ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

I entered the karaoke contest the other night with Dreams by Fleetwood Mac, and lost to some jerk cowboy named Aaron or something. I was prepared for the eventuality of bad taste on the part of the judges, though, so I’m not sweating it too bad or anything. He sang a Billy Joel song but his voice was so countrified and he was so drunk that it seemed like a crazy Travis Tritt puppet was actually performing. Crowd response is part of the set of judging criteria for the contest, and evidently our crowd really liked this guy. That is their loss. Personally I’m just relieved that the asshole lounge singer man who thought that crowd-pleasing meant shouting “COME ON KANSAS CITY SING WITH ME HERE” every few lines. He sang Dude Looks Like A Lady, and sucked bad. I would have considered murdering everyone in the bar if he had been in any way rewarded for the performances he inflicted on us all night.

Anyway, after I sang in the contest I got really tanked on vodka cranberries, which is not like me, and when we heard that the cowboy guy had won, my boyfriend’s roommate urged me to go sing Edge of Seventeen by Stevie Nicks and “make everybody sorry they didn’t vote for you”. I should have gotten drunk and sang that song for the contest in the first place, because it turned out to be a great crowd pleaser. I like to think that they were sort of sorry in the end, after all. The karaoke girl urged me to come back the following week and do that song instead, but I’m not sure I’m very keen on it. In the end it seems like both the contest and its judges are kind of stupid, and that not much of it is based on anybody having actual talent or not sucking. And it’s not like I wanted a career in show business.

At Rivermarket I met this tiny lady who was dressed up in a funny little witchy outfit. I had noticed her at another table earlier, but on my first trip to the bathroom I saw her at the sink, messing with her false witchy nails and fretting over them. When I finished peeing I saw that she was trying to leave but could not because every time she tried to open the door a nail would fall off and she’d have to stop and fix it. Poor little witch, trapped in the bathroom. I helped her fix the witch nails and let her out and she turned out to be a very nice person who cheered when I sang and who came to tell me goodbye when we left. In return I also cheered every time little witch sang, even when it was with her husband who sounded like a dying manatee.

It was my birthday this weekend, and my roommate gave me some pretty candles (scented like birthday cake) and a Stevie Nicks DVD. While we were at the candle shop we met a nice man who demonstrated for us first hand the perils of a liberal arts education. “I have two degrees in liberal arts,” he explained, “and I work at a candle shop.” I got a stuffed ghost dog. He’s dead but that isn’t a problem. He runs and plays like any dog.

The new girl at work seems okay so far, and doesn’t appear to have majorly screwed up or stolen anything yet. She does seem to have some problems with a) personal space issues and b) punctuality, both of which are things that tend to get on my nerves, but I’m being tolerant and respectful of the fact that people have to have differences even though those differences may make her hard to be around. In terms of personal space, she has committed the sin of standing too close to me and invading my personal bubble when watching me do transactions for training purposes, and also has the habit of putting her purse, coat and ashtray in my seat. I think she should take the counter at the east side of the store, because everybody knows that my boss gets the desk and I get the corner counter on the west side of the store. The punctuality thing is annoying my boss more than it is me, but that’s only because I’m not the manager. On her first day she showed up about 40 minutes late because she lives in Lansing or Bonner Springs or wherever and apparently traffic on I-70 was bad. But on the second day, my boss told me, she had asked in advance if she could come in late because she had to go in to her old job where she’s finishing up, and promised to be in by 1:30 at the latest. However, she didn’t actually get there until around 3:30. Then on last Friday she showed up three hours late after oversleeping. At least I look great by comparison, because I show up 20 minutes early every day to open the store, and my boss loves that because then he doesn’t have to hurry as much in the mornings. I love it too, because I get to open the store and get everything ready the way I like, with nobody getting in my way or bothering me.

My roommate and I ordered three more teacups that match the one I bought last week, and a teapot to go with them. We’re both switching from coffee to tea, because tea is good for you and we’ve gradually discovered that we like it better. After this new tea I’ve tried, I don’t think I could ever go back to teabags. After looking at this book my roommate’s boyfriend gave me about tea connoisseurship I’ve realized that tea is a great beverage to become a connoisseur about, even better than beer or wine or whatever, because even very expensive tea is cheap compared to very expensive beer or wine. My boyfriend and his best friend are gradually becoming bigger and bigger beer connoisseurs, and plan to make some of their own in the near future, but I can’t afford to do that right now so I’m glad tea is my thing. I think our fancy teaset is supposed to arrive today, and when my roommate gets back from her train trip next week I’ll serve us a nice tea, with scones maybe. Anyway, so far my favorites are the Irish Breakfast, a Sri Lankan tea, and the Mambo, a rich Chinese tea.