Category Archives: Twisted

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Disabled Parking for your Bum

As you know, I have a thing about bathrooms. Working in Redmond this month, when I visit the restroom (delicately put) I keep using the first stall. If you recall from my previous entry, I usually prefer the second stall. So yesterday I realized that my whole decision to use the first stall was based on false observations.

The first time I entered this bathroom I thought there were two stalls. The first stall, normal size (which is small, we’re talking “knees hitting the door” small), then the second stall, a disabled stall (lusciously large, begging for a loveseat and barista service). But as I said, my whole day to day bathroom visits for the last three weeks have been shaken up a bit, because I discovered I was overlooking a second stall in between the first and the disabled ones. How could this be? How could I have glazed over a second stall, a stall I normally seek out?

At this point I realize I can’t change what I’ve been doing, so I am continuing to use the first stall. It’s my stall now. If I switched stalls I feel I would be insulting the first stall, as if to say, “My ass has found better space.”

But wait, this isn’t why I’m writing this entry. I want to discuss the disabled stall. I never use a disabled stall unless I need to change clothes (which is hard because you never want your stuff to touch the bathroom floor) or if there is a long line in the bathroom and that’s the next one open (and even then I only do it because the people behind me pressure me into it). Why you ask? I’ll tell you why.

Once upon a time, I was waiting my turn in line. You know, the typical 30-women-long line at say a movie theatre, baseball game, or Air Supply concert. So I’m successfully avoiding eye contact with anyone and trying not to catch my reflection in the mirror, when a woman in a wheelchair rolls by us all. She pulls up to the disabled stall and waits for the woman in there to exit. What do you think happens next? If you are guessing that the woman in the stall walks out on her own two feet, unencumbered by crutches or a wheelchair, very much healthy and able, and if you are guessing that the woman in the wheelchair begins to lecture the entire line of us about how the disabled stall is only for the disabled and how dare we have the audacity to use this stall, and if you are guessing that we all hung our heads in shame knowing we have all used those stalls without abandon in our lives, then my dear, you have hit the nail on the head.

So here I am today in a small restroom, hovering over my non-disabled toilet, now fully aware there is another non-disabled stall available, when I hear a perfectly abled woman go into the disabled stall. I’m torn. General bathroom protocol is do not go into the stall right next to an occupied one if you can help it, but what if the only other option is the disabled stall?

Are we to believe that disabled bathroom stalls are the equivalent of disabled parking? I’ve tried to theory this out, working in all the variables, but I need guidance and opinions. Bring it on.

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The Abduction of Liz Bear

How many of you have met my Teddy Bear? You may remember her from stories such as “Liz Bear Hangs in London” which was immediately followed by the sequel, “Liz Bear Takes on Those Blasted French.” There was once an expose on her travels through Europe by rail and she’s even been featured in a Midwest local news article while there on research titled “Liz Bear and the Lake Okoboji Monster” (picture to come, waiting for copyright release).

After 28 years of love and travel, Liz Bear has gone through many an Extreme Makeover. It was hard to get her to lose the neck bandage as seen in the previous clippings, but she braved it and had a stuffing implant done with some fur grafting in the form of fabric stickons. Needless to say, when you go cheap (I told her not to get it done in East LA), you get bad results. When she arrived in Olympia for yet another work trip, she confided in me that beyond the vanity, she was merely concerned her insides were trailing behind her and it was not just humiliating, but possibly detrimental to her health.

Seeing as I love her dearly and would do anything for her, I marched right out to the best doctor (JoAnn Fabrics) and bought more fur grafting bits. Since I had left my operating instruments at home I decided to bring her into the clinic with me and borrow the scissors there. She said she would sit tight on my laptop and hang for the day in the Blue Cave where all the other Blue shirts come and go, while I went to work.

And then disaster struck. I returned to the Blue Cave at lunch, excited to begin surgery, and she was gone. Vanished! All that was left was an email with the following picture: Ransom Demands to follow.

Needless to say, I was distraught. Liz Bear’s life was in danger and worse yet, she wasn’t in her healthiest state! I sent out an email to all blue shirts, begging for her return and pleading with the kidnappers to treat her well.

Then bad turned to worse. The kidnapper (a Ms. Talbot) confessed, but only to inform me Liz Bear had been stolen from her! The next day Ms. Talbot received this in an interoffice mail envelope with the note: Who’s Katie going to blame now?

Ms. Talbot sent an email out informing all blue shirts of the terrible news that Liz Bear’s remains had been discovered and that a service would be held in her honor. I was appropriately devastated for a week and was even brought in to identify her remains.

Then on Sunday everyone received the following email from Liz Bear:

Hello all! During my traumatic kidnapping I managed to escape my evil captor by MacGyvering my way out of the Blue Cave. I stacked up a pile of to-do lists and some discarded classroom summaries, then jimmied the door open using nothing but a log-in card. To throw the evil Ms. Talbot off course I interoffice mailed the remains of some other poor sap of a Teddy Bear to her, then seeing an opportunity for much needed R&R, I joined a band of renegade Barbie dolls and headed to Hawaii. Boy can those ladies party.

Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll bring you back some souvenirs and maybe I’ll only get one body part pierced while I’m here. Disregard the “cigarette” in my mouth, it was all for show. I swear it.

And just so you all can quiver with jealousy, here’s a picture of me with my new lady.

Alive and kickin’,
Liz Bear Toft

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Revolve This, You Bastards

Earlier this week I attended a training for work that was located at one of our buildings in Tukwila. Since I managed to get myself unbelievably lost and arrived an hour later than I would have had I just taken the exit I had initially thought was right, I found myself rushing through the sliding doors unaware of my surroundings. I did note that many people in the lobby were looking oddly at me, but I assumed this was due to my young age and being a brand new unknown employee.

Fast forward to the end of the day. Glad to be leaving I headed towards the front doors again and this time noticed that in between the sliding doors was an evil foreboding revolving door, and on each of the sliding doors was a sign that read “Conserve Energy: Use revolving door.” Well for those who know me, I have a slight fear of revolving doors. I think I am afraid that someone will come up behind me and either try to ride in my “wedge” thereby encroaching on my bubble, or they will push too hard and not give me enough time to safely exit on the other side. I am also of course absurdly afraid it might stop working as I’m trapped in the middle (or maybe an older sister would trap me) and there I would be, like an animal caught in a trap for everyone to stare at through the glass.

Needless to say, I try to avoid the doors when I can, but I also try to pretend my fear isn’t there. I’ll usually just forge ahead and get it over with, always relieved to arrive on the other side just fine. So here I was facing a dilemma. Now aware that the staring earlier in the day had been due to the fact I, a healthy young thing, had used the electric sliding doors instead of the revolving door, I found myself forced to do as they asked.

And so I pushed forward into the door, holding my breath and cursing the woman who had appeared from nowhere behind me and was definitely pushing a bit too hard for my comfort level, then spilled myself out on the other side. Safe and sound. As I walked away from the door towards the parking lot, the electric sliding door was triggered by my weight and opened as if to laugh at me.

So I ask you this, whose energy were we conserving? Certainly not mine.

(Sidenote: I tried to see if there was an actual phobia for this and all I could find was another poor soul who had tried searching for the same thing to no avail and therefore decided to name the phobia herself. She calls it “Orbitagoraphobia.”)

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Stir fried Nightmares

Atlanta, GA

Most of my close friends know I’ve always had nightmares. Ever since I was three years old I would wake up remembering all the disturbing images leftover from the subconscious montage the night before. After a while, I started to enjoy most of them for the stories they told and the interesting notion that it took details from my days and wove them together into a David Lynchesque short film. Still, there were times when the nightmares were more like night terrors. For those who never spent their adolescence obsessed over dreams and such, as I did, the difference between the two is that you usually don’t remember your night terrors and you wake up startled, sweating, and at a loss as to what happened, just the feeling like you were violated in some way. They are actually more of a sleeping disorder so I would not say that I ever suffered from official night terrors, but that’s the best way for me to describe them. In college I had a resurgence of the “night terrors,” but this time the worst part was that throughout the following day, I would have sudden flashbacks: images of the dream flickering into my thoughts, progressively getting worse until I could remember a good portion of it and unfailingly wishing I hadn’t. This happened to me today.

So here I shall offer up one of the most disturbing dreams I’ve had in years. It was a two parter. The first night I could only remember bits and pieces and I wasn’t sure I was remembering it correctly, but then this morning I had the sequel, or rather the conclusion, hopefully. If this is a three parter, I don’t think I’m ready for it. Before I begin, I just want to apologize to those making an appearance in the dream. The cast of characters are as follows: some woman who rents out obscure locations,

…and myself of course for I play the appropriate lead character, the first person point of view role.

Nightmare Part 1: As with most dreams, this one dissolved from something absurd, I think involving being chased by a doberman, into this. Christy and I are talking and she says she has a brilliant idea. She says we should invite Kris and Shoshana for dinner, of which I think is a great idea so I say, “of course, but why?” Christy says, “Well, I have this idea. We invite them for dinner. A little veggie stir fry, your specialty, but the surprise will be that they’ll actually be the main ingredient.” I stare at her for a minute, trying to process what she is saying. Somehow she has this idea that it would be clever and ironic to trick them into believing it will be a vegetarian dinner, when in actuality it will have meat in it and that meat will be them. We will murder them. And then we will eat them. She seems so sure of it’s brilliance and foolproofness, that for some reason I begin to nod numbly and agree to invite them. All the while the word CANNIBALISM keeps flashing across the screen of my dream and I can’t stop picturing the chicken like fleshy meat in the stir fry pan. This image stays with me throughout, popping up here and there. The plan is to hold the “dinner party” out in the wilderness off this trail and she promises to set all that up if I just convince them to come. Then I woke up and was unsure as to what I had just dreamt.

Nightmare Part 2: Picking up in real time it seems, it is the next night and Christy asks me if I got a hold of Kris and Shoshana. I say yes and that they are really excited about dinner. She introduces me to this woman who tells us we can have the rental all night and that there are only a few rules. The rules consist of things such as “no pot, no drunk and disorderly behavior, however alcohol is allowed” and I all I kept thinking was, “that’s no problem, we won’t be doing any of that. We’re just going to kill one of my best friends and his girlfriend. No pot, no drunkenness.” But at the same time I knew I didn’t want to do it and I didn’t really believe we were going through with it. Christy and the woman exchange a few more words while I zone out and try to figure out if this is just a dream and how I’m going to manage to wake myself up. Then we head into a supermarket while Christy describes how everything is going to go down. She says that out on this cliff within some trees we’ve rented a kitchen from this woman and all the dishes and food is already up there waiting for us. She says she set it all up yesterday, which begs to wonder whether she did this before or after she talked me into this idea. I tell her that Kris and Shosh are going to meet us up there and they might get there first. I’m starting to worry that they’ll start to figure it out if it doesn’t look like we are going to cook dinner. Christy says, “Well, of course we’re cooking dinner. Everything is ready up there. That’s what this is all about. Dinner.” As we buy some last minute items like garlic and ginger I duck out to make sure Kris and Shosh know where they are going.

Next scene I am standing in front of the path leading up to the dinner spot, talking to Kris. He tells me how excited they are to have dinner with us and how much they are looking forward to my stir fry. As he heads up the hill, I tell him I’ll meet him later after Christy brings the rest of the food, and that’s when I notice the cop car parked right there. Two cops are sitting in the car and one leans out the window to ask me how things are going. I say things are well and they prod a bit more with questions about the “evening’s activities.” I am starting to panic and I am sure they are memorizing my face and comments. I tell them we are having a nice dinner up on the cliff. They tell me to enjoy my evening, but Kris walks back up and begins to chat with them. I had thought he was already gone so I try to hide how startled I am. It turns out Kris is friends with the cops and so while he schmoozes I leave him and head up the hill.

When I get up there, Christy shows up and I drag her into the bathroom. I faintly recall wondering how a bathroom is in the middle of the outdoors. I’m talking full on pristine white bathroom. In a panic, I start grilling Christy on whether we are really going through with this. I think I was taking shots of Jagermeister as I hyperventilated. She tells me to snap out of it and that there is no going back. For some reason I can’t wrap my mind around the idea and I tell her there is no way we can trick them into eating meat. She grabs my face with both her hands and says, “Katie, Jesus Christ, they won’t be EATING the meat. They ARE the meat. We don’t have to trick them into thinking the meat isn’t meat. We just need to put them in the stir fry.”

This is the point where I realize I just can’t go through with it, but I don’t think Christy will let me out of it. Then the bathroom door is suddenly open and a cop is standing there with Kris behind him. The cop asks if everything is alright. He says, “You’re not throwing back a few too many in there are ya?” I wipe some tears off my face as I try to stand up and push on by him. I say, “No, just some personal anguish.” Christy shoots me a look, bats her eyes at the cop, and I glance up at Kris. He is looking at me with concern, but not concern over anything he may have caught on about, but more of a caring thought for me and what might be wrong. I tell him we should go let Shoshana know everything’s fine and I that we should start chopping up the veggies for dinner. He smiles and we walk further up the path. At this point all I can think as I sense Christy wrapping things up with the cop and following us up, is how can we possibly get away with anything now that the cops have seen us and know of our “dinner party” and drama.

I think it was at this point Max woke me up. Like I said, I am hoping this is not a trilogy. I also hope that Christy, Kris, and Shoshana don’t worry about what this dream might be saying. I am not sure where this came from. I also hope that this won’t make them weary of eating my excellent stir fry, because it really is my specialty. And now this makes the following picture all the more disturbing. Quit taunting me with food Christy. 🙂

So as the great Johnny Peel always says, “What do you think, sirs?”

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Spider Update

There’s this habit in our family to put off pressing responsibilities or work by filling our time with cleaning or organizing. We comvince ourselves that the messy house or the filled e-mail inbox is due for a cleaning and that is a justified priority. So I was not surprised when I came home the other night to my sister’s apartment and the place smelled of amonia and reeked of procrastination.

Lo and behold, not only was the kitchen floor spotless, but the infamous trapped spider was gone. Apparently, it had built itself a web and made itself at home inside the glass so when my sister finally had the guts to pick up the glass, the spider wouldn’t leave. She place the glass right side up outside and we kept checking on him. We couldn’t decide if he were starving or trapped or just plain resting.

Later that night, something hit my ankle as I was washing dishes and I looked down only to find that, no not another spider, but a bee was crawling around by my foot. Now I am slightly less scared of bees so I calmly put a glass over it. The only difference here is that I was calm.

Never fear. After all the guilt I felt over the spider, it only took about five minutes for me to find a piece of card stock to slip under the glass and carry the bee outside. After releasing it I had an afterthought that maybe I should have thrown it into the glass with the spider. I’m pretty sure the spider needs food and water (he’s pretty dry, but not dead) so what do you think? Would the bee have won or would the spider have devoured her?

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Balance or Karma?

So my Labor Day weekend would have been wonderful since I got to see my good friend Johnny (read his account of our glorious fun) but instead the gods decided to once again balance out my good fortune with some bad. My computer crashed.

I spent all day yesterday trying to troubleshoot the error messages. You know the ones. A BSoD (blue screen of death) with numbers like 0x000000C2 or 0x000000A5 and of course everything I read doesn’t really help. Every time I thought I had fixed the problem there seemed to be a new error message or number. I won’t bother you with the details, but after shedding some tears in a Best Buy yesterday because they refused to let me exchange the wrong memory card (which they finally did exchange by the way, just to try and get this crazy woman…namely me…to stop crying) and then being on the phone all day today with Dell, I finally got to the point where they said it was the motherboard. Then after another hour of waiting to be connected to the guy who was supposed to set up a time to come out and change my motherboard, I finally talked to Kurt.

Kurt has renewed my faith in Dell. Before I talked to him I had decided (and will actually probably stick to this) that I will never let another friend buy Dell. Horrible tech support. Non-communicative. I could really go into it, but I won’t. But Kurt, wonderful, beautiful Kurt, listened to me. Really listened to me. He asked the right questions, he explained why he was having me try a few more things, he described what he was looking for, and within 15 minutes he figured out it was the original memory card that was bad. Not the ones I had been buying. Now my computer works again and they are sending me a free memory card. Thank god.

So I ask again, was this to balance out the spectacular days I had on Thursday and Friday? I was on such a high and then this happened and I haven’t cried so much in one day for a very long time. (There was more to cry over than just my computer, but I’m sure I would have been more apt to yell instead of cry if it were just that.)

But as I’m writing this I’m looking over into my sister’s kitchen (my sister who’s couch I’m sleeping on) and I see this glass on the floor in the corner. A glass that has been there for about three weeks or more. Underneath this glass that is turned upside down, is a spider. A big scary spider that my butch lesbian ex-army combat helicopter pilot sister was too scared to deal with. And so am I. We are so pathetically afraid of spiders that we have trapped this poor thing for almost a month and neither of us want to acknowledge it’s still there. So maybe it’s karma. Maybe my lack of compassion for this spider is what led to my computer crashing. Hmmm… Our mom was here last night and she always took care of spiders for us when we were little (never forgetting to include a “I can’t believe you girls are such wimps” kind of mumble under her breath) so we asked her if she would take care of it since she was here. She just looked at us like we had to be kidding.

Alas, the spider is still here and my mother won’t take care of it, probably as some statement about us being adults now or something. Do you think I could ask the Dell Tech Support guy to take care of it? I’m starting to feel guilty.