Random things

Just after I got on my bus yesterday morning, it sideswiped a parked car. The sideswiping happened on my side of the bus, too. But I was on my way to only my fourth personal training session, so I’m pretty sure the bus wasn’t off-kilter because of my massive musculature. Though you never can tell. I was worried I’d be late for my trainer (OK, I was worried about the poor owner of the car too … but to be brutally honest I was more worried about being late for my trainer) but I’d left the house with a 15-minute cushion so I figured we’d be OK as the driver waited for whatever CTA officials are dispatched to deal with sideswiped cars at 6:00 am on a Tuesday. Fortunately, the officials came quickly, and they instructed the driver to get right on Lake Shore Drive (four blocks early!) and get all of us passengers to our downtown destinations. So I was at the gym in plenty of time for a brutal attack on my chest and back.

Because I’m done with my trainer by 8:00 and I have a very short walk to my office, I’m usually the first one to get to work on my training days. One unanticipated benefit: I’m the first to use our bathrooms. Which means I get to pee in the blue water the cleaning staff leaves in the urinals overnight. The early bird really does get the worm!

Speaking of our work urinals, some mouth-breathing cretin has penned a crude drawing of what I assume is supposed to be male genitalia (or else it’s a very disfigured hand) on one of the tiles over our leftmost urinal. Our company shares the bathroom with three other companies on our floor, and the bathroom gets lots of traffic—except, of course, on Tuesday and Thursday mornings when I get to make some frothy “blue + yellow = green” magic in blissful solitude—so I don’t know when anyone would have found the privacy to actually write on the walls without being noticed. (It’s not as though the building management had the basic humanity to install partitions between our urinals or anything.) More disturbing still is the fact that some adult male in an adult office building in big-city Chicago would feel compelled to draw a penis on a bathroom wall. As though he were in a truck stop. Or a grade school. Or a Ted Haggard tent revival.

In other big-disfigured-penis news, Alaska Senator Ted “Bridge to Homophobia” Stevens has been charged with seven counts of felony corruption. And Dubya is leaving what’s left of our country with the highest dollar deficit ever recorded. And Scrabulous has been forcibly removed from Facebook, along with all records of my 30 wins and 20 losses and my 90-something-point score for actinium. Which is so devastating to me, I can’t even find the strength to bring this post full-circle and close it on a pee joke.