Ratatouille
So a few days ago I dropped some coffee filters behind the mini fridge at work. When I moved the fridge to retrieve them, a large rat darted out from the corner. I screamed. My co-worker screamed. The rat ran into the adjacent office and over the feet of a third co-worker. She ran into our office and slammed the door, confining the rat to her space.
I was freaking out and ran into the hallway and hyperventilated for a while, and by the time I returned, Facilities and Pest Management had been summoned. Within half an hour, Bob, a mangy guy with long gray hair and thick glasses and a faded sweatshirt, showed up. He planned to catch the rat with his bare hands and "dispatch it," which, he told me quietly, meant breaking its neck. He chased the rat around for a while (I was traumatized and had taken my work to the library), grabbed it by the tail, but then it escaped. So he laid a bunch of traps, deemed the office off-limits, and all of us camped out in the other office for the rest of the day (after I stuck a bunch of phone books in front of the crack under the door). My officemates are animal lovers and talked at length about ways to save Ratatouille, as (s)he was dubbed (my crazy so-called feminist co-worker insisted on the possibility that the rat might be female). They came up with nothing.
So the following day we arrived at work. Bob had called Facilities to clean up the "mess" he had encountered upon arrival, and my co-worker started wailing about Ratatouille's fate. He interrupted the wailing."The rat is fine," Bob claimed. Apparently, the mess had only to do with Ratatouille's overnight bodily functions. "He avoided all the traps and I caught him this morning and set him free." I think this is a total lie, but whatev, it was kind.
I asked Bob how he had gotten into the rat-catching business and it turns out he did three tours in Vietnam and then worked for 11 years in a maximum security prison. He was recruited by the prison's pest control guy, who can deal with all manner of creepy crawlies but gets unhinged by rodents.
"It takes a lot to drop my jaw," he told us. "And the funny thing is, I really love animals. I love bats especially. If I have to catch them, I sing to them, and approach them really gently, because they can't see and they get startled by fast movements. They also get scared by the cold so after I catch them, I put them in my jacket. Then I bring them home. In the summer, everyone on my block has tikki torches and citronella candles and even then they have tons of bugs. I may have bats swooping around in my yard, but it's been years since I've had a mosquito bite."
I'm still horrified by the rat run-in, but I'm really glad I got to meet Bob.
Posted by Dori at 12:43 PM
In Case You've Been Living Under an Iceberg and Haven't Seen This Yet
Posted by Dori at 11:24 PM
The Lewd and the Law
So my co-worker served for three days on jury duty, weighing in on simultaneously the funniest and saddest trial ever. I know that
Melinda, who did time as a reference librarian at a public library, will definitely appreciate the following. So sit back and relax, and break out the Purell.
A young mom was reading to her little kid not far from the public Internet terminals, and she caught a glance of a teenager addressing his adolescent urges in front of one computer. She whisked her daughter away and asked the librarian to call the police. The librarian refused. The mom went to the police station, and the cops were forced to press charges. All this went down in April, and the trial was set for last week.
Over the course of three days, two lawyers tried to convince twelve jurors that the teenager had/had not exposed himself publicly or engaged in lewd and lascivious behavior. The lawyers presented, as evidence, diagrams of the library's Internet terminals, the teenager's sweatshirt (which his attorney claimed was baggy enough to obscure the alleged behavior, and thus introducing reasonable doubt). There was a lot of discussion about what the mom claimed to have seen, which she claimed resembled "the stroking of a tiny hairless animal." She described the guy's package in detail, and the attorney refuted her description based on the distance between the computers (source of p*rn) and the wholesome family area where she'd been situated. My co-worker says that the jurors all looked straight ahead or took detailed notes, and that everyone was terrified that if they so much as glanced at each other, they would all start laughing uncontrollably and be kicked out of the courtroom. In the end, the kid was convicted of indecent exposure and indecent behavior, but not of trying to traumatize a small child. (These are legal terms, obviously.) The judge did the sentencing later. He probably got community service or something, and I guess the episode will be expunged from his record when he turns 18.
So this seems funny, right? Absurd? Everyone in the office (especially me) was laughing. Except, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it actually wasn't funny at all. Turns out the kid was super poor. The reason the sweatshirt was admitted as evidence was because it was the only one he owned (how else would he have remembered which outfit he'd been wearing, seven months later?). He was awkward and had really bad skin. He probably didn't have Internet at home, which was why he was doing his thing (which, let's face it, is the same thing that 99.999% of 15-year-old boys do constantly, without having to discuss it in court) in a public library. He just had the extremely bad luck of being caught. Can you imagine ever living such a thing down at school? Can you imagine looking your mom in the eye after the police call her and tell her what happened? And have her cough up legal fees? Not to mention having to sit in court for three days have have random strangers hear your junk compared to a "tiny hairless animal?"
Even more sad is that while trials for rapists and murderers drag on for years, a 15-year-old checking out tax-supported p*rn gets zipped through the justice system in mere months, taking up an entire courtroom and all its resources for three days, not to mention the time, energy, and patience of twelve jurors. If all that isn't one giant wank, I don't know what is.
Posted by Dori at 6:30 PM
Mother Nature's Hot Flash
So I had a rustic autumn weekend in my hometown in Western Massachusetts. I consumed cider donuts and freshly baked pie. Golden leaves rustled beneath my feet. My parents and I engaged in leaf-peeping of an exceptionally high caliber (photo credit to a visiting university student Yi Feng). A top-flight weekend, all in all.
Posted by Dori at 9:08 PM
It Doesn't Matter What You Wear
So I went to a dinner party this week and did not look cute. It was hosted by two female friends and I was expecting to hang with them, some of their generally very casually dressed peeps, and some assorted offspring. In other words, there would be no dating prospects in attendance. Now almost always, I strive to look cute at parties, because You Never Know. But this time I did not look cute. I wore my glasses, my hair was meh, and I wore jeans and a boring top.
So I arrive at my friend's house and am immediately introduced to "
Mark." Remember "Mark"? The guy with whom I went on some lovely dates last year, and then had some excruciating moments? Well, it's a small world and "Mark" is now dating "Ella" who is friends with "Jesse" (we'll get to "Jesse" in a minute) who went to grad school with the hostess. It took me a minute to place Mark, and then we both realized that we had dated briefly, and both considered whether to acknowledge this, and then both decided to be adults and said breezily, of course, we've already met, how are you, good to see you! Which for the most part was true, because Mark is hilarious and smart. Things didn't work out for us, but I harbor no ill will. I just
really wish I had looked cute at the party.
So. The evening goes on. The food is tasty. "Jesse" is toeing the line between outgoing and domineering. He talks about books: "I just finished this amazing novel about refugees in Hungary. It's by Jane Doe." There's a pause because no one has heard of the author Jane Doe. "You know, the sister of Jim Smith. He wrote
Famous Novel." No one has heard of Jim Smith or his allegedly famous novel either, but we all nod and try to feign intelligence. I'm thinking Jesse is a snobby arrogant jerky jerky, but he's hot. And he kind of grows on me over the course of the evening. He discusses his membership in the gastronomic history club of Harvard, his love of all things culinary, and the recent banquet he prepared for loved ones. I'm really wishing I looked cute but am trying to make up for it by being charming.
After a while the conversation turns to ice cream makers and he says, all off-hand, "my girlfriend really wants me to get one, but the really high-quality ones are very expensive."
You really just can't win. Cute outfit or no.
Posted by Dori at 9:41 AM
Thanks for Coming Out: UpDATE #500, 233
So the guy I sensed wasn't into me? The Jewish lawyer? The one whose dream job would be chief counsel for the Sierra Club? The one who loves his nephew and is close to his family? Who proposed a second date in a cool, under-the-radar authentic Brazilian place? Who is super funny? Who wrote a novella in college? Who believes Bill O'Reilly is the Enemy of All that Is Good and Righteous? Who donated a zillion dollars to the Obama campaign? Who has the same Working Assets credit card that I do, which benefits progressive causes? Who seems emotionally intelligent, and, during Date #2, remembered things I had said during date #1?
Remember that guy?
Well, after aforementioned date #2 I dropped aforementioned guy off at the subway. After an agitated hug which was constrained by the seatbelt (which recoiled somewhat violently after he unfastened it, and hit the side of his face), he turned to me and said:
thanks for coming out.
I guess it is further evidence of his awesomeness that he didn't even lie and said that he'd contact me, or that he'd like to see me again. Since I already put myself out there by asking him out on date #2, I am not going to follow up. The ball is entirely in his court.
And
thanks for coming out? Is like putting the ball back in the can, putting the can in a smelly gym bag, stuffing the gym bag into a locker, and then buying a smoothie for the hot tennis instructor in the cute white pleated skirt.
Posted by Dori at 6:16 PM
