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No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Saturday, July 30, 2005

Last week I spent pretty much a whole day sitting around a table in a conference room. This was one of those conference rooms with big windows and a view and glass jugs with iced water and condensation on the jugs under tasteful recessed lighting on a settee in a built-in alcove. As always when in that kind of conference room, the question that needs to be asked is whether the conference is one for good… or one for evil.

I didn’t really feel that evil, being there, but the chairs we were all sitting in around the table definitely indicated otherwise. They were these big, black leather contraptions, with lots of dials and levers underneath. Significantly, the backs of the chairs rose up and fanned out, way up past the sitter’s head level. They were the kind of chairs where if you spun around to face away from the door, you would be completely concealed from sight to somebody entering the conference room as you sat there in your chair, stroking your evil-cat, or dreaming about your world-destroying laser that is almost complete, save for one last, crucial component, the worlds biggest ruby, currently held in the private collection of some eccentric billionaire in a mansion in Paris! But when I have that ruby, I will install it in my laser and the world will be mine! Ha Ha Ha!! HA HA HA HA!!!

But really, I self-aggrandize. I was there at that meeting of (apparent) evil-doers only in my usual role at this kind of thing - the role very accurately portrayed by that guy acting as Chris Kattan’s (sp?) assistant in the movie Undercover Brother. Most of the action was going down at the other end of the table from where I was sitting. But let me tell you, even in my limited capacity, it’s not easy being a super-villain. After about an hour or so, I realized that somebody had left my evil villain chair on its “eject” setting. It was really uncomfortable. And my ass was killing me, even with like four hours to go. I reached under the seat, thinking that maybe I could adjust the setting, but my hand found an unruly mess of control dials and joysticks and levers. In the end I decided not to activate any of the buttons or switches. Who knows what one of those levers or dials would have done? So I just sat there and took it.

The guy next to me, further yet from the action, he couldn’t take it after only like three hours. I don’t think there was anything wrong with his chair. He was just SO FUCKING BORED. He kept fidgeting around, there in my peripheral vision. I looked over at one point, and he lifted up his arms and slid down out of his chair, down under the table like a misbehaving four-year-old at a restaurant where the service is slow. The guy crawled around under his end of the table for a while, looking up at the underside of the table and feeling it with his hands. I’m not sure what he was doing – looking for gum maybe? I wanted to pass him a coloring book and some crayons or something to keep him occupied, like maybe one of those restaurant placemats that have connect-the-dots puzzles next to the kids’ menu. After a while, the guy crawled back up into his chair. He was an older guy too, and it was really hilarious. This is the kind of old guy I want to be. The next time I looked over at him, he was sitting in his chair like a good boy, but he was leaned really far forward and was pressing his face flat against the table, squishing his nose and pushing the ear-pieces of his glasses up off his ears. “Ohhh!” He moaned with boredom against the table through his squished lips, “Oooohhhhhh!” At this point, he didn’t care if anybody could hear him. Everybody at the table just politely ignored him, except for me, because I thought it was really funny. I guess I have a lot to learn about being a super-villain.

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

I’m off the ‘tips. The ‘tips are what got me in this mess in the first place. They SEEM like they’d get the wax out of my ears, being all absorbent and cottony and all. But really, whenever I slide a ‘tip deep, deep into my ear canal, I think it just pushes the wax in there further, all hard and compacted, like a waxy little ear-clogging stink-nugget. I’ve got two wax-nuggets, one for each ear. But the one in the left ear is the worst. It’s not so dense, but (counter-intuitively) that’s bad. The left ear nugget is big and soft and wet and diffuse, and it’s clogged the whole of my left ear canal.

So now it sounds to me like I’m underwater all the time, except for just a second after I press that little flap of cartilage down over my ear hole and let it up, and it seals for a second and then releases, and the pressure differential opens up my ear canal and lets me hear for just a second. Sometimes when I press it, my ear stays open, but ninety-nine percent of the time it goes back to clogged in a microsecond. I call that little flap of cartilage my “reset button.” At best, pressing it is a temporary fix. I’m in a deplorable state. I can’t hear on the way to work and assholes are sneaking up behind me on the el platforms and startling me with their presence. And I’ve had to turn my T.V. up way loud, like a senior citizen, and now I am shamed because everybody in my apartment building knows I am a huge fan of Elimidate. Worst of all, when my boss comes into my office yelling and pointing at me and gesticulating, I have no idea what he’s yelling at me about and I have to further complicate the situation by furiously pressing my reset button while asking, “what?” “what?” “what?” “I can’t hear you, my reset button’s not working,” “what?”

Whenever I tell somebody my ear is clogged up, they’re always like, “that’s what Q-tips are for!” That’s what Sharon P. said. But I told her the ‘tips were what got me into this mess in the first place. I told her that I was off the ‘tips for good, choosing rather to swab my ears with hand-twisted sticks of toilet-paper. So I guess that’s why she made such a big deal when she caught me in the bathroom of her apartment, me with a ‘tip from the jar by her mirror in each of my ears. I knew I was spending too much time quietly in the bathroom to not arouse suspicion, not having established a diarrhea cover story or anything.

“Aha! I knew it!” she shouted and laughed. “You’re back on the ‘tips!”

So I was.

I was back on the ‘tips. But it was worth it because I was hitting pay-dirt. Sharon P. agreed to look at the first few ‘tips I pulled out, so she saw the one that was all waxy brown, all the way to the stick, and the one that had a dollop of stinky ear wax on it. She said that she was impressed. But after that she refused to look at the ‘tips anymore, and she missed the one with the fibrous waxy bundle on it, and the one oozing black ear tar, and the ‘tip that came out with a little piece of the nugget intact, like a little moon rock or something. That one was the best one of all and she missed it. I was getting a shitload of wax out of my ears. Why couldn’t she just be happy for me?

Saturday, July 02, 2005