My Life is Absurd

Now don't get me wrong, I'll be the first to admit that I'm a bit of a hypochondriac. If I get a chest cold I think it's lung cancer. All that aside, when something is actually wrong with my health I generally notice.

So, for the past few weeks my allergies have been really bad. Now silly me I just think it's seasonal and will go away. I keep taking my allergy pill and just deal with the sneezing, watery eyes, etc. Then the other day I got an itch on my leg. I look down to see I have hives. I have not had hives since I was a little kid. What the heck? I just try to ignore it and hope it goes away. (It's clear that my sister is a healthcare professional right? I mean I'm so responsible about this stuff, obviously she's taught me well...) I continue on for a few days just being generally allergy ridden. Then came yesterday.

I get home after class and decide to take a nap because I'm super sleepy. When I wake up I realize my lips are swollen. Oh hey, that's a symptom I'd left out, I was in like a constant state of having supermodel lips. Anyway, so I wake up with crazy swollen lips. Annoyed, I take a benadryl.

Then I decide maybe it's something in my room that is causing this, not actually just seasonal. I take off all my sheets and put them in the washer. I go up to the living room to watch TV with the roommates and wait for my lips to go back to normal. They don't. They actually get sort of worse. And then I start to panic.

I call my sister 'cause she's a doctor now. She makes fun of me a little and says I'll be fine.

Then the wheezing starts.

Now I'm scared. I decide to go sleep at my sisters because suddenly it dawns on me. I think I'm allergic to my new house. This is easily one of the stupidest things that has happened to me recently. I mean for real, who has a house that actively tries to get them out? It's like it's haunted only it's haunted by allergens!

So anyway, this morning I had to go to the doctor. I told her I was planning to clean my air ducts with a bleach concentration. She yelled at me. She told me I needed to ask someone else to do it. She told me I should not go back to my house until it had been done and the house had sat for a day or so. She made me get an EpiPen in case something went really bad.

Now I'm a nomad. I have no home (although I do have a very kind friend who is letting me stay with her for a bit). Luckily I have a friend who cleaned the ducts for me. If that does not work I don't know quite what I'll do. If you happen to see me sleeping on a bench on campus next semester though maybe throw a blanket over me.

Pray for me?

Sometimes you’re the pigeon sometimes you’re the statue.

I should have stayed in bed today.



4:30a.m. I wake up. Why am I awake? Why am I so awake? I’m a little hungry, maybe I should eat something.

6:22a.m. Alarm goes off, I get up, shut it off, and promptly fall back to sleep.

7:12a.m. Crap! I need to leave for work in 18 minuets. I have to shower because I had bug spray on last night. Sleep…

7:22a.m. What the heck self?!? Get up! Must shower!

It’s at this point that things get kind of intense, I’m fairly certain I break some laws of physics and maybe find a crack in the space time continuum while taking the fastest shower of my life. I scurry out and almost bite it on the tile floor but manage to catch myself.

7:25a.m. Clothes. Must find clothes for work. Solid colors, yes, solid colors are good. Solid colors match. Shoes. Grab a pair of TOMS. Phone, keys, planner, check. I grab my Froot Loops (side note, somehow I have never noticed that froot loops is spelled absolutely absurdly, I mean for real, who’s idea was that?) and run to the kitchen. I grab a sandwich bag to pour some cereal in. I proceed to spill all over the floor. I pick up the loops I can see, zip the bag, and dash out the door.

7:40a.m. I get in my car. I am officially running late.

7:42a.m. I open my baggie of Froot Loops.

7:43a.m. I spill my baggie of Froot Loops all over myself.

7:43:15a.m. I try to salvage as many as I can, clean myself up, and drive all at the same time.

8:00a.m. I am not at work. I should be at work.

About here is when I start to realize it’s going to be one of those days.

8:05a.m. I arrive to work and clock in.

8:07a.m. Receive email from my professor saying I need to correct something on my quiz. I don’t know what she’s talking about. I thought I'd done everything right. Crap.

We have another quiz today. I bought a bottle of wine last night in preparation for not doing so hot on it. Not sure how I feel about that yet. I will be really glad when this day is over.

True Life: I Sit at the Regional Manager’s Desk.

If you’ll remember, in my last post I mentioned that the building I am working in is under construction. Because of this, when I got here on my first day, my boss (Jake) and another man (Cliff) had set up camp in a large office belonging to the regional manager. Apparently, he seldom comes into the office, preferring to work elsewhere. So, as both of the desk areas in the room were taken Jake got me a small round table that we put my computer, shelves, pens, etc. on. And that was my spot. I had my little corner and there were three of us in the one office. It was a pretty good little setup. Until yesterday that is.

I get to the office at about eight o’clock Thursday morning and head to our big room expecting to see Cliff, when I arrive though, his desk is clear. His new cubicle is finished and he has moved. I’m a little sad that I will be working alone for a couple hours (because my boss is lucky and gets to come in at like ten) but it’s not a big deal. I go to my little table and get to work.

At about nine thirty Jake comes in, “Did Cliff already move?” he asks. I resist the urge to respond with “clearly,” and instead reply with a simple, “I think so.” So then Jake starts moving out. It’s at this point that I start to get a little worried. I have it on good authority that my cubicle will not be finished for about a week. I figure I will just have to walk a little more and I’ll just stay at my little table. Not so.

After moving all of his things out Jake comes down with Cliff. They are talking about returning the round table to its owner. I remember Jake saying something about me living at a podium for a week. I really thought that was a joke. Maybe not. Maybe I have to stand all week. Maybe I have to put my desktop computer on my lap. Maybe next week is going to suck major.

“Hey Kyley, why don’t you just move your stuff to the desk Cliff was at.”

“What?” I say/laugh.

“Yeah, that will work; you can just sit there for a week.”

“You want me to move my stuff to the regional manager’s desk? And you want me to sit there, alone, in his giant office, alone, for a week…alone?”

“Yes.”

So I live here now. It’s one hundred percent absurd. It’ll be a miracle if this guy does not come in while I’m chilling in his office. What do you even do in that situation? “Oh sorry, I’m the intern, is this not the inter office? Silly me…”

This could be good.

I will not kill the internship lily!

So, I think it is about time I write something about my internship. This being said, on my very first day, the rest of the office is just returning from a week long sales meeting in New Orleans. My boss comes in a few minuets after (slightly nervous and overzealous) me. There is a lot of filling out paperwork that we’re going to skim over, trust me, you’re not missing much. So, now I’ve been at work for an hour or so. I go to my bosses office where he has made me a little desk of sorts. Oh, I should give some background here…

The building I work in was, and still is, in the middle of some serious construction. Ergo, my boss’s office was a large room shared between him, another coworker, and myself. Okay, now back to my little desky work area.

Next to this makeshift work area there is the most depressingly droopy peace lily I have ever seen. Sorta like that photo, but worse because it didn't even have flowers. So my coworker (we’ll call him Cliff) says to my boss (Jake, if you will) “Your plant looks bad.” For some reason both of them seem to find this very funny. I, however, am lamenting for the poor lily, clearly it is in the ICU of the plant world. Jake goes and gets some water for it, I’m still worried so I start trying to prune off the overly dead parts in an attempt to entice it into living.

“She touched it last!” I hear in semi surround sound. Then I get the back story.

Apparently, this poor peace lily has been living in the office for quite some time. It has had many owners and homes around the building. It has not, however, really flourished. In a related vein though, no one has killed it yet. So, now we get to “my most important duty of the summer.” Keep the peace lily alive. Kill it and I’m fired. Make it bloom and I get great reviews. Challenge accepted.

The lily is kind of mine now, I water it, I talk to it a little, and I asked if it could come with me to my cubicle when we move. I ordered plant food for it yesterday. I’m determined to make it bloom. I mean I need to be serious about this, it’s internship priority number one after all.

Corporate Finance Woes

My life is a dark, scary, swirling black mass of pain, humiliation, and numbers at the moment.

Note to self: taking a math class in the summer is not, in fact, any better than taking one during the year. It may actually be worse. Cramming twelve weeks of material into four is one of the A. most absurd and B. least mathematically sound, things I have ever heard of. Would you like to know how this works? How the administration managed this feat of time condensing sadism? It goes like this...

You have class for four weeks. Three days a week. Three hours a day. Three hours. Let that sink in. One hundred and eighty minuets. Ten thousand eight-hundred seconds. Too. Freaking. Long.

Three straight hours of math has had an interesting effect on my brain. Some days it feels like pudding, others like molten lead, and yet others like a hyper saturated sponge, unable to absorb anything.


If only this situation were even a third as funny as I’m trying to make it seem.