Showing posts with label crying at work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label crying at work. Show all posts

Monday, June 23, 2008

I Would Like To Complain About My Staycation


Dear Wendy,

When I first heard about taking a “staycation” on The Today Show, I was very excited about the idea. Since I couldn’t afford to go to Europe, the Grand Canyon, or the grocery store this summer, booking a week in my own home for some relaxation sounded like just the ticket. And so it was with a great sense of anticipation that I asked for time off at work and phoned myself to book a week with me in my home. However, though I am not the type of person to normally complain, I found that the accommodations and service on my staycation were so abominable that I simply had to write this letter to me to let me know how much I failed to satisfy me during my stay.

First of all, when I arrived at my residence for my staycation, the place was a total mess. Clearly, I had failed to even make an attempt to clean up before I arrived to stay at my house. There were dishes in the sink, the bed had not been made, and one of the so-called “guest-rooms” was filled with boxes that had never been unpacked since I moved in almost four years ago. Also, why were there Christmas decorations still hanging up? It was almost as if the management had been suffering from years of a low-grade ennui that has caused her to neglect her environment in favor of talking to her cat, drinking whiskey, and shouting at the TV.

When mealtime arrived each day, I found that the management had not even bothered to go grocery shopping, but would instead try to talk me into eating weird food from unidentifiable sources. I can’t be positive, but I think that one morning I had part of a mitten dipped in tomato sauce. It’s a little hazy because the management kept me up until four o’clock the night before, insisting that I drink a bottle and a half of wine, call my ex-boyfriends and ask them, “what the fuck?”

The lack of preparation in terms of cuisine and accommodations might have been more easily overlooked if the management had delivered on some of the “fun leisure activities” I promised me. Instead of spending the days engaged in a variety of workout classes, craft activities, and productive but fun organizational tasks as promised, I found that the only activity actually scheduled was “lolling about in pajamas, mentally cataloguing regrets.”

In short, this staycation met none of my expectations, and if it weren’t for the downturn in the economy coupled with the perky insistence of overpaid newscasters that a staycation is a super awesome fun way for regular people to console themselves about the fact that they can no longer afford to even leave their house for a week, I bet I’d feel pretty ripped off.

Sincerely,
Wendy





Tuesday, June 17, 2008

Timeliness

Astute commenter and sometime superhero Stella Kevlar was good enough to point out the irony (irony?) in my noting the timeliness of writing an E.T.-based piece of comedy (comedy?). Well, my current assignment at work involves watching dozens of Universal movies to put together a -- no joke-- comedy tape featuring a bunch of actual Governors (you know, from the Government), green-screened into various films.

Anyway, one of the movies I watched yesterday was E.T., which I hadn't seen since it was actually in the theaters. Here are some things I discovered:

1. The kids in that movie were actually genuinely talented actors. AT THE TIME. What happened afterwards, well...not my call here.

2. The movie is not about a cute alien like I remembered. It's about a bunch of kids who've been abandoned by their father, and E.T. symbolizes the way you can only repair abandonment by learning to care about someone else. When Eliot asks E.T. to stay at the end, and E.T. asks him to come with him, we actually see Eliot grow up when he realizes that not all partings have to be negative and that loss is a part of life and that he can choose what kind of man to be.

3. The kids' father is never going to come back and take them to baseball games.

4. Everybody is going to basically be okay.

5. Don't get caught crying at your desk at work because you are watching E.T.

On the docket today:

Jaws
Erin Brokovich (see number 5)
Babe (oh boy)
and Kindergarten Cop (kill me)

I also watched The Birds yesterday, which is to me fantastic. People complain that it adds up to nothing. Those people aren't paying attention to the underlying themes of female panic about the gathering threat of loneliness. Both Annie and the mother are terrified of desertion, and as their terror grows, the attacks multiply. When the (single) mother of the young girl in the cafe tells Marlene Daniels that her evil (sexuality) has brought the birds to Bodega Bay, it's genius.