTING!!! SUCK ON MY AWESOME VALENTINES MAILBOX, MOTHERFUCKING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY DEPARTMENT!!!!! whew.
so, i went to CVS, all power-hungry. i had my eyes on the prize. i got all kinds of tissue-paper and glue, and i got this irridescent blue paper stuff. i got the sweetest-shaped box. i went home, and parked out at the kitchen table. i cut all the tissue paper into one-inch squares. then i started glueing little tufts of tissue paper on the box, slowly and methodically. super anal-retentive. i was gonna make the goddamn fluffiest and romantic box ever.
(one hour later)
guy: what are you doing?
me: making a valentines box for the contest at work.
guy: what is the prize?
me: i dunno. power. EXTREME POWER
guy: i bet the prize is candy. you are gonna feel real dumb when you spend two days making a valentines box, and you just win candy. you don't even eat candy.
me: the prize is POWER. maybe it will be candy, but the candy will come with great power.
(three hours later)
my fucking fingers started hurting like hell. the box was only an eighth of the way done. tufting takes forever. i seemed to forget the last time when i tufted something, and it took me a month to make a penguin-shaped pinata. things started to look bleak.
the next day after work, i started working on it again. i had to have it done the next day. i put a couple more tufts on it, and then i sat in the bathtub and read cosmo for two hours and went to bed.
i don't even think i went to work that day. the sheer thought of all the power left me so weak that not only could i not finish my valentines box, i had to take a sick day.
(for some reason this story reminds me of science fair in eighth grade. i had this awesome idea for this project, and i worked on it real hard for two days, and interviewed all kinds of people in my class, then the day before science fair, i saw how much more i had to do, all making awesome posters and compiling data, and scrapped everything. i changed my hypothesis to "exercise raises your heart rate", and just made up all the data off the top of my head, and cranked that fucker out in two hours. i guess its not too much like the story, i mean i actually finished it and went to school the next day, but oh well.)
love, natalie
