Cardiogirl: 19% body fat 100% fun

I think I am ready to talk about something other than the craziness that has been consuming me. I’m still sad, I’m still uptight and I am still feeling like a big old mess. But I feel I am ready to write one of my more standard posts.

Cue Gloria Estefan’s song, “Coming Out of the Dark.” Hear that crescendo of hope in the gospel singer’s cheesy refrain?

“Coming out of the dark,
I finally see the light now
It’s shining on me

Coming out of the dark,
I know the love that saved me
You’re sharing with me”

Well I ain’t quite there yet, so you can just take off the choir-issue robe, stop clasping hands and swaying back and forth with the back up singers.

I didn’t say I was over it, but I guess my sarcasm is back. Sarcasm, my dear friend, how I have missed thee, betch.

So as you know, we are ensconced in Winter these days. With Winter comes oranges as the fruit o’ the season. I like oranges. I got nothing against oranges. And strangely enough, while I am right-handed in every other endeavor, I cannot peel an orange with my right hand.

I use my right hand to score the orange with this handy-dandy orange peeler from Tupperware and then I actually peel the skin off with my left hand. I have attempted to peel the skin off with my right hand with disastrous, sticky results.

I find that odd and it’s not really relevant to this story. It’s just an interesting side note before we get down to business.

So long ago, in a land far away, I worked at a mortgage company in the Marketing Department. My boss was pretty much a jerk. He was a big picture guy who didn’t really think about any of the details or the deadlines involved in any project. He would promise a client the moon and then casually mention to me ten minutes before the meeting that I needed to whip up a design for that very meeting.

When I would question him, in my anal-retentive way, why he never mentioned this before, why I did not have this written in my Franklin Planner, he would then sort of stammer and try to explain that he was sure he explained the need for this project to me a couple of weeks ago while we were talking in the morning over coffee. He would try to recreate the faux conversation we had in an effort to “remind” me how I must have forgotten the assignment.

I guess that makes him a lying boss.

Oh, this is totally irrelevant, but I just have to share this with you. He had a coffee mug that he used daily, just like I did. After I was finished drinking coffee for the day, I would wash my coffee cup out and leave it on my desk the rest of the day, so the next morning when I came in and finished brewing a new pot, I had a clean coffee cup ready to go.

Tim drank coffee all day long. Frequently he had a coffee cup half full of cold coffee, from the previous day. One day, after he had been off for a couple of days, he came walking to the coffee pot with that coffee cup, half full of three-day old coffee mixed with cream.

I watched silently in horror as he dumped the old coffee into the trash can, surveyed the ring of old coffee that remained inside the cup half way down, shrugged his shoulders and poured a new cup of hot coffee into that skanky cup. He then took an investigative sip before he walked away down the hall, leaving me standing in front of the coffee pot attempting to fight back the dry heaves.

Anyway, he was annoying. And Jeanne, a friend of mine in a different Marketing Department at the same company, called him Ed to his face. His name was actually Tim, but she referred to him as Ed around him, so she could talk about him behind his back, in front of his face. She let me in on the secret a couple of months after I was hired.

And then she would talk about what a disorganized loser Ed was, in front of Tim, with a big smile and an evil glint in her eye. I really enjoyed her; she was fun. Of course, as is the case with most of my friends, she now lives approximately 2000 miles away in Utah. Hey Jeanne! How you doin’?

Okay, so Tim was my boss. I worked at that company for a total of eight years, and had worked there with Tim for almost two years before I got married. Out of sheer obligation, I invited my boss to the wedding. He returned the RSVP saying he was planning on attending with his wife. All the brides out there know that means I paid for his and his wife’s dinner.

He never showed up at the wedding. That would have been fine, if he had at least turned down the invite, so I didn’t have to pay for his and his wife’s uneaten meal. Further, when one accepts a wedding invitation, there is a social expectation, here in the US, that the person who accepted the invitation will fork over a wedding gift. It’s just how things work. Go ask Emily Post.

When I returned back to work, after my week-long honeymoon, Tim had left a Tupperware orange peeler on my desk as a wedding gift. Just in case you’re wondering, it wasn’t wrapped. And there was no card.

Apparently Tim’s wife sold Tupperware and had an extra orange peeler. I learned that while standing in front of the coffee pot my first morning back as a married woman. And I had, indeed, mentioned earlier in the year that it would be nice to have a 99 cent orange peeler from Tupperware, yet I didn’t know anyone who sold Tupperware.

It looks exactly like this orange peeler on sale on ebay.

Our orange peeler gets a lot of use in the winter, when oranges are in season. I enjoy the orange peeler, as it is a handy tool.

And for the last 13 years, every single time I peel an orange I think of that cheap bastard, Tim, and I wonder if his wife still sells Tupperware.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 30th, 2007 at 6:40 am and is filed under Observations, Stream of Consciousness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.