Celluloid Eyes

You know how it is when you have one of those days when everything is going, oh, decently enough for a weekday morning considering that you don’t really want to be up and moving but you are even though you’re feeling crampy and cross, and you’re just about ready to leave for the office and you take your vitamins and allergy medications and notice that one of them is seriously running out and you had better do the online refill with the mail-order company soon, so you put the pill bottle next to your computer and then realize, no, you better do it right-damn-now or else you’ll be sorry later so you restart the laptop and open Mozilla and remember that the stupid prescriptions site only works in IE and then open that and find the page and the stupid browser doesn’t remember your login name or password so you have to find the bit of paper with your password hint, but the paper doesn’t say which email address you used for this particular account so you have to open your email app to figure that out, and then the site takes forever and a day to process your refill request so by the time it goes through, you’re pretty pushed for time, and you run to the bathroom to take care of things and you discover, in the worst possible way, that your feminine products aren’t working as well as they should, and you’re trying not to panic or cry or cuss too much as you change personal items of clothing and switch products and vow to get one of those damn Diva Cups, and you take some deep breaths and it’s okay if you haven’t left for work yet, you have a very good reason even if you can’t tell anyone what it is, they’re not strict about tardiness like your last job, thank goodness, it’s okay, so you brush your teeth and head back for the kitchen feeling crampier than ever and realize you haven’t finished making your lunch, but that’s fine because all you have to do is cut some brownies out of the pan and put them in a sandwich bag and get some pickles and shit, the pickle container is in the sink, but you can wash that really quickly and you’re trying to forget that you should have unloaded the dishwasher this morning but that will simply have to wait, and you dry off the little pickle container and pull the brand-new jar of pickles out of the fridge and it doesn’t open, so you smack it on the tile floor like you usually do to loosen the seal and it still doesn’t open, so you smack it again and it doesn’t budge, but of course perhaps you’re not smacking it hard enough because you don’t want to risk cracking the nice kitchen tiles, so you unlock the garage door and smack the pickle jar lid up against the garage floor with a nice resounding thwack and go back into the house and god-fucking-damn, it still doesn’t open, and it hits you suddenly that you probably should have opened them before putting them in the fridge, perhaps getting the boyfriend to open them, but you’re an independent woman and you can open your own damn pickles and you use a knife around the lid to try to pop the seal and fuck, it still doesn’t open and by this time you are screaming “Goddamnit! Fucking goddamn hell!” and other things at the top of your lungs because you are so frustrated and this is no longer a matter of having pickles with lunch, this is a quest, a battle, this is needing to prove you don’t need someone else around to open your fucking pickle jar so you run the tap in the kitchen sink and while you’re waiting for the water to heat, you feel as crampy as you have ever felt in your life so you turn to the drawer full of meds that you never closed after pulling out the bottle of allergy pills and find the naproxen (Aleve) bottle and slam three of them (which is okay, or so a doctor once told me) and chase them with a little water and the stupid kitchen tap water still isn’t hot yet so you get a napkin to put in your lunch bag and you look at the clock and you are late, late, late but the water is finally hot enough to run the pickle jar under and once you’ve warmed up the jar lid you turn off the water and dry the jar with a dish towel and hold the pickle jar close and twist the top and it suddenly pops open and yes, shit, you’ve got pickle juice all over your nice shirt, so you flood the dish towel with water and soak up the pickle juice and sniff the shirt and it still smells like pickles and you put more water on it and wonder if you shouldn’t change into your denim shirt but god damn it, this is a nice comfy shirt and you wanted to wear it and you’re not changing any more clothes and that’s that and you sniff the shirt again and it’s better and hopefully no one will get close enough to you to notice that you smell faintly of dill pickles, so you plop four of the godforsaken little pickles in the pickle container which had better not leak one tiny little drop today, damn it, and put the jar away and zip up the insulated lunch box and grab your purse and work bag and find your fucking keys and drink the rest of the water in the glass by the pill drawer because you don’t want the Aleve to give you heartburn on top of everything else, and you finally finally leave the house and hope to hell you didn’t forget anything, and as you get to your car you see that for the third day running, the birds have gone completely crazily wild in using the side of your car as their bathroom facility, and it’s now beyond gross and your cramps morph into sudden nausea but you’re okay, you get into the car and don’t throw up and the dashboard clock shows you’re late to work before you’ve even left, and even though they’re not picky about it, it does mean you have to stay later, and you wonder why the goddamn hell you’re rushing to get to the office to work on that horrible math-related project that is tedious and irritating and incomprehensible and the whole day is going to be miserable and you might as well have given up and taken a sick day because of the cramps but you just had a four-day holiday weekend so you really can’t and as you drive to work you try to cheer yourself up by saying, “I smell like pickles” in a Ralph Wiggum voice and after you park on the topmost floor of the parking garage since you’re so damn late, and you realize you’re going to have to walk up all those stairs again when you leave that night, and you stalk to the front door of the office building feeling crampy and cross and slightly damp around the shirt, you think that you can’t wait, you just cannot wait for someone to say or do one. wrong. thing. today.