Ever notice how it's the little things in life that amuse us so much? More to the point, ever notice how it's the silly little idiocies in life that amuse us more than anything else? Well, this is not as much ''the little blog that could'' as it is ''the blog that enjoys going up the down escalator in your local mall.'' Will it have anything of real importance? No, probably not. But enjoy the ride never the less!

 


It's darn near the end of 2011, and I notice that I haven't made a new blog post since early August. It's almost apropos, since that's not too far off from the inception of the reason for this particular post. I'll be honest: I've come to dislike blogging as a whole. Not because I don't have things to write about, but simply because I've been more tired this year than in the past, and as a result have found myself incredibly impatient with the Internet. You can only stare at so many LOL- and Nyan-cats before you find them staring back at you.

However, this is definitely worth dusting off the ol' blogger. Assuming you still semi-regularly glance at this little bit of nowhere...and haven't already seen the ever-so-subtle remarks being made over Kevin's Facebook account...Mel and I have an announcement of particular importance! No, she hasn't agreed that my ass is sexy (and subsequently ushered in the end of the world).

But she is pregnant and we're going to have a baby!

And apparently, votes are already being tossed in for their official nickname of being 'Rampage' regardless of gender. ;p

Interestingly enough, this particular announcement (and the official discovery of it, to boot) is being made rather late in the proverbial game. We had attributed a number of the early baby indicators to other factors--mostly stress-based ones considering we spent the last part of summer and most of the autumn fighting an aspiring bedbug infestation in our apartment. While we are in the process of finding out how far along Mel is, we're pretty darned sure it's far along enough to put a due date around her birthday.

So for any friends going to Anime North 2012, you'll actually be seeing the little tyke there. So huzzah to little otaku-in-the-making once again! But on the plus side, at least we're not so scary as to name our kid Inu Yasha. That'd just be ridiculous. I'm opting to name them Sesshomaro myself.


Mel: "WHAT?"

Me: ^^;; "Um...I meant Carrot Glaces?"

Mel: "You do realize any harm I inflict on you now can be legally whitewashed as 'temporary insanity', right?"

Me: o.O;;;

Labels: epic Baby Daddy post

posted by Phillip at 7:44 PM

 



And at the risk of sounding like a Mortal Kombat game: it has begun. This past week has seen our store’s official beginning of the Back To School season, wherein we did multiple small rearrangings of the store, contended with a lot of shipment boxes and saw a higher than usual crowd of people (typically with multiple kids in tow) coming in.

Normally this wouldn’t have been too much of a problem--this year I’ve staffed us up the proverbial wazoo--but we also had to contend with the week before that…wherein we also had to do multiple *large* rearrangings of the store, contended with an unholy mess of shipment boxes and still saw a higher than usual crowd of people.

Honestly now, we did not need to get 80 boxes for just one day. Now before you call me on whining too much, bear in mind we get shipments every Monday through Friday. And those 80 boxes showed up on a Wednesday. Yep…for the two days before and the two days after those 80 boxes smashed into us, we were already being clobbered by roughly 50 boxes each day.

I swear, I spent most of that week doing only 3 things: opening boxes, trying to figure out how to rearrange our stockroom to actually fit everything from those boxes, and then switching our wall displays around to accommodate the impending BTS season.

Happily, I’m not as burned-out exhausted as I ended up being by this time last year, but I’ve definitely been really bloody tired after every shift I’ve finished for the past straight fifteen days. Hence the more than slight lapse in updates, and my general need to curl up on the couch and be anti-social since all my remaining energy’s gone into simply fighting to stay awake. (At times a winner has been me, and at other times…well, 10pm is kind of a late hour, right? Right?)

Aside from all that, not much else has been happening. Or if it has, I’ve been too preoccupied to notice. For the time being, we’re just muttering mutinous words under our breaths about how the weather forecasters keep promising a thunderstorm to blow away all this humidity, only to have a storm never even remotely manifest. The closest we’ve seen for the entire past month has been little more than a piffly spit of rain that actually ramped up the mugginess rather than cut it in half.

“But hey!” you insist. “Can’t you share something other than your pitiful bellyachings?!” Alas, I don’t really have all that much to give in terms of life-affirming and/or comical anecdotes. But at the very least, I can offer proof to Gaffney that there is still a Fanboys! Fic out there that’s being worked on before The Unnamable Fic is tackled once more….

(I know: shameless self-promotion. How could I betray your valued reading trust?! Well…I could always indulge in more emo-blog.)




“Look, you just can’t stampede into our series,” Dark Mayhem said. “Beyond it being just plain rude, you idiots are going to completely ruin everything we’ve managed to establish as canon.”

Rei glanced over at Carnage. “Your series has canon?”

“Well, it has at least two cannons,” Carnage said. “I’m going to be mounting those babies onto Escafanboy tonight too!”

Naturally, sweatdrops ensued. “Are we even talking about the same thing?” Rei asked him.

Of course, the ongoing conversation continued just as heatedly as before.

“Oho, like you Fanboys are any better?” the Narutard self-insert laughed derisively. “We’ve read up on each of you guys, studied your fics. There’s over twenty full-blown fanfics in your series, and in all that time what have you accomplished?”

“I’ve perfected my recipe for salsa,” Demolition offered.

Travis Tranquility gawked at him. “You what?!”

“Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it,” Makoto said. “It really is good salsa.”

The Narutard pointed at Chaos. “And you’re the saddest avatar of them all.”

Chaos was of course indignant. “Why, I’ll have you know that I’m the lead character in this world!”

The enigmatic, normal-looking avatar paused for a few moments as he contemplated these bold, brilliant words. “But you don’t even serve any viable purpose,” he said, speaking for the first time. “You’re useless. You’re irrelevant. You’re the Gema Ball of this series.”

“Wha--I am not the Gema Ball!” Chaos exclaimed.


[Cue Gema floating through the living room!]


Gema: “One of us, gema… one of us, gema…”

Chaos: -.-;; “Hysteria, smite him.”

Hysteria: >) “Eyebeams!!!”


[Cue the eyebeams sizzling through the air & fragging Gema!]


With a rather dispassionate look on his face, Pesti-chan watched as the charred remains of Gema floated down onto the kitchen counter. “Well, I *was* going to eat that bowl of salad,” he sighed.

Minako could only scratch her head in confusion. “How did Hysteria hit that thing with her eyebeams if she’s still in the bathroom?”

“With the door closed too,” Ami added, now also perplexed.

“It’s one of life’s great mysteries,” Setsuna told them. “Try not to dwell on it or you’ll break your brain.”

They all turned to Usagi, who was writhing painfully (and yet so comically) on the floor as she grabbed at her head. “It huuuuuurts!” she sniffled.

“I warned you not to dwell on it,” Setsuna said, shaking her head.

Meanwhile, fuming about this newest slander against his already tarred-and-feathered name, Chaos stomped up to Anarchy. Anarchy casually glanced up from what was left of the six-pack of Yebisu beer she’d already consumed.

Summoning the very passion of his core being, Chaos slammed his hands down on the coffee table and stared Anarchy in the face. “Anarchy!”

Sipping her beer, Anarchy leaned back in an attempt to distance herself from the now teary-eyed Chaos. “Is there a particular reason you’ve turned into a blithering idiot, or is it just that time of day?”

“You don’t understand!” Chaos said, and pointed angrily at the normal-looking avatar. “He said I was the Gema Ball of this series!”

Anarchy’s eyes narrowed as she slowly turned her gaze to the aforementioned Newbie Sue. She glanced back at Chaos and said, “I have no idea what that means. Is it humiliating?”

“Absolutely!” Chaos said with a nod.

Anarchy shrugged and went back to drinking her beer. “Sounds accurate, then.”

“It is not!” Chaos shouted, once again slamming his palms down on the coffee table. Unfortunately he didn’t look before he slammed, and as such sent his hands right into the pointy bits of an errant Togepi. After a brief intermission wherein Nurse Minako volunteered to stitch up his hands, and Chaos instead went to another medical facility with nurses who weren’t so scary—


Dark Mayhem: “So where’d you go?”

Chaos: “Silent Hill.”

Hotaru: [sigh!] “You are such an idiot, Chaos-chan.”

Chaos: “What? Everything was fine so long as I walloped their grotesquely malformed bodies with my pick-axe every now and again.”


--Chaos took his cause back up with Anarchy. “As I was saying,” he continued. “It is not right, and I will not tolerate anyone insinuating I am the Gema Ball of this place.”

“Insinuate, hell!” the normal-looking avatar shouted across the room. “I’m blatantly stating it.”

Chaos spun around and glared at the rival Mary Sue. “Hush, you! I’ll show you how things are done in these fics. Anarchy, I demand an ass-kicking!”

Anarchy arched one of her eyebrows. “You’re sure?”

“Without question,” Chaos agreed, nodding smugly.

Anarchy sighed and slowly lifted herself off the couch. “If you insist.”

Twenty minutes and particularly brutal ass-kicking later, Chaos hobbled back into the apartment in crutches, covered in bandage wrappings. “Perhaps,” he warbled, “I should first have specified whose ass I wanted you to kick.”

“Oh,” Anarchy said in mild surprise. “You mean it wasn’t yours?”

“Why would you think that?!” Chaos exclaimed.

“I don’t know,” Anarchy said with a shrug. “It’s your perverted fetish, not mine.”

Labels: Captain Whineypants of the 51st Retail Legion, Curse of the Fanboys

posted by Phillip at 9:16 AM

 


It's nearly mid-July, which means two very special things:

1) there's a lot of gorgeous sunny weather out there I'm doing my best to enjoy when I'm not trapped inside a mall, which has for the most part been using Shady as an excuse to take longer than usual walks around the neighbourhood; and

2) I am roughly 1 week away from having the two most commonly used words in my vocabulary being "f'ing backpacks."

You may laugh, but once again I must remind you: it's nearly mid-July. I've already received the set-up instructions for when we turn the store into "back-to-school hell". (Though not necessarily as far as the kids are concerned. More and more over the past few years all the kids who come in shopping are surprisingly revved up to go back to classes. I can't tell if this is because they miss their friends, or they've already regressed about how much they bitched about the homework, or if it's simply due to the fact that they're shopping for new swag. Sadly, from what I can tell, it's mostly the latter.)

Mind you, this year I am a lot more prepared for the crushing crowds that await us in August. Having cut my teeth on last year's "hey, new mall, new store, let's all flood the place at once!" stint, I'm armed with more staff and have already been prepping the stockroom to receive the impendingly exorbent overstock. So I am cautiously optimistic about this year...which I'll really need. Between last back to school and the Christmas season, I brought myself to the threshold of totally burning myself out, something I've only been recovering from in the last moth or so. (And mostly by deliberately easing down from my usual pace at work.)

In other news of the season, I am alarmed to discover that I am apparently quite tasty. Not in a "seriously, I don't need to hear about what you & Mel do when no one's around" kind of way (though to answer that, I generally say or do something silly, and Mel verbally lambastes me for it. Not quite as glamorous as you'd been hoping, is it?), but in an "itchy without the tasty" sort of way.

Yes, with it being near mid-July, it's mosquito season. And for some bizarre reason, this year I'm getting eaten alive. I don't understand it. I've got bite marks all over my arms and legs, and even a small community of them at the base of my spine. In years past, the mosquitoes have hardly cared about me. At worst I'd get one or two bites a season. A season! And now I've been bitten more times in the past 2 weeks than I've suffered probably in the last 5 years.

Quite honestly, I'm baffled.

Even with Mel joining me on our walks, she is left alone. But me...I swear there's a neon "free buffet" sign hovering just out of my line of sight that all the blood-suckers are responding to. I haven't been itch-free for ten days straight. Normally I can Zen the itchiness away and ignore it, but that's been particularly difficult a task when you Zen out one itchy spot, only to have four more start itching. Honestly, is O+ that popular with the mosquito crowd now?

Other than that, it's the typical "calm before the August storm" for me. Laundry's in the process of being laundered, my cat is hunting the dog, Mel is still asleep and I'm contemplating having a Corona at 10am whilst diving into the 'Battle Royale meets 1984' book "The Hunger Games."

That, and I have Nyancat stuck in my head.


Help?

Labels: can't sleep mosquitoes will eat me, nyan nyan nyan nyan nyannyannyannyan nyan nyan nyan

posted by Phillip at 6:38 AM

 


Not too long ago, we had opted on cold meat deli sandwiches for dinner; they're quick, easy and leave very little of a mess in the kitchen. There's the added bonus of a nearby local grocer called Vincenzo's that has the most awesome array of meat for a lot less cost than your standard Zehrs. They sell more than 4 different types of procuitto, people! Over 4 types!

...but nothing over 9000, alas, unless you count their sheer coolness factor. Yes, I'm geeking over groceries. I have officially reached adulthood. We'll see how long I can last before we have to start attaching the "mature" part onto that title. If I'm lucky, it'll only be when I'm in my 60's, and that will be attributed more to my age than my attitude. Responsible adult, yes. Mature adult...nyaaaaaa.

Or even better: NYAN!




...anyhoo, back to the meat. I had already eaten, being quite ravenous upon my return home from work. Mel opted to have hers later. And wouldn't you know it: about an hour or so after, the following conversation ensues:

Mel: [not so subtly nudging me]

Me: "Yes?"

Mel: ^-^ "Hungry!"

Me: "And?"

Mel: ^___^ "Help with nom-noms!"

Me: [getting up off the couch] "Okay, okay, I'll...wait a minute. Did you just tell me to get into the kitchen and make you a sammich?!"

Mel: "Yes, but my way was cuter."

Me: o.O;;; "That's still the same thing!"


So, yes. I have been demoted from "husband" to "sammich maker." But on the plus side, I get to wear a really cool hat for it. (Okay, so not really, but I'm seriously considering putting it on every time I'm required to do the sammich thing for Mel. It's big and black and has a large feather in it. Not as cool as a fez, mind you, but I think it works for the kitchen.)

In other news, the past week has been filled with families and gatherings. Last weekend, Mel & I trekked out to Hamilton to pay homage to my niece, She-Who-Is-Dangerously-Aware-Of-How-Cute-She-Is-At-Only-Two-Years-Old Josslyn. Naturally, I shutterbugged all over the place, and even managed to snap a decent picture of Mel in the process. Bear in mind that Mel's philosophy on having her picture taken is a lot like my grandmother's: whenever possible, she either averts her head or demands a happy face sticker be tacked over her face in the picture. This can only lead to disaster on my part, for that only fuels my desire to sneak in as many photos of her face as I can. Being her husband/butler/sammich-maker, I think I'm entitled to that.

One added bonus to the visit was that my Dad came down from Nova Scotia for it, and planned to stick around a little afterwards. It was very cool to be able to spend Sunday hanging out with most of the family in a "we're not going to run around everywhere" fashion. A day or so after that, my Dad jumped over to KW to spend a few days with Mel & myself. In the process, I managed to procure an extra day off for myself, which was great: we hit the Farmer's Market, and spent a decent amount of time just driving around town. A lot of old places and landmarks my Dad remembers have either changed or are altogether vanished.

All in all, a fantastic time was had, and this really lights the proverbial pilot light under my butt to get over to Nova Scotia within the next year. (Something I'm sure Ysa & Chris will object heavily to ;)

This left me with only four working days last week. I know, you say: what could possibly go wrong in those mere four days? The good news is nothing went wrong. The bad news is: Head Office slammed us with a multitude of desired changes & rearranges, one after the other. I have spent all my shifts scrambling around to get markdowns completed, switch around the luggage wall, remerchandize one of our large display carousels...and on Monday, I have to change all the signage before I open. At least the added bonus there is it means I can get paid to go in early for once.

They could have just as easily split all these tasks between last week and this week. Last week we had no outstanding work orders from Head Office, and were kinda bored between customers. Now it's non-stop. I'm starting to think it's planned this way. Maybe they have the Cobra Commander on their payroll, and since he's little more than a washed-up megalomaniac now, he has to take his petty grievances out on us retail grunts. Though if he did work at Head Office, that would explain a few silly-assed ideas & policies that have come down the pipeline....

There's a potential crossover fanfic here, I'm sure of it.

Labels: and knowing how silly your employers can be sometimes is half the battle, family reunions, stop typing labels in here and go help with nomnoms

posted by Phillip at 6:42 AM

 



Aaaaand, tada!

After 6+ months on the vanished list, due to popular demand this blog has magically reappeared! But don't for a moment think that you'll get any of that "behind the scenes/how'd they do that?" treatment. Mostly because if you do, you'll be subjected to lots of sad little remarks about how work is attempting to kill me; about how tired and rather apathetic I've been when it comes to updating the world about my life; about how--ooh, Mel has gummi bears! Shiny.

...hey, at least she's not staging a gummi orgy this time around. (She says, and I quote, "they're too tired to have sex right now.") Rule 34, folks. Even Mel adheres to it.

Anyhoo, here we are once again: you attempting to read this little bit of nowhere, and me attempting to update it on a regular basis. There's no guarantee I'll be anything even close to regular in the entries, but the current plan is to at least tac something up once a week.

To start: Anime North 2011!

The Con was very enjoyable this year, even if the cold from hell attempting to pound me into the ground before it even started. (And you know that it's a particularly sadistic strain of cold when you down an entire bottle of Buckley's over 2 days, and the cold just laughs at the effort.) After a rocky start--fun with the rental car, and the Walmart pharmacy being anything but efficient--we managed to pack ourselves and Shady up, and we were off to Toronto!

The Doubletree Hotel was ready for us this year, with all five elevators working for once. I will say it made a surprising difference: you barely noticed any lag time in waiting for elevators, and there didn't seem to be a lot of stopping-on-every-floor whenever the cabs were going down. Not even a minor sign of Gimpy the Wonder Elevator...which does make me kind of sad. Gimpy was always a mainstay.

The greatest heartbreak about the Con this year was mostly room-related. For the first time in about 5 years, we didn't have a window facing the TCC. Instead we got a scenic view...of the hotel rooftop. Awe-inspiring, truly awe-inspiring. So sitting at the windows and Cosplay-watching was pretty much off the roster this year, but we managed.

Anyhoo, we snagged our Panelist badges, hoofed it over to the TCC, met up with Nightbreak and just loitered about in the looooooooong line for the Dealer's Room. We did have fun watching the Cosplayers and trying to break Mel. Unfortunately, Mel pinched back.

Once we did get in, the Dealer's Room offered a lot of great and varied things. I will say it was a very good Dealer's Room this year, and I'm sure many an otaku went home with sobbing wallets and a shitload of swag. Oddly enough, Mel & I didn't really come home with a large haul. It's strange to reflect on, in many ways: I myself have been an otaku for going on 15+ years now, Mel for almost as long, and in that time we've collectively built up a sizable DVD collection and a pretty decent manga collection. Matter of point, for the last two years I've been focused on acquiring backlog titles that are harder to come by. As a result, there's not a lot left that really catches our eyes these days.

However, I did finally locate the X movie, and I somehow stumbled across a brand new Dominion Tank Police for $10. Mel nabbed a kanzashi from Maral's booth, some Mokona chess pieces and some very cool fanart from the Artist's Alley.

Amidst all this we managed to hang out with random members of the Fancrew, as well as the Fic Bitch and Dejana. Huzzah for friends! Huzzah for socializing with people who aren't customers!

And then there were panels as well. Fandom Entitlement was fun, especially since we had more people this time around (last time we were competing with the Dealer's Room and the One Piece panel). Sailormoon was filled with fans rejoicing the return of the manga series. Yuu Watase featured many people who hadn't yet heard of the new Arata series, so we spent a bit of time pimping that. Fanfiction was its usual good stuff, though I think given the crowd and interest there is the possibility of expanding or dividing it into a number of different panels with specific focuses. Aaaaand then there was FicFicBoom, which once again giddily devolved into Savage, Nightbreak, Gaffney and myself trying to break the audience. Bonus points for the all-hat orgy, the 4 Gospels shipping and Sean attempting to kill himself with a squeaky mallet. (Sometimes it's not necessarily the panel that makes it great, but the people you're on it with, and FFB remains my favourite still. ^-^ )

In between it all, Mel & I lounged in our hotel room (I played with Shady, and Mel played Plants Vs. Zombies), and lounged in the TCC parking lot as we idly watched the Cosplayers go by. I swear I'm more and more into the people-watching as years go by.

By the time Sunday rolled around, there was a welcomed dinner at Ginko's with Matt, Gary and Jen. Ohooo, do I love their sashimi. If I could just lay it all out on a table and roll around in it naked, I...uh...nevermind!

Now all of that is over. The Con is now 12 months away (again), and I've spent the last week fighting off that creeping cold--which has tried to kill me at work three days in a row now. But on the plus side, at least my store didn't burn down in my absence!

Wait...that means I still have to actually go to work. Dammit!

Labels: Anime North 2011 Con Report, the blog that wouldn't die (or update for that matter)

posted by Phillip at 5:45 PM

 



So. Halloween.

A day celebrating the night where the dead walk amongst the living and the ghoulies & long-legged beasties eat drunken idiots too stupid to stay out of obviously bad places. It’s a night were scary-looking children visit houses looking for handouts. Or, if you were me, a day where you’re stuck at a store where children’s sometimes scary-looking parents visit us looking for handouts.

I don’t give a damn if you’re willing to pay cash. You’re still going to have to cough up the extra bit for the HST. And while I say this with a sincere smile on my face, bear in mind this is one day where me dragging your bloody mess into the stockroom will simply garner remarks along the lines of, “Such great gore effects! What did you use for the blood: cornstarch?” So please don’t be a haggling ass. Just this once?

At the very least the evening has redeemed itself with The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Granted, none of the movie makes any sense to Mel--definitely not the camp, certainly not the cheese and absolutely not the cult status it so rightly enjoys. But she’ll sing along to the music so long as sexual innuendo and sweet transvestites aren’t involved with the lyrics. But for Halloween, she tolerates it for me.

Awwwwww.

Or, at least that’s what I’d normally say, but I know there will be payment demanded tomorrow for this. Oh well. Frank-N-Furter is worth the act of bribery. One of these years I do plan on attending a theatre showing of Rocky Horror, especially since I’m shameless enough to even enjoy the hazing for being a “theatre experience” virgin. And doubly especially since I’d make sure to smuggle in some toast, or at least a noisemaker or two.

Mind you, the sad truth is that with Halloween over, the inevitable rush towards Commercialmas begins. Well, mostly. The in-mall Zellers started beefing up their Christmas display over the weekend, and the Bay has had their tree decorations out on display for almost a solid month. Okay, I’ll begrudgingly agree that we now have less than two months to go before Christmas hits us in the face with all the wet smack of a frog from the Biblical plagues. But I’d as soon not dwell on it just yet. Give me one more week of November, and then I’ll slip into the gift-giving mindset. I promise. I might even sing a Christmas carol this time around. “Hot Patootie” counts, right?

Labels: This ain’t much of a blog by the light of day but by night it’s one hell of a lover

posted by Phillip at 7:49 PM

 


It’s Saturday afternoon. The weather outside has been remarkable fickle if not downright manic-depressive, shifting wildly from cloudy-with-sunshine to gloomy-clouds-ahoy to sudden-and-aggressive-downpour.

I have the day off. Mel doesn’t. So I’ve spent the morning running a number of random errands (library book drop-offs, post office pick-ups and an utterly failed attempt to find Pocoyo DVDs anywhere other than online, since at least locally I wouldn’t have to pay for shipping) and the afternoon with a short but productive burst of writing.

It’s the writing in particular that flummoxes me right now. The last year or so has not been kind to my muse. I’ve had a hell of a time just finding the time to sit down on even a semi-regular basis to write. And typically, when I have attempted to, my efforts unravel and I wind up staring at a screen where I’ve typed ten words and found all of then to be wholly unsatisfying, even if they’ve just been picking up wherever I left off with an ongoing story.

I haven’t been attacked by that somewhat over-hyped bogeyman called Writer’s Block, and I can’t exactly say I’ve suffered a Writer’s Burn-Out either. Though I think I have been starting to noticeably burn out in terms of life itself, and that has drilled its annoying little tendrils into other avenues. It’s only been in the last week that I’ve discovered I can still be productive at writing--I just have to do it in the morning, when I’m at my most alert and energetic. I’m a morning person by nature (contrast to Mel, who is firmly in the camp that believes mornings as a concept are blasphemous, and really shouldn’t start until maybe 11am), which certainly helps. But what I’ve come to realize is that by writing in the morning, I’m not broadsided by the end-of-the-day exhaustion that’s been up to this point rendering me unable to focus or concentrate on anything.

This does prove somewhat problematic, since I only have one, maybe two mornings a week where I can just relax and write for a few hours. As a store manager, I primarily work mornings (and prefer to do so, truth be told), so getting up early to write could mean a 6am rise almost every day if I want to get at least and hour so squeeze in before I run out to catch a bus. I fear I might not be able to survive that sort of routine either, and it’ll start turning into the same sort of aggravating exercises I’ve been experiencing most nights.

We’ll have to see where it takes me, in the end. I admit for a time I was ready to just throw in the towel, fearing the best was already behind me; I had been prepared to abandon writing altogether, which would have been preferable to banging my head against a proverbial writer’s wall until I came to despise it altogether. This at least gives me hope that maybe I was just suffering a little bit of teh crazies, and so long as I’m not dead on my feet all the time, as I have been for a lot longer than I’d have ever liked to have been, things could be looking up.

Then again, this whole strange thing could be caused due to the strange fact that I am inexplicably now a woman, and, branching out from that logic, Mel is now a lesbian. At least, that’s what my Head Office seems to be under the impression of.

I wish I was making this up.

You see, recently Head office switched the company hosting our benefits package. To make sure the transition was as smooth and painless as possible, they sent each of us managers a short form to be reviewed and verified for our new benefits package. Mel happened to be looking it over a few nights ago, trying to see how extensive our drug and eyecare plans were.

There was a pause, then a loud shriek of laughter. This was followed by easily a solid minute of gut-busting giggles as Mel tried to maintain bladder control. You can see why I immediately had to ask what on earth she found so funny on a personal information sheet.

She handed me the sheet and told me to pay close attention to my information. There it was, as plain as the penis I apparently no longer had: next to my name, the Gender box had been checked in by Head Office as “F(emale).”

Naturally, no good came of this. I do believe my first response was to exclaim, “They gender reassigned me?!”

To which Mel, being the caring wife she is, fell over from giggling so hard. And she continued to giggle on the floor for a good five minutes as I alternated between stunned disbelief and pure rage as to how epic a fuck-up this was.

Now I’ll admit: on the phone at work, my professional voice shifts up an octave, and I’ve been mistaken as a female by more than a few people for me to admit that I can sound like a girl. But only in that situation. I have not the slightest fucking idea how someone can make the jump from “sounds kinda like a girl” to “fully possesses female genitalia.”

I mean, hell! Right next to that block was my name. And last I checked, Phillip was not a girl’s name. There are some Greek female variants I’ve seen like Philippa, but I lack any sort of vowel at the end of my name. Even more so, there’s not a lot of us male store managers in this company; you’d think I’d stand out simply because I’m in the minority in that respect.

But no, now I have submit the form with the noted correction: the “M” block checkmarked, and a line running through the previously-marked “F.” And they had better accept this correction, otherwise I’m afraid I’ll be forced to visit Head Office on their tab and prove to them that I am a guy. And it’ll probably involve a “no pants” moment, but one that’s clearly required.

Oh, Head Office. First you take my pride and dignity, little by little as the years go by. And then when you realize that isn't enough, you take my penis from me.

Labels: as part of our new benefits package it’s gender reassignments for everyone, reflections on writing

posted by Phillip at 2:35 PM