Who Would Have Thought That So Little Material Could Cause So Much Vexation?

I actually don’t think that Mr. Lunch Hour was necessarily being truly creepy. In fact, he voiced his comments with a certain apparent sympathy, like he was saying, “Boy, it’s one of those days for you, huh?” (Like I was “somebody with a case of the Mondays” from the film “Office Space” or something.) It was disheartening to me to recognize that my mauled stockings were so noticeable, and at least as disheartening to recognize that I’m in an environment where I can’t really get away with the sorts of sartorial slips that I’m otherwise careless about.

By mid-morning, so many officemates both female & male had mentioned the condition of my panty hose that I felt tempted to distribute a memo about it just so I wouldn’t have to repeat the same conversation again. Contrary to repeated suggestions—and quite possibly my own better judgment—I did NOT sacrifice my lunchtime nap on the nylon altar. Propriety be damned: I need to sleep during my mid-day break or I may not muster sufficient verve for the afternoon. (Yes, I resemble a preschooler in my addiction to daily naps. And I resemble a homeless person in that I sleep in my car.)

Furthermore, I reasoned that everyone who was likely to have seen me at work would have already seen my ripped hose throughout the morning. If they would find such tears offensive, they would have already been offended by lunch. If their opinion of me would degrade, it would have already have degraded by the time I would have had the chance to run to Walgreen’s anyhow.

I Look Like I Was Mauled By A Bear Five Years Ago

I have never fully made peace with panty hose. Tights I’m good with, by and large. They are opaque and substantial in the leg and usually pretty forgiving in the waistline. Panty hose—whisper-y sheer in the leg, cruel in the upper regions—are an unavoidable bane in my professional wardrobe. They are the astronomical gasoline prices of my work wear: I will rage against them vehemently, knowing all the while that my presently chosen way of living requires that I deal with them. I may try to mitigate their—gas prices and panty hose—strangle-hold--by reducing my elective driving or wearing more slacks—but no effort to that end can really be expected to be total. My current lifestyle requires that I spend at least some of my time wearing sheer, flesh-toned nylon stockings while burning black gold in my car’s engine. (I may join the Peace Corps just to avoid panty hose and high gas prices. Is that wrong?)

Today I’m feeling especially pugnacious towards both the hose and the gas prices. The latter because I filled up my car’s tank this morning. That alone generally sets my mood afoul. What a shame that, commuting in Houston, I have to fill up my tank every few days. The former because, when I arrived at work, I discovered gigantic runs—tears! gashes!—in my stupid stockings. They were not little unobtrusive fissures in the material, but wide swaths of split nylon. I look like a survivor of a grizzly attack, wounds faded to flesh-colored scars.

I haven’t learned to keep a spare pair of panty hose on my person at all times. So, I’m stuck at work in ripped hose. If I remove them, I risk reprimand for violate the dress code—no bare legs in the office. If I keep them on, I have to tolerate the sort of comments that I’ve already received from several people already. I’d like to think that no one notices these things, but that’s a mother-fucking lie.

The first person to comment was an executive—a man in his sixties—who observed my panty hose before he even greeted me with “good morning.” He then proceeded to say, “Well, I guess you’ll be buying a replacement pair at lunch, huh?” This suggests that I will sacrifice both precious nap time on my lunch hour AND precious fuel from my gas tank in order to drive somewhere to purchase another pair of loathsome panty hose mid-day. This seem doubly or trebly offensive to me.

But one ought to be careful about what one finds offensive. The objects of our hostility can be instructive.

This was the month that people began to suspect that terrorists had infiltrated Middle America, set up underground tunnels in the rural areas, like gophers. During any moment, it was feared, a terrorist might tunnel up into your house and replace your dog with something that resembled your dog but was actually a bomb. This was a new era in terrorism. The terrorists were now quicker, wittier, and more streetwise. They spoke the vernacular, and claimed to be philosophically sound. They would whisper into the wind something mordant and culturally damning about McDonald's, Jesus, and America--and then, if they wanted to, if the situation eschatologically called for it, they would slice your face with a KFC spork.

People began to quit their jobs. They saw that their lives were small and threatened, and so they tried to cherish more, to calm down and appreciate things for once. But in the end, bored in their homes, they just became depressed and susceptible to head colds. They filled their apartments with pets, but then neglected to name them. They became nauseated and unbelieving. They did not believe that they themselves were nauseated, but that it was someone else who was nauseated--that it was all, somehow, a trick. A fun joke. "Ha," they thought. Then they went and took a nap. Sometimes, late at night and in Tylenol-cold hazes, crouched and blanket-hooded on their beds, they dared to squint out into their lives, and what they saw was a grass of bad things, miasmic and low to the ground, depraved, scratching, and furry--and squinting back! It was all their pets, and they wanted names. They just wanted to be named!

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake. It was something else. A get-together on Easter Island. You, the botched clone of you, the Miami Dolphins; Coco-Puffs, paper plates, a dwindling supply of clam juice. That was life.

The economy was up, though, and crime was down. The president brought out graphs on TV, pointed at them. He reminded the people that he was not an evil man, that he, of course, come on now--he just wanted everyone to be happy! In bed, he contemplated the abolition of both anger and unhappiness, the outlawing of them. Could he do that? Did he have the resources? Why hadn't he thought of this before? These days he felt that his thinking was off. Either that, or his thinking about his thinking was off. He began to take pills. Ginseng, Ginkoba. Tic-Tacs. It was an election year, and the future was uncertain. Leaders all over the globe began to go on TV with graphs, pie charts, and precariously long series of rhetorical questions.

--Tao Lin, "Love Is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists"

My Bloody "I" Situation

Thanks to those of you on- and off-line who've expressed concern about my eye, but I'm quite confident that I'm okay. It's healing really rapidly and doesn't hurt at all anymore. I'm mostly just amused by the social ramifications and implications, not worried about the physical damage.

I thought immediately how the way that other people react to it is sort of a social litmus test of sorts, but I reflected later that how I reacted myself is sort of a litmus test of my confidence in my general appearance. It didn't even occur to me until well after the fact that I might be embarrassed by having a gross bloody eye. I didn't feel ugly or anxious. I didn't even consider that I would wish that I could, like, hide out at home until it healed until a well-meaning friend said that she was sorry that I had to go out in public with my eye in that state. I didn't even think of it like a bad hair day! Instead, I was just entertained by it.

I don't really know what my response says about me. That I am fascinated by physical anomalies and human carnage? That I generally feel secure enough about how I look that it seems absurd that a bloody eye for a few days would threaten my self-concept? What does it say that I took more pleasure in openly acknowledging--even drawing attention to--my little deformity? Maybe it's not unlike times on this blog over the years when I've openly acknowledged my much more serious shortcomings: I feel lighter when I'm not hiding what ails me. If I offer them first, my weaknesses (real or popularly conceived) no longer feel like they have so much power over me.

I just don't dig on embarrassment. I just don't dig on shame. Where the hell did they ever get me? Did they ever make me a better person?

When I got promoted to a position at work a while back, in a field I had zero experience in, I told my new boss, "I am probably going to have a ton of questions and make a ton of mistakes. I'm not claiming to know anything about this stuff. I think I'm just going to save us both a lot to time and trouble and just ask those questions even if they make me look dumb and admit when I screw up even if that's disappointing. Otherwise, we're just going to waste a lot of time and energy with me trying to pretend I know what's going on when I don't and covering up what I've messed up. Is that okay with you?" Oddly enough, this seemed to go over pretty well.

Maybe it comes to this: I've spent most of my life trying to, if not be perfect, make others think that I am. Neither ever worked, naturally. And I've squandered a shit load of psychic energy on the anxiety of working towards those impossible goals and roiling in torment over the inevitable failure to meet them. It never got me anywhere I wanted to be. Self-loathing never made me a better person. Self-loathing never made me enjoy my life more. All that self-hatred, all that protection of a false image, all that desperate, insecure defensiveness was just a fucking waste.

The world is too interesting, too exciting, too full of questions, too full of cool shit to waste a moment in it. Bloody eyes happen. They always will--whether I want to hide them from others' view or I find them a reason for amusement and curiosity.

It’s Really Only Funny If She Is Wearing Her Habit

After initial conversations that, despite their preliminary delicacy, could be alembicated to roughly “hey, have you noticed my/your eye is bloody?” at least a few of my coworkers clearly felt comfortable enough with my current Eye Situation to turn it into a running gag. Much of this tomfoolery was at the expense of my dignity, and a goodly portion of it came from my own mouth. I loved this, however. I loved this almost as much as when a former coworker would make jokes about his own amputated arm. HIS OWN AMPUTATED ARM. Now, that’s a stellar sense of humor!

Tangential to my own bloody eye, one woman offered a story about her children’s piano teacher, a Catholic sister, who passed out while recovering from general anesthesia after a routine surgery. She hit her head on the hospital bathroom sink on the way down to the floor, earning a respectable shiner in the process. A nun with a black eye!

Many jokes about nuns with black eyes followed—nuns in pubs, nuns in street gangs, nuns playing baseball, etc.—though none (ha!) so amusing to me as the simple image of a nun with a black eye. I don’t know why I was so entertained by this image. I still am! I love nuns. I love the juxtaposition of contrasting elements—visual irony, if you will. Bring that shit together and we’ve got some gold.

The Bloody Eye Situation

While washing my hands at the end of a visit to the ladies’s toilet yesterday, I noticed in the mirror that my left eye was bloody. There wasn’t blood actually trickling from my eye socket (thank God!), but there was a nasty amount of blood in/on my eyeball. Yikes!

Little burst blood vessels on one’s eyeball are nothing extraordinary, of course. I’ve had plenty of them before—from coughing or sneezing hard or, back in the day, from vomiting. Not only can I not attribute my current bloody eye to those pedestrian causes, but this looks much more gory than just a few busted vessels. It looks like I’ve been in a bar fight and caught the meaner end of a broken beer bottle.

I’m guessing that some tiny debris lacerated my eyeball . It is rather tender and feels scratched, but is not extraordinarily painful. I don’t recall any incident that made me think, “Sweet God, this is going to leave a mark.” When I reflect on the many times I’ve jabbed myself in the eye with a mascara wand, or poked myself while distractedly putting on my eyeglasses, or ashed a cigarette in a stiff breeze, or otherwise tempted the eye-damage Fates, and yet not suffered this sort of visible injury, I can’t imagine what exactly happened yesterday to cause such an angry looking eyeball gash. In fact, I was taking apart a piece of office equipment yesterday—another story unto itself, one involving men who would rather call for professional service than even think about trying to fix something and me, someone who refuses to be bested by a simple machine—and I thought, “I should probably be wearing protective eye gear of some sort.” But my fears of having a metal object fly into my eye socket as I was prying and prodding went unmaterialized. Or, more accurately, I THOUGHT they had. Until I saw my bloody eye. I don’t remember any sharp bits hitting me in the face, but the coincidence does seem pretty great, probably too great to believe.

Today the blood is not as dark and concentrated, but it is diffused over a larger area, making me less concerned but evidently making it look no less—probably more--dramatic to others. I say “evidently” because yesterday friends at work kept exclaiming, “Oh, my God! Your eye is bleeding!” Given their responses, I imagine that everyone who was not explicitly responding this way was refraining from doing so out of decorum and not because they had not noticed. It looks pretty vicious, like I’ve sustained a minor head trauma or something.

Since the physical discomfort is mere irritation, and I’m pretty confident that the damage is nothing that requires medical treatment, I’m mostly just sickly amused by The Bloody Eye Situation. How people behave in response to my unpleasant appearance fascinates me. Of course, matters are made worse by the fact that the unpleasantness is located IN MY FREAKING EYE, meaning that usual strategies for, say, not staring at someone’s gimp-y leg or missing arm, like maintaining steady eye contact, won’t do the trick under these circumstances. Which people ask me what happened? Which ones keep averting their eyes when conversing? One coworker has mentioned nothing, but has compulsively rubbed her own eye throughout our exchanges since the emergence of The Bloody Eye Situation.

And what about my own behavior? Do I voluntarily acknowledge The Bloody Eye Situation, even if just to put people at ease, to let them know that I know that my eye is all bloody? Would I make them more uncomfortable by bringing it up? Should I just find ways to pepper my speech with “eye” (or “I”) as much as possible today, just to mess with people?

Maybe I should just take this opportunity to live out one of my inveterate fashion dreams—to sport an eye patch. I think I could do a wicked Elle Driver impersonation right now.

" . . . At the beginning of this season Josef Zotter will hand-scoop his creations starting with the cocoa bean . . . ."


DJ was right. The above picture of Josef Zotter needed to be included as a follow-up to the earlier Zotter chocolate post.

I'm not sure what precisely it means that he will "hand-scoop his creations," especially if that hand-scooping only starts with the cocoa bean. Does this mean that Herr Zotter runs his fingers through every ingredient and finished product available from Zotter Schokoladen Manufaktur? I do not know. Does this make Zotter chocolates tastier? I do not know. Is this practice even sanitary? I do not know, nor do I wish to know. What do I know? I know that this is the image of a man who loves chocolate.

And I want to taste the chocolate that inspires that sort of affection.