Yesterday morning I got a text from my boss, who used to be my real boss and now is my kind-of boss since I'm just freelancing. I don't know why I just said all that and I'm becoming one of those terrible storytellers. Maybe I'll start saying, "Wait, let me back up" somewhere in the story, too.
So there I was, MINDING MY OWN BUSINESS (I have to get over hating that phrase), when the text came.
BOSS: Hey, June, why don't you take today off? Then you can work five hours each Thursday and Friday, using up all the hours we've budgeted for you in September.
JUNE: PARRRRRTAYYYY! BACK THAT ASS UP! RAISE THE ROOF! THE ROOF! THE ROOF! THE ROOF IS ON FIRE!
Apparently I was going to party like it was 1984. And 1990. And whenever Back that Ass Up was a song.
Oh, I just looked. It was 1999. Yay! I was gonna party like it's 1999. Yeah yeah yeah.
By the way, I want Back That Ass Up played at my funeral. I want you to give no explanation for it whatsoever.
How many songs have I commanded you play at my funeral? You're all gonna be there six hours, just listening to New Order and Juvenile and 76 Trombones. No, it was Marvin who wants 76 Trombones, isn't it? He wants 76 Trombones and Whoot, There It Is. Geez, should someone tell his current girlfriend? I feel like my wishes won't be so listened to anymore, once Marvin's feeling the silk.
Honestly, do you know anyone who gets off on tangents faster than me? My friend used to call me the Queen of the Nonsequiter. Eventually I'd go off on one of those tangents and she'd just say, "Are you the QUEEN?"
She'd be queening out right now.
So, whenever I have an unexpected day off, I always start out with such hope. Oh, I can go to the farmers market, get a bunch of crackers and desserts and other processed food like I always do there, then I can take my dry cleaning in, because my prom dress and wedding gown are practically in that pile for the dry cleaner. And hey, my oil needs changing and I could stock up on migraine meds. I mean, there's so much I can accomplish on a day off.
But before I left, I noticed the house was kind of a wreck.
There was just stuff hither and yon. Like, why did ABBA need a pick? Are they digging out from something? Why do we always have to see ABBA in those one tshirts, the ones they had made with the animals of their country on them? Obviously these were the go-to tshirts, and I'm not really certain I get it.
There was just kind of crap everywhere, and a big hairball on the couch. BAH! I enjoy that not-at-all precarious coffee cup in the corner of the couch. Nice.
Attractive. Don't you feel welcome, with my bunched-up tablecloth and clothes rack table?
So I straightened everything up, because it was bugging me. Then I did laundry, which resulted in this:
MORE clothes on the dining-room table! Go, June! Back that ass up!
Iris has been totally judgy about the whole thing, and she can barely SEE this mess.
So somehow, once I started putting things away and separating ABBA from their pick and such, I realized I had these two boxes of meds in the closet. So I got those out and began disposing of any expired stuff, which was pretty much everything.
"You threw out expired meds?" asked Ned, who clearly leads a whole dark thug life I know nothing about, because he said, "You could SELL those on the street and make a fortune. You're an unemPLOYed person. You should've considered that!"
He was all vehement, like I was telling him I didn't have a 401(k). Expired Mucinex is going for top dollar in the streets, I hear.
And also what streets? Do I just go outside right here and shake my meds? Shake my moneymaker, as it were?
I noticed I had a can of Solarcaine that had expired in August of 2007. We MOVED here in August of 2007, which means we schlepped an entire can of expired Solarcaine across the country. "You use AEROSOL CANS for sunburn? What's wrong with aloe vera?" judged Ned, who had become thug Al Gore all of a sudden.
Remind me not to tell things to Ned about my day.
I felt proud of my accomplishments, with the throwing out of the meds and the straightening up, and just as I was getting ready to leave and have fun at the farmers-of-processed-foods market, the mail came.
My cell phone bill was in there. It was hideous. I've never had a large cell phone bill before, and it turns out I'd gone over my minutes TALKING TO STREET-DRUGS NED, over there. From now on we're using my, you know, actual phone to talk. Last night was the first time he'd ever called me on my real phone. What is this world coming to?
My point is, I called AT and their T to see if we could reduce the damn bill (we could. You never know about these things, but they did it. I'm not saying Mrs. AT&T Customer Service Woman was what you'd call cuddly, but she did it because I'd never yakked on my cell phone like a teenager before), and somehow she got on the topic of me using The Cloud.
The Cloud. What the hell.
"Oh, The Cloud blooos your bleedely bloos and you can blah de blah blah! It's great!"
Does everyone else feel like computer talk makes no sense? And when she showed me how to put The Cloud on my phone, she said, "Go to your phone face" and I was all, now what now? And she said, "You know, your phone face."
If you ever want to get on my nerves, be sure, when I ask for clarification, to say EXACTLY THE SAME THING ALL OVER AGAIN, because I'm SURE to get it that way. What the Sam Holy Hill is my PHONE FACE? Is it like an O face? I've never heard of such a thing.
Nevertheless, eventually my phone got cloudy or whatever and yay, and then I headed out to take back that Ulta bag you saw above on my table/laundry hamper, there.
Yes, I still hate Ulta. But sometimes you have to go, like you have to go to the doctor or Applebees. And about a year ago, they discontinued my favorite foundation, which by the way I've been searching for PRETTY MUCH MY WHOLE LIFE, and once I found it I had it for five years or so and boom. The geniuses at Smashbox decided, "Let's bug June. No more foundation for her! Let her blotch for the world to see!"
So, seriously, probably nine months ago I went to Ulta and told one of the helpful sales zygotes the tale of my foundation, and she said, "I recommend this one, as a replacement" and she got me a teensy bottle, a Thumbelina botttle, of foundation and gave it to me to try.
Girl, I'd have this foundation's children if there were an app for that. I would MATE with this foundation, which I guess is kind of the same thing as saying I'd have its children. No one ever promised I'd be articulate. I would change my last name to This Foundation. June This Foundation.
And do you think I can recall what kind I tried? And do you think the helpful fetuses at Ulta wrote it down? THREE TIMES now I've been back there, told my story to some blank-faced salesgirl, she suggests another foundation and I come home and put it on and do kabuki theater. NO ONE has found for me the foundation I was given in the Thumbelina bottle. Oh, that stuff is lovely. And I've managed to DRAG OUT that sample all year. I meter it out like it's gold or really good heroin, which Ned is probably selling expired on the street while we talk.
So yesterday, since I had all the time in the world, I returned the last Marcel Marceau foundation they'd tried on me and decided this time I was gonna look at EACH KIND IN THERE till I found the stuff they'd given me in that sample.
Girl, I was over there fingering so many foundations you'd have thought I had a bottom-of-your-house fetish. And I never said I was a person who made a lot of sense. I tried Smashbox's new stuff. I tried Benefit. I tried Elizabeth Arden, even. Finally? FINALLY? I went over to Urban Decay.
And there? Like Jesus in the manger? Is what I am pretty certain was the foundation in my Thumbelina sample. It had the consistency, the color, the oh-doesn't-June This Foundation-look-flawless thing. Oh! I'd FOUND it! I just had to spend a little TIME, is all. So I cleaned my foundation-filled hand and went back to the Urban Decay section?
They don't have it. THEY DON'T HAVE IT. All they had was the sample.
........{insert frowny-face emoticon if I believed in them}.
I called over a sales girl, who was drinking from her sippy cup and spilling it on her onesie. "Oh. Yeah. We're out of that? They have? Like, a really big demand for these?"
Yes. And god forbid a store like Ulta, such a SMALL LOCAL STORE, would participate in the concept of supply and demand. GOD FORBID. And I can TELL you why there's a demand for it. It's the only makeup they sell that doesn't make you look like you're Shields and Yarnell.
"DO THEY SELL THIS AT SEPHORA?" I asked, as loudly as I could in the hopes everyone would stampede out with me. "Yes, they do," said the salesgirl, looking for her Diaper Genie.
I huffed out of there, but to tell you the truth, the only way I was gonna be able to afford the foundation at Ulta was because I was exchanging it for the one I'd already bought. So I didn't go to any Sephora. But I hope they THOUGHT that's what I was doing, and I hope they all cried into their crib bedding all night.
So, when I got home, I plugged my phone into my computer, as I am wont to do, and it did the thing it always does--"bleek!" It makes a little beep sound at me, which means if I took any pictures it's gonna load them and so forth.
But then? THEN? Do you know what happened?
It made all my pictures go away. ALL OF THEM. Well, that's not true. ONE picture popped up, of some flowers I photographed on March 3, and I have NO IDEA WHY it saved that particular photo. But for the last year and a half? All my pictures? Gone.
Oh, I clicked and I searched and I went into the Finder and dude. No photos.
TWO HOURS WITH APPLE CARE LATER ("It CAN'T be that you joined The Cloud, ma'am. That just makes no sense." Oh REALLY? Because when I woke up this morning I had 2,063 photos. Now I have one. Of flowers. From March 3. I get on this stupid cloud and miraculously that same day, ALL MY PHOTOS ARE GONE. But it can't be The Cloud.) (Hey, you, get off of my cloud.) I finally got ALL TWO THOUSAND SIXTY-THREE photos on my DESKTOP, where I had to PLUNK EACH ONE INDIVIDUALLY back in the iPhoto thing.
Perhaps you're wondering, Hmmm. June's mood. Was it sparkling when she had to do this?
THE ANSWER IS NO.
I did find this photo, since I looked at OVER TWO THOUSAND OF THEM last night, and it bugs me. What was I doing? Why so glum-ish? Was I drunk? When did I get such obvious labial-nasal folds? Is it time for whatever that injectable is called? Abreva? No, that's for cold sores. Whatever it is, I probably had some, expired, in my cupboard.
Anyway that was my stupid day off. If anyone desires some expired Mucinex, I could dig it out the trash.
