Drug Dealer Economics

In the next week or so, I may be getting a desk at work. As in, my very own, with my very own computer on it and not one that I share with a girl who customizes the desktop with pictures of an underwhelming climbing trip (fixed rope hooks? please) and who has a variety of viruses growing in her mostly-empty, lipstick-smudged bottled water collection. The one remaining corner in the office is about the size of a toilet stall and has a load-bearing support beam running right down the middle of it, so it'll be interesting to see how they plan to wedge me in there with a giant farting dinosaur of a computer. I'm rooting for some kind of hammock system.

This is part of a recurring trend in my employment history. The more valuable I become to an organization, the more they try to physically compact me into a smaller, more powerful version of the original. My paycheck grows at the expense of leg-, arm- and headroom. I started my last job pulling down a modest salary in a vast, poorly-lit back room full of servers and spiders and ended up making gobs of money tucked under my boss's left ass cheek. I had to make three-point turns just to back out of my cubicle and had devised an ingenious way to suspend my coffee cup from the hanging file folder next to my head.

Just today I found the perfect analogy for this equation in the economics of drug dealers: I am a sack of weed bought cheap and then concentrated and compressed both metaphorically and physically into a big sticky ball of hash that gets my employers very, very high. So high that it seems reasonable to ask someone to work in the half lotus position.

But hey, if it means I get to customize my own desktop with images of the chupacabra, I'm totally down with it.

Last week was my birthday, and for once it didn't suck. In fact it was awesome. My folks came down and visited briefly and I helped them get their truck dug in to the powdery, surprise-ridden Padre Island sand. Luckily we were rescued in short order by chain-toting redneck angels.

Then we went to San Antonio for the weekend to see Dave Chapelle's stand-up. His routine was predictably hilarious, but he also managed to gracefully address his much publicized personal problems right from the start, which made the rest of the show feel surprisingly intimate, given that it was a theater packed to the rafters with howling San Antoni-hoes. Seriously, the sheer volume of sequins in that place was staggering-- if you plucked all the sequins from all the overstuffed tank tops and all the limp, muppet sac-like armpit purses, and then burned them, the resulting lump of smoking plastic would be the size of a Hummer. Too many of those there too. And then for every hoe there was a hulking, hair gelled dude in a shiny button down shirt grunting into one of those awful walkie-talkie phones. In between obnoxious shouts of "WOOOO!" and "I love you!" from the audience, Dave managed to make a few deft, cutting remarks about the war, the hurricane, the vacuum in black leadership, and the politics of marital masturbation. "Jerk-Off Ninja" has got to be one of the greatest terms ever coined.

Other than that, I got to spend time with my husband's incredibly normal family, including my sister-in-law, who kicks ass, and my leetle nephew, who, while being the cutest kid on the planet, still managed to reinforce my ovaries' self-tied knots of protest when I got a look at one of his unspeakble green-splatter diapers. Despite the occasional hiccups from my biological clock, I am so not ready to clean someone else's taint on a daily basis.

And thus began my 27th year.