Saturday Grab Bag Weirdness

I have this weird persistent cough that I feel like I've had for about a month. That might be annoyance-induced time-dilation, but it's certainly been a matter of weeks. On the one hand it's weird for me because I don't usually get sick and never for very long, unless you count allergies, but this doesn't feel like allergies, which usually assault my sinuses directly. It's also weird because - in total and complete seriousness - it appears to be work-related. The cough will go away over weekends but always comes back on Monday and hangs around until Friday. I don't know if there's a fresh batch of Legionnaire's Disease in the HVAC system in the Big Gray, or - and again this is going to sound like a comedy bit but I'm totally serious - it could be one of my new officemates has introduced a miasma to our workspace (via cigarette smoke or perfume or who-knows-what) which irritates the hell out of my alvioli. Because the persistent cough seems to have started right around the time my two new colleagues showed up.


So, surreally enough, I'm on the verge of going to my supervisor and asking if I can maybe have my desk transferred because I can't stop coughing and I suspect the cause is environmental. The main thing holding me back is that the IT logistics of moving computers are so nightmarish in this agency. In the mean time I am mainlining generic Rite-Aid brand Mucinex, which contains botha cough suppressant and an expactorant. This strikes me as the pharmacological equivalent of putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier in the same room and letting them duke it out. Weird.

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My wife recently took to the notion that I should have a smartphone of some kind. I demurred, and she more or less dropped it, but the whole thing struck me as somewhat odd because I am very accustomed to pining for certain material possessions and not others. I will always want a beefy, lightning-fast high-end laptop, but probably will never buy myself one because they are a bit too pricey to justify. Smartphones, on the other hand, are less pricey in absolute dollars, but arguably equally pricey in relative terms for their particular device-landscape, but I have no desire to own one at all. I'm perfectly content with my current touchscreen phone that flips open to a full keyboard (even though some of my buddies have referred to it as a "girl phone" which I totally missed the gender-normative memo on). I think in large part my wife just wanted to do something nice for me and suggested making room in the budget for me to splurge on a gadget and assumed I would jump at the chance tog et a smartphone, which was a reasonable assumption since most people would, but just turned out to not quite have the desired effect because I am weird.

I said my wife more or less dropped it, by which I mean she didn't press the issue but every once in a while she will point out when we find ourselves in a situation where a smartphone would come in handy. Such as when we were driving to my brother's house in terra incognito New York, and saw multiple roadside restuarants advertising that their menus included "spiedies" which ... what? Like, is that a local thing? It was just the kind of curiousity-tickler that a person with a smartphone would be able to answer immediately, in the car, while the rest of us must needs wait until a proper internet-connected computer presented itself. At which point one might very well have forgotten to remember to look it up.

But I remembered! Apparently it's a kind of marinated meat kabob served on the skewer but also on Italian bread, and you pull the wooden skewer out and then eat it like a sandwich. Mostly confined to Broome County, NY. So there you go.

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Finally a weird bit of blog-keeping ... I had wanted to do a quick follow-up to my Everything Is Different Now post, but the Saturday on which I might have grab-bagged it was the Saturday of my brother's wedding, so I'm finally getting around to it now (long past the point where anyone remembers or cares, but ah well). The main thing was just to give another example of watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with new eyes, specifically the episode where Cordelia drags her to a frat party at the local college (despite Cordy and Buff still being in high school) and someone slips Buffy a roofie. The implication there of course is that your average girl could be overpowered by a couple of fratties (and summarily chained up in the basement and sacrificed to a snake-demon) but the Slayer could kick an entire chapterhouse full of ass, unless she gets drugged. The other implication being frat guys are date-raping dicks and college is kind of scary. And the first time I saw that episode I rolled with it and mostly got nostalgic for campus life and weekend benders and whatnot. The more recent viewing, on the other hand, had my wife and I looking at each other during the scenes where a drunken 16-year-old Buffy is staggering around the frat house and saying to each other "Will somebody please help that poor girl! She needs to be taken home!" Again, we know full well the episode ends with Buffy triumphant and meatheads duly punished, but still that instinctual urge to Be The Responsible Parent will not be silenced. My wife and I hope to have more kids beyond the little guy, but if we end up with a little gal ... hoo boy, I really don't know how I will survive letting her out of the house past age eleven or so.

The second follow-up relates to my reference in that original post (which you may recall was actually about the movie Independence Day) to Adam Baldwin as a young-up-and-comer in 1996. My brother-in-law quite rightly pointed out to me that Adam Baldwin previously played Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket, which is a movie from ... 1987. Clearly this only serves to underscore how eerily ageless Adam Baldwin is as his career currently spans twenty-three years. But I wanted to give credit where credit is due in regards to my brother-in-laws knowledge of the Baldwin filmography.