A Shallow Girl’s Guide to Reheating Leftovers
A Comedic Look at Life by Anne Egeland
This book is dedicated to:
Peter
Paul
Logan
Kira
Christian
Catie
Billy
Riley
& the ones who haven’t quite gotten here yet
I love kids. I was a kid myself, once. – Tom Cruise
Prologue
"I think I did pretty well, considering I started out with nothing but a bunch of blank paper." –Steve Martin
This book is a compilation of diary entries, blog posts, emails, and stories of my clumsy, idiotic adventures that I would tell to my friends when I have had too much to drink and was feeling a little too honest.
Make no mistake, mid-2008 to mid-2009 was the worst year of my life. I have decided to make something good come out of that year. I looked for the funny in every situation, and I tended to fall ass-first into weird situations that would make everyone around me laugh. Those are the stories I compiled here for you to read. Because honestly, in that year, these humorous situations were the only thing that kept me going as I waded through the hell that was my life at that time.
Sincerely,
Anne Egeland
Aka Enna Stein of KosherPorkchops.com
Making A Good Impression
I try, against all odds, to be lady-like at work. It’s an uphill battle, let me tell you. I am not ladylike at all. I don’t wear high heels because I know that I look like a rhino trying to delicately tip toe through the marsh when I wear them. I bite my nails. I rarely do my hair. I abstain from all forms of lipstick since it always just ends up on my teeth. My nylons, when I wear them, frequently get runs and tears in them. I have been waiting since the age of four to finally grow some facial hair so I can just become a man already. I am a hot mess in a girl’s body.
I made popcorn at work one day. Why? No reason other than I was hungry and it was the healthiest thing available in the vending machine. Every time I passed the vending machine my stomach would remind me that those five Twix bars are calling for me, yearning for me to just accept my fate and become a fat girl already.
But I abstain from the Twix bars, and I pop myself some popcorn instead. I head on back to my office, lean back in my chair and start to toss pieces up into my mouth. I miss my mouth a lot. Then I suddenly remember that there’s a meeting I am supposed to be in. Pretending to care, I hustle off to the meeting.
In the middle of the meeting, I realize there is about a handful of popcorn in my cleavage down my shirt. So, when my boss decides it’s time to take a break from the meeting and everyone gets up to stretch and go check their email, I am left alone in the room.
You know where this is going.
I reach down my shirt, grab a handful of popcorn, and start eating. What I failed to realize, however, was that the guy who was late to the meeting came in through the backdoor of the meeting room - the door that was inconveniently behind me, and saw me take popcorn out of my boobs and eat it.
I look up at him, mouth full of popcorn and say, ” Ehhhy Pfofkern?” This was my way of saying, with my mouth full, “Want any popcorn?” I know you’re thinking this somehow sounds like I might be vaguely hitting on him, but let me assure you I am not nearly attractive enough to pull that line off sexily. I really just did not know what else to say. The guy laughs so hard he starts coughing and leaves back out the door.
The rest of the meeting I had to deal with people asking “Does anyone smell popcorn?” The guy who caught me boob-snacking was trying hard not to laugh all while I try not to piss myself out of fear that he will tell on me and my secret boob stash.
All-in-all I have to say I think I am making a great impression at this new company.
Supergirl Strikes Again
We blew a tire recently. Considering the government has yet to identify me as a national treasure and pay me handsomely for being such, I am still very much broke.
I took the car to a tire center right by our house and asked if they had any used tires or how much it would cost to replace one tire. The guy looked at the tires on my car and told me he has NO IDEA how the car is not sitting on 4 flats instead of one. For those of you wondering if the guy was trying to scam me, he wasn’t. My tires were balder than Mr. Clean.
He then gave me a quote for their cheapest tires, and I …well, I started crying. I said I had almost no money and then I started swearing through my blubbering about how tires were so expensive.
Then, Mr-Tire-Man-Who-Should-Be-A-Saint offered me the greatest deal under the sun: $25 for all four. I got coupon on top of discount on top of coupon. The guy essentially gave me four free tires and just charged me for the install. I was so happy…I cried again.
The tire salesman said that he knew I would get back on my feet financially soon, and not to worry, everything would be fine.
Then he went about putting new tires on my car and I went about waiting in the waiting room chatting with my friend Ann. I get off the phone and notice my reflection in the store window.
In my haste to change the tire, I just threw on anything. “Anything” consisted of a white t-shirt and a Superman bra. The Superman bra is bright blue and has the red Superman symbol where the nipples would be. And guess what? While I was outside changing the busted tire and adding the spare, it started raining something fierce. My super white t-shirt was now super see-through. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I might have gotten this super deal because I accidentally flashed my Super Goodies at the tire salesman.
It could have been worse, I could have been wearing NO BRA, and mercy would that have been a sight. But then again, maybe I would have gotten a free CAR.
Don King in a Headlock
I was on my way to a job interview, and I decided to stop at a public bathroom in downtown Chicago so I could splash my face with cool water and make sure I wasn’t a hot sweaty ghetto mess.
First I go to the bathroom, see no one else is in the bathroom and I have it all to myself. I am one of those “shy-bladder” people. You know the kind of person I am talking about, they can stop mid stream if someone comes into the bathroom and then resume when that person leaves.
I finish up and I hear someone come in and run the water. I exit the stall and come around the corner and see what only can be described as a homeless bag lady with no pants or underwear furiously washing her va-jay-jay, to quote Oprah.
Do you ride public transportation? I do. Every so often someone on the public trans system finds an unattended box or gym bag. Every time this happens, it is treated as a bomb threat and everyone on the train needs to be evacuated as quickly as possible. The train conductor announces that an unidentified package has been found, the bomb squad has been called and please exit the train as quickly and calmly as possible. There’s this moment of silence and then all hell breaks loose. People are pushing and shoving their way out of the train as quickly as possible.
This is what happened to me in the bathroom. I turned the corner, processed what I was seeing, and then internally – all hell broke loose. I RAN out the door.
And, for the record, the woman had pubic hair from her thighs all the way to her belly button and it was all soapy. It look like she was wrestling Don King with her thighs in the middle of a Car Wash.
By the time I got to the job interview, I was a hot sweaty FREAKED OUT ghetto mess. But on the plus side, I remembered to wear deodorant that day and I will take any little victory where I can find it.
Swearing in Spanish
At one of the delightful jobs I have held in my life, I used to work with a Spanish woman. She was actually from Spain, came over here, met an American, got married, popped out a couple of very cute kids, and went to work at the same place that I happened to work at.
One of Sara’s jobs was cleaning out the warehouse once a whenever. I say ‘once a whenever’ because it really was whenever she felt like it. There were entire months where she wouldn’t set foot in there. And then there were months where she cleaned it every week. This particular story happened during one of those times when she had gone months without cleaning out the warehouse.
In the warehouse, we stored equipment from different locations. One of the requirements for storage was that if it once held food, it had to be cleaned, sanitized, and wrapped in plastic wrap on a pallet.
The warehouse workers started to complain about a smell about a month before we figured out what was really going on. They said it smelled like a rat had crawled into the wall and died. So naturally we called an exterminator. The exterminator came out, smelled around, said he couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and laid some glue traps down.
Then the smell got worse. It got more intense. The warehouse workers started to really complain, saying they were gagging all the time and that the smell was definitely coming from a pallet in the storage area. Sara goes to look and decides that it’s time to figure out where the smell is coming from. I decide to help because at this particular company, the power would go out frequently, as would the internet. This happened to be one of the times the power was out.
So Sara and I, armed with flashlight hardhats, descend on the warehouse.
The smell was like getting hit with a wave of hot garbage and corpses. It was that bad. After sniffing various pallets, I finally found which one was the offender and we unwraped it.
Inside we find four small refrigerators. Carefully, we unwrap them and open them up. The second refrigerator we open is filled with mush. We stand in front of it, while it pours out on our legs and feet, and try to figure out what it is.
It was nothing but maggots and rotting meat. There was a whole ham that was decomposing inside. Then we found the dead rats, who probably figured out how to get into the fridge and then couldn’t get out and suffocated. All around, it was a hot mess, and Sara and I both vomited and swore up a blue streak.
We ended up calling a professional cleaning crew who came into the office in hazmat gear and cleaned it out. When they were leaving, one of the cleaners said he has been to crime scenes on hot July days that have been more tolerable than what he just cleaned for us.
I Owe Leah a New Car
Recently, I was reminded why I no longer drink. My friend Leah was regaling me of stories of things I have done while drunk.
Once, one of our friends threw a margarita pool party. It’s not what it sounds like. We took a kiddie pool, filled it with margarita mix and kiddie bathtub toys, and proceeded to throw a party around the pool. Everyone was given a cup, but by the end, we were all laying on our backs with large tubes running from the pool to our mouths.
After a night of heavy drinking, Leah offered me a ride home and I proceed to pour myself into her backseat. The whole ride home I am belching and drooling uncontrollably. Leah turns around and asks “Anne, are you about to vomit?” My response? “I’m thhhhhinkin’ about it!” At which point Leah pulls the car over as fast as she can. I, in my drunken stupor, try and throw up out the window. The problem was, I didn’t roll down the window first. I literally pressed my face against the window and vomited. I was quite the delicate little flower back in the day.
Leah eventually went away to college, which left me on the Chicago bus system. Let me tell you, they are significantly less forgiving when you press your face against something and vomit.
Drug Lords
I was helping one of my friends clean out her grandmother’s house after she died. At the time I was unemployed, and since I cannot get enough of the smells of cabbage, bleach, and mothballs, this was right up my alley. Plus I figured my friend would appreciate someone being there with her, especially when she got to her grandmother’s undergarments. No one wants to handle their own grandmother’s undergarments. Not that I was exactly looking forward to that part, but I digress.
My friend never knew this, but her grandmother was a hoarder. You know what I mean, some people never throw away a newspaper, others it’s clothes, other people it’s pets, etc. For my friend’s grandmother, it was a different collection for each room.
In the spare room, her grandfather’s old study, it was Elvis and Clowns. There were figurines everywhere. I wasn’t afraid of clowns before, but I am now. She even had an Elvis Clown, which I am pretty sure my friend is busily looking up on Ebay to see how much it is worth, because neither of us had seen such an abortion of a figurine in our entire lives. And therefore it must be worth a nice sum of money.
In every purse we found sugar packets and cookies that date back to 1979. This woman had close to 50 purses too. One of which I was allowed to take home because my friend thought it was a dead animal. Like you could resist a purple and green shag purse? Don’t act like you could.
But nothing – nothing I tell you – prepared us for the drugs. The woman had a bathtub full of pills. Not that we found them in the tub, we just used to tub to store them as we found them. They were stored by pill type in those large freezer-sized sandwich bags. She had antidepressants, she had morphine vials, she had anti-anxiety medications, she had painkillers that would knock out a horse. She had pills I have never even heard of. She even had unmarked pills that we were afraid to touch. There was everything from synthetic estrogen to birth control pills to what I am pretty sure is ecstasy (do any other pills have happy faces on them? I don’t think so.)
We spent half the day using the internet to look up the different pill types. Each search made us more and more horrified, and more and more sure that her grandmother was probably an elderly drug lord.
My friend and I were surveying the bathtub o’ pharmaceuticals, and a thought occurred to me: We are totally street rich! We could sell these on the black market!
I was kidding, but only a little. I am sure there are people out there who would be willing to pay us a hefty sum for a handful of these little beauties.
But that idea did leave us with a question: What do we do with all these drugs? We couldn’t flush them because the toilet looked like it was from the 1800s. We couldn’t just throw them away, what if a kid was messing around in the garbage can?
So, we did what normal women do when they do not know what to do:
We called her mother.
Her mother called a cop-friend of hers, and then the police showed up and hauled off our Monty pile of street riches. We had to give our names, which means somewhere in the system I am listed as a possible drug lord. I am sure that will buy me some street cred when I eventually get sent to prison. I will eventually be sent to prison too, since my mind went straight to the illegal possibilities when I saw all the pills, as it always does when I am in a tricky and morally ambiguous situation.
Things I Have Done for Minimum Wage
I was once interviewed on the phone, and the interviewer asked me to describe an instance in any of my previous jobs where I went above and beyond the call of duty. These following instances are what I thought of, none of which are what I said because I was not stupid, and actually wanted to work at that company.
I once had to identify an employee of
my company after she refused to give her identity to the police. The
police showed up to her branch after she threw scalding hot coffee in
a pregnant woman’s
face becasue she cut in line in front of her for the sink.
I once had to stop a grease trap from
overflowing. I was literally shoveling grease into garbage bags
while standing knee-deep in molding grease. It smelled far worse than
you are imagining. I was a teenage fast food employee at the time and
made no more than five dollars an hour. I was told by my boss that I
had to do it or I would be fired. I drastically underestimated how
good it would have felt to be fired.
I once fell waist-deep into a deep
fryer. It was off, and the grease was cold, but I did not know that
at the time. I thought I was about to get seriously burned
and was so scared that I
peed when I fell in. My boss then made me clean out the fryer. In
retrospect, I should have just kept my mouth shut about the peeing
thing. Most of the customers at that particular fast food
establishment wouldn’t
have noticed anyhow.
I once had federal marshals bust open
the door to my place of employment looking for someone who listed the
business’s
address as their last place of residence. Apparently he was wanted
for armed robbery. I got to go home right after that, and yes, it was
because I instantly peed. I tend to pee when I get really frightened.
It’s
why my family has never thrown me a surprise party.
I once had to check in an employee’s
old uniforms when we fired her. She graciously filled the bag with
thongs. I didn’t
realize it until I was arm-deep into the bag. And yes, they were
dirty. And yes, I burned all my arm hair off with chemical cleansers
after that.
Instead of saying any one of these things to the woman interviewing me, I mumbled something about being a team player and staying late when needed. I think I need to start being more honest in interviews. “When have I faced adversity in the workplace? Does having a federal marshal point a gun 5 inches from your face and scream at you to get down and tell him which one of us was Tyrone count? No? Huh. I guess never.”
I Ordered the Fish
Back in my college days, I decided to Rush a sorority. It’s a right of passage every girl must go through. Not the Rushing, the learning that pretty much all sorority girls act exactly like they are portrayed on television and in the movies.
Anyway, one of the last challenges I had to undergo before I joined the sorority consisted of a loyalty test.
I walked into the room and all the sorority sisters were sitting on one side of the table. On my side there was a glass with a handkerchief covering it.
I ask, " What it is I am supposed to do?" They say to remove the handkerchief and I would know what to do.
So, I do. And under the handkerchief, there is a glass with a fish in it.
Thinking there were no other options, and knowing what I had to do - I grab the fish, throw it in my mouth and swallow it.
The sorority sisters were horrified. They said it was an exercise in trust, and that normal people usually hem and haw and then finally agree to it. At that point they usually stop them and give them a diatribe about trusting your sorority sisters. But instead I just ate the fish and I didn’t give them a chance to stop me. I was the third person to go into the room, and there were easily ten girls behind me who still had to undergo this trust test.
One of the sisters was really angry, because now they had to think of something to do to the rest of the girls rushing. The rest of the sorority sisters instantly voted me in. Because really, if I was willing to eat a live (albeit small) fish for them, there really wasn’t anything else they could test me with that would trump what I just did.
And really? I eat sushi all the time, like eating a small fish was going to bother me all that much. Still though, it could have used a little soy sauce and ginger.
Have You Seen This Axe Murderer?
I was happily sitting at my computer, looking up pictures of my favorite stars in bikinis so I could feel better about my own dimply thighs, and I hear a loud BAM right next to me. I looked up and saw my patio doors covered in blood.
My reaction was to fall out of my chair and try to figure out if the blood was mine while writhing around on the floor screaming. My first thought was that a drive-by had occurred. I had temporarily forgotten that I was living on the top floor of a large apartment building in the far west super-safe whitewashed suburbs of Chicago.
It turns out that a seagull, or possibly a very large pigeon, smashed into my patio door and literally splattered everywhere. There was blood and chunks of bird everywhere.
I fill a bucket full of water, and start to wash the bits over the side, and a little voice tells me that I am directly above the main walkway for my building and there are people down there. I am essentially pulling a “Carrie” on the people below. So, I calmly walk back inside, since I do not want to look over the edge and therefore give away that I was the one dumping the blood over the side on them.
For the record, I felt really bad about that. I didn’t think before I acted. It’s like I am still four years old diving head first into the shallow end of the pool.
So, I waited about an hour, and tried to think of how I can clean this mess of bird remains up off my balcony without chancing bloody water flowing over the side onto the walkway below.
My fiancé Eric has tyvek suits he wears for work. I grabbed one and I suited up. You know that scene in E.T. where the government comes for E.T. and they are wearing those weird suits? That’s essentially what I was wearing, only, you know, without a respirator attached on the back. I grab my cleaning supplies and get to work. It takes me roughly an hour, but I get all the chunks and blood sopped up. Then I take it in a bag to the garbage shoot. The garbage shoot in my building is in a closet, so I enter the closet, dump it down, and walk out.