Kettle, Meet Pot

People can usually tell when it’s safe to enter my office. They can gauge the mood depending on what music I have playing. If Winehouse or Duffy is soulfully crooning, I probably just got in a fight with my boyfriend. Jazz? I’ll be all smiles and may even pay you a compliment. If I have my nineties mix going, it’s time to stroll down memory lane to the days when my BFF and I thought we were the shit in our Beavis and Butthead t-shirts with matching bling; however, if you hear Barbara Streisand’s haunting voice wafting through the speakers perched upon my desk or through my headphones… you better stay back or there will be hell to pay.

Something about her empowering and soul-wrenching voice makes me feel all warm and gooey. It keeps my raging anger and the moment just-before-I-go-postal at bay. To this day I don’t know what it is about her that keeps me from throwing my Sith coffee mug at the office idiot who still doesn’t know how to convert excel to PDF; or catapulting my Sting replica letter opener at the face of the craptacular, arrogant schmuck who needs the report I sent him two minutes before yet again, because he still hasn’t learned how to access anything but porn on his iPhone.

Sweet, sweet funny girl; I can almost smell the hair gel and glitter sizzling under the hot lights of the recording studios as she and Barry Gibb laid down “Guilty.” She makes me tolerate my boyfriend whose fingers are flying across his Mac like Liberace sans the glitter cape and heavy foundation.

“But babe,” he pleads, “I just need five more kills before I level up my hunter! Wanna watch?”

Somehow, I sit through those five kills and watch him skin them with disturbing glee. My grimaces and protests of mauling defenseless cyber wolves minding their own business go unnoticed. He tells me he’s going to record his level eighty honor so he can watch it again later and warns me to brace myself because it is going to be so “epic.”

Sipping my ginger vodka, I watch as his character glows for half a nanosecond.

(Insert pregnant pause here)

“That’s it?” I ask.

“Well, yeah. My computer was kind of lagging because I was recording, but when you watch it back and magnify him it’ll look so awesome.”

I’m still waiting for a trumpet or horn to sound, marking the occasion. Nothing. I look over at my German Shepherd laying in the closet. She blinks twice and goes back to sleep on my pile of clothes. “Exactly.” I tell her, but my boyfriend doesn’t hear me. He’s too busy already training his character in order to complete his accomplishment.

“Fucking gamers.” I say to myself while I pour another drink, turn up Babs, and proceed to design my t-shirt that reads “Nerds of the world 010101010110111001101001011101000110010100100001.”

I chuckle at my cleverness and smirk pompously as I think of how bad ass I’m going to look at next year’s comic con.