Enhancement

Don’t worry. Ziggy the Cat hasn’t died yet, of tulip poisoning. All my worries for naught. I’ve started giving him baby spinach leaves, you know, whenever I have some in the house, and he just snarfs those up. He’s apparently a vegetarian cat who just wants a little roughage. He gets a Boca burger tomorrow night.

I’m really busy at work lately. My poster proposal (something having to do with qualitative something and quantitative something else, if memory serves…I’ll check the title before I present it) got accepted for this conference I’m going to in a couple of weeks, and so all of a sudden I’m having to do all this grad-schooly, math-y, writing-a-paper-y stuff again. I have begun to sincerely regret all the times I sat in research classes and rolled my eyes and said to My Friend Michelle, sotto voce, “Like I’m ever going to use this again.” Oh, Fate. You cruel mistress. Again with the SPSS. Again with the making up academic-sounding language, and with the messing around with PowerPoint and the crying and begging people to help you with your quantitative analysis. This sucks. I can’t believe I thought this was a good idea. A couple of months ago I was all, “Oh, this will really expand my opportunities at this job! Why, I’ll be able to actually use my degree.” Right. I neglected to notice that my degree is not, sadly, in Researchy Stuff, and that I really have no idea what I’m doing. And this is just a poster. It’s not even a real published article or anything. How pathetic am I? I’m two years out of school and I’m cramming. Oddly enough, I never did all-nighters when I actually was in school…I believe in getting my eight hours, you see…and so I don’t know why I’m starting all these bad habits now. In my program we did tons of group projects…get it, we’re social workers! Ho ho!..and I was always the jerk who volunteered to make everyone finish their part of the paper on time by writing snippy emails with the subject heading “Re: Your section, where is it?” I was also always the jerk who was known to recoil in horror when she finally did get all the sections and had to edit them together somehow into one harmonious whole. Let’s just say that my program apparently wasn’t looking for writing skills when they accepted people, because I can’t believe how some folks graduated from high school let alone college and then got into grad school. “This population is a population where children are sick because of the cancer that they have and also they are poor and they are dealing with mental health issues that is because they are children that are poor and sick and also who have cancer.” For real. I’m not claiming to be the queen of grammar or anything but I would pale visibly when presented with one of these gems. And I used to read college application essays for a living, too.

So that’s taking up a lot of my nine-to-five lately. Off the job, I have been employed in going to parties at which there happens to be a karaoke machine and by going wedding underwear shopping with My Friend Treasa. Everyone goes underwear shopping with their friends, right? Wedding underwear, though, that’s a slightly different situation. More fraught with peril, you might say. I have to say that I have been really lucky in that I have never come into contact with one of them Bridezillas you hear so much about. Still, though. Your wedding dress. Body shapers and bustiers and push-up bras. It can get tense.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not so much for the shopping when it’s me that has to take off clothes in garishly lit cubicles and tug on shirt fronts and furrow my brows in the mirror. I tend to fade quickly in a situation where I have to have a new pair of jeans by Friday and I tend to make very poor clothing decisions, as my new pair of hideous (yet workplace appropriate) khakis will tell you. It’s all very daunting and I tend to make little nasty comments and then I go home and sigh and put everything in the closet an growl about how nothing ever looks good. It would seem, however, that when cast in the role of Friend Along For The Ride, I become a crisply efficient model of efficient crispness. It’s so great.

“We’re looking for something to wear under a wedding dress, “ I said to the Victoria’s Secret salesperson who accosted us when we walked in. I raised my eyebrows for extra effect, letting her know how important this errand was. “I see,” she said, nodding gravely. “A wedding dress.” I put a protective arm around Treasa and led her over to the section of Vic’s Sec that houses the most hilarious undergarments ever created. I’m speaking, of course, of the Ass Enhancers.

I can’t seem to find them on the Victoria’s Secret Porn Stash site so you’re going to have to imagine along with me. Okay, so a half slip. A very tight half slip. Sausage-casing tight. Meant to smooth out any errant bulges one may have on oneself if one is not a Victoria’s Secret model, and which might cause the line of one’s wedding gown to fall in an unsightly manner. Okay, got it? Okay. Now, try to picture that this sausage-casing has some parts which are even tighter on it. Some parts are tight, and some are even more tight. And then imagine that the really tight parts make a sort of seam that gently cups both cheeks, and…enhances them. Up and out, baby. Does this make sense at all? I guess this is why this thing isn’t on the website, because it just defies description and because you have to see it to believe it. I had already had fun with the full-length version of this thing before encountering these special features. Treasa couldn’t put it on by herself, unsurprisingly, and at one point I she had it over her head and arms and I was trying to get it over her chest and I lost hold for a minute and then she was stuck in there with her arms above her head while I freshened my grip, and I had a momentary vision of the morning of her wedding, and how she would have to be shot from a cannon and the rest of us would sort of hold this thing open and hope she went through it somehow, because this was SO HARD to get on her. The last time I went wedding underwear shopping, Another Anna tried on this same thing, and it was just as difficult. Anyway, while I was trying to stuff this poor girl into it, the salesperson was knocking on the door every 4.6 seconds, and asking if there was anything she could get us. While we were both laughing at the…enhancement, I muttered, “Yeah, can we have some more ass?”

The other incident of note is that I did indeed sing a little karaoke over the weekend at the aforementioned Another Anna’s birthday party. I sang “Someone To Watch Over Me.” I was okay. The whole evening turned into more of a sing-along than a karaoke party, because everyone was so excited to sing that everyone just sang everything, including my favorite Shaggy song ever, which I realize should be outlawed, technically, from being a karaoke song because there is nothing worse than a roomful of people belting out “Can you believe we were both buck naked banging on the bathroom floor?” Nothing worse, yet nothing more stupidly fun. I think I like it though. I’m going to have to try to go out and go to a place that has more than eight songs, because I think that I could really get into “Father Figure” by George Michael. Put your tiny hand in mine, indeed.

The really good thing, karaoke-related, is that I was at work today trying to get into a meeting room (I was supposed to be at a meeting, you see) and I was telling one of my co-workers about my adventures rocking the mic. She likes to sing too, and so we were singing at each other, la la la, singing what little Cole Porter we knew, when all of a sudden a couple of the women who worked in the area came running over to us with their hands full of candy. “Is that you girls singing? It’s just wonderful! Here! Here’s lots of candy!” Isn’t that the coolest? My voice is candy worthy.