American finally freed in Nicaragua.

Thank fucking God. I’ve been personally invested in this case for quite some time now. After I watched some crime show about him, I felt like I had a real mission in life. I was going to start a coalition to vindicate him. I was going to make a website and go on Good Morning America and Tyra and I was going to collaborate with Bono to make the best charity mix CD ever. But by the time the show ended, I had to ask Henry to remind me what that dude’s name was, and by the next day, I had moved on to other missions, like eating raspberry preserves.

But now he’s free! That guy is way too hot to be in prison. Oh, and also he shouldn’t have been in prison because of that whole alibi thing.

So, supposedly there’s one of those Steelers games on tonight, and Kim and Eleanore are being all football-y and speaking in a lexicon that I am not privy. Oh, but I WOULD be able to join in the revelry if COLLIN had taught me the ins and outs of that dumb sport like he said he would! Can’t I count on anyone anymore?

"We have to win this game, I mean, if they want diamonds and gold," said Eleanore, quite philosophically.

You get diamonds and gold if you win a football game?! I’m signing up Chooch.

"Mmm mmm mmm. Sonofabitch. Play defense now, come on fools." I love listening to Eleanore when the Steelers have their fingers around her proverbial nutsack.

So, Secret Santa — sorry, Holiday Gift Bag, how un-PC of me — festivities have been underway all week. I don’t know who picked me, but they’ve been doing a bang up job. On Monday, in a little red box with glittered snowflakes, sat a bejeweled beetle pin and let me just tell you that it’s practically hemorraging with awesome. I was really excited and yelled, "It has my name written all over it!" hoping my secret gift giver was within earshot. I immediately pinned it to my shirt (after sticking my flesh with it first).

Tuesday, I got a black candle burner with a fierce red dragon emblazoned on the front, the kind of angry dragon that perhaps a fan of Godsmack might have tattooed on their chest. I’m not a big fan of dragons (or Godsmack) normally, but I was pleased that they took note of the fact that I did not want anything with flowers or meat on it. I guess the opposite of flowers would be a dragon, to some people.

Yesterday, I got a really fancy-looking hot cocoa kit — a bottle filled with cocoa powder, a bottle filled with marshmallows, a whisk and a measuring spoon, and two big brown mugs. Unfortunately, it didn’t come with directions, which is a bad, bad thing for someone like me. I tried to wing it last night, but it tasted crappy so I sulked for awhile. Bob said it was probably bought at the dollar store and at first I was offended that he would make such biting accusations against my secret gift giver, but then I thought, "Who am I kidding? Bob’s probably right." Even Kim said, "That doesn’t even smell like it would be good." Still, I’m sure if it was made properly, and with milk instead of water, it would have tasted quite indulgent, like the kind of rich beverage a Queen would sip while watching thieving peasants get beheaded. The mugs are really nice, though.

I left a note on my desk before I left last night, thanking my secret gift giver. Today, there was a reply, in large typed font, in place of my note. I kind of felt a surge of excitement because it reminded me of the time I wrote a note to Santa when I was little and the next day he wrote back. On my own purple notebook paper, even! And I didn’t even find it suspicious a few days later when I watched my step-dad sign his name on a check. "Hey, you and Santa write your ‘D’s the same! Neat."

Today, I came in and found a large rectangular object all wrapped up in shiny red paper. Gum Cracker ran over and said, "Hurry up and open that! We’re all dying to know what it is!" (She thinks I’m her secret gift giver, which I was initially before I traded with Kim, so she’s been talking sweetly to me all week.)

It’s a sparkling gold fabric memo board. I was going to take it home, but then I decided it would be put to better use here. I pulled out some older photos of Chooch that I have in my desk and slid them underneath the ribbon.

"Please don’t put your serial killer friend in there—Oh, Erin, no!" Kim begged.

It was too late.

Pele hadn’t been walking right for a good portion of the week. Chester wasn’t into men or anything, but he couldn’t help his eyes from floating down to Pele’s ass every time he passed by Chester’s cubicle in the office.

Writing it off as overzealous anal sex practicing, Chester went back to licking envelopes. The taste of the glue reminded him of his mom’s breath, which he smelt every morning when she would send him off to school. It was from all of the cleaning solution she would drink in her tea, hoping to end her life. Cleaning up his father’s pubic hairs from the bathroom had really taken a toll on her over the years.

One Wednesday afternoon, Chester was walking past the restroom after fetching his lunch from the office kitchen, when he overheard a loud cry of anguish ricocheting on the other side of the bathroom door. He paused, glancing at his lunchsack containing a relish sandwich, and deliberated ignoring the deathly wail of his fellow co-worker in favor of tearing into his delicious lunch.

But Chester was too nice for that. He had been a hall monitor in grade school, after all. For two straight weeks!

Inside the restroom, he found Pele cowering in one of the stalls, the toilet bowl cloudy with dilluted blood.

"Pele, do you have hemorrhoids?" Pele turned his back toward him and spread his cheeks far and wide. Several swollen lumps sprung out around his rectum.

"I think we need to get you to the hospital! I don’t know how you’ve been walking with all of those swollen flesh buttons." An acrimonious exchange was had, with Pele resisting Chester’s suggestion.

After booting Pele good and swiftly in the ass, aggravating the pain, Pele was putty in Chester’s hands.

Chester sat in the waiting room for a few hours, reading Time and slurping back some decaf from a Dixie cup, when the surgeon approached him. "You can come back now, Mr. Dog."

When Chester entered the recovery room, he was appalled to see Pele’s lifeless body sprawled out on the bed, his decapitated head discarded next to him.

"Oh. I thought his head was the hemorrhoid," the surgeon offered as his excuse.

To this day, Chester refuses to seek professional care for hemorrhoids. If they get too bad, he whips out the Exacto knife. A strategically placed maxi pad takes care of the bleeding and within a few weeks, he’s able to go back to his spinning class.

I sent everyone at work my death row pen pal’s (severely outdated) website last night: It made Bob sad, Lindsay said "LOL," and Eleanore started lecturing and patronizing me. Oh OK, Pot-Kettle. I should have reminded her that she once married her inmate pen pal, but I digress.

It made me think about this other inmate pen pal I had a few years ago — Aaron. He was around my age and in prison for seven years for shooting a Mexican in the ass. I didn’t like him too much because all he wrote about was the rap music he liked, the skanks with kids who would come to visit him, and lifting weights.

He sure was cute though.

A few months into our postal courtship, and a year before his release date, I got this bombshell in the mail:

Erin,

I don’t know how to say this. I guess I’m just a chicken shit, and don’t like to say the wrong thing. I guess I like you more than I should. I think you are beautiful and I love your personality. You don’t have kids, and your [sic] normal*. I guess I’d rather be with you than be just friends.

I tried just being your friend, but I want more. I guess I’m greedy, but that’s me and who I am.

So I guess if you and Henry don’t work out, which I’m sure you will, but if not I’d like to give it a shot.

— Aaron

I wonder what he’s up to these days. Well, I guess it doesn’t matter, since I have a KID now. God, I’m such a whore.

*HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

What has:

• pole-dancing,
• spiked egg nog,
• exotic cheeses,
• Santa with a hard-on,
• shiny door prizes like panini presses and a magic wand for can-opening ease,
• a chocolate fountain centered around an array of fresh fruit and lady fingers in scandelous poses?

Not our department holiday party.

No, we got cold cuts drowning in a mucous-like moat, cheese slices that needed the aid of Freddy Krueger’s nails to be surgically removed from each other, a bowl of frozen fruit slices, and a giant sheet cake that had nauseating pink flowers piped precariously around the perimeter. (I deduced at once that it was going to be an offensive supermarket bakery cake, so I walked past it with my nose in the air.) We got scratch off tickets and Tina’s hair collar and a platter of bland cookies that were at least moist and not stale like I had initially suspected.

The cheese lasagna was a real treat, though.

1. A dayshifter who sits next to me. I rue the days she works late because she laughs like an engorged elephant cock is lodged in her throat and she’s trying to summon her inner Vesuvius to phlegm it back up. She handles a runny nose like your typical Teamster: loud, wet and crackly, like a bowl of exploding Rice Krispies is draining down her throat. She’s nice though.

2. Hey Tina, ever since you switched to the day shift, something really confusing and alarming has arrested me: I think I like you. Not in a ‘Hey, let’s go French in a bathroom stall’ kind of way, but in a ‘You’re over here talking to me yet I have no urge to inflict any bodily damage.’ But no, I’m not sad that I wasn’t sitting at your table. And while I imagine playing games with a bullyishly dominate personality such as your own is a dream come true for some (like perhaps a tribe of indigents who have never played games before) I’m not jealous that your table was playing  Taboo, as rousing and scintillating as it sounded.

3. Big Bob. He stole Collin’s Hot Pockets and made him cry.

4. Non-Big Bob’s plate of meat goods were a little too close to me. I felt violated and kept imagining someone gagging me with that slab of ham.

I was happy to be seated at a table of socially capable people — Lindsay, Bill, Brandie, and (Non-Big) Bob. However, we were joined by Stanley. I am fortunate to not have to deal with him because he works during the day and sits over by Bill and Lindsay. He has no filter, kind of like a child, and random strings of rudeness spray from his mouth in fairly consistent intervals. When we were walking up to the Mezzanine, one of the more heavy and elderly employees was up ahead, taking each step with deliberate slowness. Stanley yelled up, “Hey, Donna, we need to get you an escalator.” Someone behind him called him on his rudeness, only making him justify himself. “What? It’s true! Donna needs an escalator!” If I had to deal with that brand of idiocy for eight hours a day, one of us would have lost our job by now.

Stanley spent a good fifteen minutes diligently rubbing off five scratch off tickets, and even after inspecting them closely above his head, he still found reasonable cause to have Lindsay double-check. I took a picture of his crotch from under the table. Sadly, no boners arose from the rub-off frenzy.

And Bob, poor Bob; he stared off into the distance most of the time, mourning his other half’s absence. (Collin called off.) He seemed lost in thought, and I wondered if he was thinking about all the nights he and Collin spent playing their little celebrity chain game to pass the time while braiding daisy chain crowns for each other’s heads.

One of the games everyone (and by everyone I mean the Daytime Clique) was playing consisted of taping the name of a celebrity to each player’s back, and then everyone had to take turns asking a question to find out who they were. I told Bob it would be a good game for him and Collin to play and he lit up. “You’re right! I didn’t even make that connection!” Then he smiled to himself for awhile, probably rewinding the Collin-montage in his head.

Bill spoke of foreign-sounding things for awhile before I realized he was speaking in baking-tongue, while Lindsay smiled at me like an adoring fan and laughed at all of my antics, like when I took a picture of this guy who I have never seen before in my life, but supposedly he’s part of our department and works upstairs (if you want to take Bill’s word for it) and then ten minutes later I blurted out, “Oh shit, I think I made myself have a crush on that guy!” Lindsay giggled. In my head, I dubbed her my new work BFF. I’m not sure who the old one was. Bill perhaps, even though working opposing shifts has really driven a wrench in our rapport.

He doesn’t even bring me brownies anymore. I bet he brings some for Tina, in tiny baskets lined with rich Italian linen. Well, they can have each other.

Kim approached our table and asked why we weren’t playing games. Maybe it was just me, but I thought it was pretty obvious that our table was way too cool for parlor games, at least the ones that didn’t involve heavy betting and liquor. “We’re playing our own game,” I said. “It’s where everyone tells me how cool I am.” I smirked appropriately and Kim acted like she was about to be sick.

Since I pitched in a devastating twenty dollars to this elitist shindig, I gave myself a goal of “eat more than you paid for,” but the party started at 11AM and I just really wasn’t hungry. So in the end, I probably only ate $5 worth, which jacks me right off. (However, later on that evening, I had a piece of leftover lasagna for dinner. This is how it was made possible:  “Tina, you know how you’re always looking for a reason to leave your desk?” Tina looks at me, slightly frightened, before cautiously saying, “……yes?” I jump in for the kill. “Will you get me lasagna?” What? I didn’t want to lift that big pan-y thing out of the fridge! So Tina did. And it was decent.)

Then it was time to go back to work. Most people offered to help clean up, but I just got up and left.

My death row pen pal Greg, a charming gent with whom I have been exchanging delicately penned letters for the past six years, sent me a recent photo of himself today. Naturally, I hung it on my wall at work and every time my boss turns around to talk to me, she screams, “Ugh, I wish you would take that down!

It looks like he’s leering at me!

“

Then I sent her his website and she refuses to look at it.

Ten minutes later, she shuddered and said, “I can’t believe you sent me that.

”

What? What’d I do?

There was this awesome seafoam green desk for sale at my job. A retro metal kind from the ’50s, like one that a teacher would prop his feet on and wish was mahogany, while the students were busy writing lines. It had nicks and scratches in just the right places, deep drawers perfect for stowing hatchets and paper clips, and rounded edges so my kid wouldn’t bust his head open.

The original asking price was $20. I’d slow my pace each time I went outside for a break, dragging my fingertips over the top in admiration.

“I really have to have this,” I would tell Bob and Collin each and every time like clock work. I’m sure they cared.

A few days later, a fat red line was struck through the $20, and a tempting $15 was scrawled above.

“Holy fuck, that’s a steal of a deal,” I thought in amazement.

By Friday, it was on sale for TEN DOLLARS.

Last night, I told Henry about it.

“For what?” he asked when I whined about having to have it.

“Just to have!” It’s annoying when I’m expected to have a reason for everything.

He rolled his eyes and said I could alert the guards today that I wanted to buy it. I channeled my inner-adult and decided it would be a Good Idea to maybe measure the thing first, make sure we’d have room for it. Kim just happened to have a tape measure in her purse, because she’s the best boss ever.

I ran out to the hall excitedly. Then I stopped and spun around.

The fucking desk was gone.

GONE.

I asked the guard if someone bought it and she very ambivalently said, “Yeah, I guess.”

“Could you find out?”

And she walked away. She probably had better things to do, like fighting cubicle crime and shaking down vending machines.

I came back to my desk, holding back some serious tears. Honest-to-God salty eye-water. I couldn’t stop picturing the desk in various positions around my house; sometimes there would be rivulets of candle wax flowing over the edges, other times it would be flanked by an armada of merlot while wearing a spread of fine European cheeses

Yet another dream unrealized.

“Here,” I mumbled, handing the tape measure back to Kim. “I won’t be needing this.” I waited for her to ask why not. She didn’t, but I continued on as if she had.

“Because someone bought it.” I waited for the condolences to roll in.

“Oh, too bad.” And she turned her attention to much less important matters, like work.

“I wanted to sit at it and pretend like I was a PI,” I said quietly. Dayshift Brandie laughed and Kim muttered, “You gotta love her. I don’t know why, but you just do.”

I’m angry at the lack of sympathy I’m receiving over my loss.

The Secret Santa gift exchange at work is this Friday and I’m proud to say that I’m 100% ready.

Since yesterday. Five whole days early. This is unlike me.

The girl I shopped for is 18 and cool like me; she likes music that I like, and nautical things and her favorite colors are red, yellow, orange, and brown. I bought her a bunch of little things, and then I decided to try and be an ultra-sweetheart with a center of pure delight and honeyed raindrops. So I painted her a picture of an anchor garden.

Lookie, the flowers are all blooming in her FAVORITE COLORS.

See how I did that, combined two things on her list? See that?

I’m a bit intimidated though, because she’s a real artist (according to my boss) and not a fake poseur ass ho-bitch artist like me.

Dying to know who got me. Sneaking suspicion says Tina.

“I don’t get it: We’re on stilts, wearing garish lamé parachute pants, and have capped our domes with ridiculous gift boxes from outer space and people STILL aren’t looking,” complained one part of the stilts trio in the midst of drunken indie fucks and ironic hipsters at Coachella.

“Maybe show your tits,” said the passing man.

But they, unfortunately, did not.

After much careful deliberation, a considerable amount of mulling, and a brief engagement with hemming and hawing, I have officially decided to participate in No Name Calling Week. This futility workout will begin on January 21, at which point I will shelve my Tourette-ish need to call Henry an ass-fucking moronic dick-shitting piece of trailer trash with a second-grade level spelling proficiency who washes his underwear in a creek. I will not tell Christina she’s a dumb fucking fake Mexican lesbo God-fearing lame rapping banana-stuffed cunt. I will not call my child a Little Asshole.

Luckily, I can still punch the shit out of Janna.

I will be monitored all week by Henry, Christina, Janna and I guess I’ll have to tell some people at work, since that’s going to be a very crucial chunk of the week.

“I’m going to win,” I boasted to Henry.

“Somehow I don’t think the point is to win a prize,” he said, yet another ounce of his faith in me fluttering off to Heaven.

I think I might be biting off more than I can chew. I also think this is intended for school kids.

A Google search for “sewing-up-her-vagina” brings up my blog in a very respectable number two position. I cheer.

Lamonjelo was a quaint village full of chirping birds, friendly vibes, marijuana and a sno-cone stand run by organ grinders. Some of the cottages were capped with ivy-woven thatched roofs; others kept out of the riffraff with wrought-iron fences hugging their perimeter. A Samoan sold honey-roasted cucumber seeds on the west end of Main Street, even in the rain and the occasional brush fire, and kids paraded through the park pretending their balloons were puppies on leashes.

When Marcel Bone founded Lamonjelo in 1896, he declared one edict, and one edict only: Everyone would remain in a grand mood. Outwardly, at least. Oh yes, townies could stab each other with ice picks over lost games of Poker and get orally raped in the streets — there were no laws against that — they just had to appear happy while doing so.

Mister Flannigan would smile and return a hello with a robust felicitation of his own, even though he was thinking about the smell brewing from the bodies beneath his floorboards. Mable Cleaver would beam and flutter her eyelashes after the postman inquired of her current emotional state, even though every time she shat it felt as though razorblade-embedded pine cones were passing through her dirtstar.

Behind closed doors, the townsfolk were permitted to let out their real emotions.

They could sit on the tiled floor of their bathrooms and cut themselves; they could toss their children down basement steps; they could listen to Nick Drake while penning suicidal prose. As long as no one saw.

Draw on your smile with a Sharpie if you have to.

That was the motto you’d see inscribed onto a rusted sign as you drove past the old canning facility and over the threshold of Lamonjelo.

Lamonjelo was truly a precious town to live, though, on par with the North Pole itself when you consider it. They didn’t have elves, but once Farmer Sitzbath bred an entire litter of pygmies, which sent parents into a frenzy as each tried to snatch one up for Easter presents.

And Artemus Weenerankle, good old jolly Artemus, was practically Santa’s doppelganger. Every Tuesday he’d sit in a sagging and worn lawn chair, the fabric ribbons of which exploded in the national colors of the Seventies, while young boys and girls would pause on their jaunt home from school to perch upon his distended belly. When they asked how he was doing, he would smile past his bleeding gums, ignore his burning canker sores and spew out words cobwebbed in merriment. It was just the right dose of candy-coated oration the children craved after a long day of arithmetic and sex-ed.

One day when Artemus was leaning his wrinkled face out of the trailer window, taking in the pungent aroma of exhaust and tobacco, a pail of kitty litter was dropped accidentally from above by Mrs. Blackass, connecting squarely with Artemus’s creviced crown. The blow caused something inside of him to stir.

That next Tuesday, when little Jonny Applecrack scooted his bony buttocks upward until he was sinking gently into Artemus’s seersuckered crotch, things in Lamonjelo were about to change.

“Hello Mither Artemith! How are you?” little Jonny Applecrack cheerily lisped through his gap teeth.

“Well there son, lately I’ve been dreaming about you,” Artemus began. “…in a pool of your own blood. I guess I’m not doing all that well, would you say?

” Little Jonny Applecrack ran sobbing in the direction of the train tracks, where a drunk flaneur scooped him up and stuffed him into a burlap sack, which he swung over his shoulder before continuing on his way.

Minutes later, Artemus returned April Pisspool’s inquiry with a snarl. “Today I found blood in my stool and learned that my son is not mine. I’d say I’m pretty fucking lousy.”

April fled for her home in a whirling dervish and told her nanny everything. Word spread quickly, and honesty spiraled through the town like an epidemic. Artemus had unwittingly broken the sacred edict and the dark and bloody secrets burst from Lamonjelo’s underbelly like bats from a cave. Apparently Marcel Bone had bound his edict with a black magic chastity belt.

The floodgates had opened; it started on the south side of town, outside of a small Bavarian-styled bungalow. “I’m feeling nauseated because I just watched my husband encase our gardener’s head in a plastic bag which he then pummeled repeatedly with a shovel. Have you ever seen someone drown in their blood?” Candy Calftooth cried when Father Fiddler, passing by on his way to urinate in the orchard, asked how she was doing.

It was an uproar to rival the likes of the Great Crabs Outbreak of 1974, when Susie Bigmams shacked up with a traveling Encyclopedia (the Ukranian version) salesman who had just made a killing in a neighboring whore house. (Those warted tarts taught him uses for encyclopedias that blew his mind, among other parts.)

While townspeople ran around in a disheveled fashion, unable  to prevent their tongues from spitting out exactly how they were feeling, breaking up friendships and marriages, Artemus closed his window and laid down for a nap.

Dear Diary,

I was outside enjoying the nice view of the parking lot and bus garage in the distance, when a shifty man wearing maroon track pants and a hockey jersey approached. He claimed that he worked here but left his security badge at home and could one of us let him in.

A flimsy excuse if ever there was.

I shook my head no, but Collin shrugged and said sure. I gave him a Very Stern Look, which he either didn’t see or ignored, and he let the homicidal wanderer into our ONCE SAFE place of employment. He couldn’t have, oh I don’t know, PATTED HIM DOWN first?

Now there’s some jilted ex-employee (or homeless cave dweller with a data processor rape fantasy which he’s trying to bring to fruition) roaming the halls of this building and I feel so unsafe. I can’t believe Collin would endanger his fellow co-workers like that. I told Kim immediately, hoping she would say, “Oh, well that’s grounds for termination” but she shrugged and said, “Hmm. Oh well. Next time, just let the guards handle it.” Then she went back to work. Just like that.

Well, I hope she’s his first victim. And while he’s garroting her, I’ll slip away into the night.

Later, I cautiously journeyed to one of the other areas of our floor to snatch Hershey Kisses from the secretary’s desk. (How do they make the hot cocoa ones taste so much like hot cocoa?! It really is quite remarkable.) I speed-walked back, craning my neck around cubicle walls before nervously rounding corners. At one point, my heart exploded when I heard jingling next to me, but then I realized it was just the change in my pocket.

It’s killing me that I’m blind to the stranger’s location. What if he’s taken a hostage upstairs? Or wiring a bomb in the kitchen? Or fucking a toilet paper roll in the bathroom? These are things I desperately need to know.

Just now, as I’m typing this, one of the cleaning people wheeled a giant garbage can down the hallway and I lurched back in my chair. Kim laughed at me, cruelly. She also suggested that I get medicated. “You have insurance now,” she reminded me.

All of this after I JUST had dialogue with Henry about my need for a butterfly knife.

Later,

Destined to be Murdered.

I am naive. I never know when someone has a crush on me, I keep thinking Days of Our Lives will get good again, I think my cats will live forever.

And I never considered the possibility of retaliation after the Pig Mask Showdown.

I spent the first six hours of last night’s shift being psychologically heckled and taunted by Kim. “What’s wrong, Erin? Scared?” Her voice had a chilling cadence that made me suck air past my teeth. I panicked every time she left her desk and was out of my sight. I jumped at the sound of every padded footstep.

Three times she successfully scared the piss from its sac last night.

Three motherfucking times.

1. I was sitting at my desk, working diligently like I do, when I felt the sensation of being watched. A quick turn to my right showed me Kim standing right next to me, right next to me, holding out a pen in prime poking position. I screamed. She laughed and said, “God, I wasn’t even trying!

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”

2. I had scooted over to Eleanore’s desk so she could show me something on her screen. When I wheeled back to my desk next door, I noticed several small wads of paper had congregated on the floor under my seat.

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Wow, I made a mess tonight, I thought as I went back to work. Seconds later, I glimpsed an airborne paper ball in my peripheral. Kim! I jumped out of my seat and craned my neck, trying to look over top of her desk, thinking for sure that she was crouched down in the hallway on the other side. I turned around to tell Eleanore I was going to get to the bottom of it when I saw her. She had flattened herself against the small partitioning that separates my desk from the day-shift woman who sits next to me and sucks back snot like a Teamster.

Kim was doubled over, face red in silent laughter. She had been chucking folded-up scraps of paper over the partition and running her pen up and down it, in hopes of baiting me to peek around. I don’t know how she was able to stay so quiet! I’d have been snorting and squealing and breathing heavily. I called her a little bitch and ran away.

3. During the last hour of the night, I was regaling Collin and Bob with tales of the pizza guy I was stalking (they were hanging on my every word, believe me). I had my back toward the hallway while visiting them in their area, and it was the perfect set-up for Kim to walk all the way around the perimeter of the department and shove something (fanned papers? I was too scared to notice) in my face while shouting. It was so startling that even Bob was jolted.

I had roller coaster heart for the rest of the night and slept with my lamp on. Kim should be a ninja. Or at the very least, a CIA agent.

Today, I walked into work, determined to give her the silent treatment—you know, the most mature tactic I’m capable of—when she said, “I saw these today and thought of you so I bought them!” and tossed a pair of awesome red-and-white striped fingerless gloves layered over a black pair onto my desk.

She’s always fucking with my emotions and I fall for it every time. Because I’m naive.