Have you ever met someone who you could just tell was slightly…off? You know what I mean, someone who is perfectly okay on the exterior but underneath is someone completely different?

What sucks the most about these people is you never can tell if it’s you being bitchy or it’s them being insane. It means butterfly was that kind of person, not outwardly mean or cruel, but drove just about everyone who met her insane. And I never knew if I could REALLY complain about her, because was she really bad? Or was it JUST ME?

She was addicted to the computer far before I was, and as such, she never, ever went off her chat program. She talked to Dave constantly on IM, no matter what I was doing. Even if I was having The Sex.

One day, after class I ran back to my room hoping that she would still be in class but no, there she was hooting and cooing at the computer screen. I informed her that I would be napping, hoping that she would leave for an hour or so, but no, she sat there clacking away on the computer.

Maybe it’s me, but I can’t handle that kind of noise when I’m trying to sleep. Once I’m asleep, it’s all good and I can totally sleep through anything. But going to sleep, I need quiet. Well, this day, it annoyed the fuck out of me that she wasn’t taking the hint.

So I sat up furiously and said, “It means butterfly, I am TOTALLY buying you a quieter keyboard for Christmas!”

Well I’m sure that my tone was decidedly angry, it didn’t warrant what she did next: burst into tears and ran into the hallway, presumably to tell on me. This pissed me off even more, because I hate nothing more than the guilt of making someone cry, so I got off and flounced off to Pashmina/Stimpy’s room where I vented.

I could still here it means butterfly crying from there, and I felt bad, but not that bad.

We both pretended it had never happened.

Several weeks later, during the end of October, her boyfriend came up to stay with us, as SIU closes it’s campus during Halloween due to some previous riots. For a whole week.

What I was expecting when Dave showed up is a fumbling nerdy guy, probably 350 lbs, glasses and back-ne. What Dave was is a skinny Metal Head. A cool one. I liked him immediately and wished that HE were my roommate.

(and no, this Dave is not The Daver. I would never allow a penis that had been inside of it means butterfly to be inside of me. I do have standards, afterall).

Since I was in the bottom bunk, and they shared the top one for his visit, I jokingly told them that they could not have The Sex while I was underneath. Our bed swayed alarmingly if you so much as breathed on it, and I knew that if some humping was going down, I’d never get to sleep.

And ew.

It means butterfly was not a very attractive girl, and I already had to watch her pillowy body flop around the room, and I did NOT need to think of her having The Sex.

One night, during this time, I went to sleep, headphones on and grooving to some Slayer (or something. I don’t remember), when I started to feel something…moving. My bed was suddenly rocking back and forth. This displeased me so much that they were doing gross things to each other ABOVE ME that I grabbed my stuff and went to sleep on Stimpy/Pashmina’s floor.

And boy was I pissed.

I spent the rest of the week sleeping on another friend’s floor (A BOY!!) and occasionally popping into my room to get supplies (mainly cigarettes). During one of my brief stops into MY OWN ROOM, I came to find it means butterfly frantically tearing through our room, throwing my stuff around while shrieking and crying. She got so upset about this that she barfed in the garbage can in the bathroom.

I asked her what the hell she was doing and she screamed “LOOKING FOR THE GODDAMN REMOTE! I CAN’T FIND IT!”

She tore up most of my room looking for the damn thing, which she eventually found in her own bed.

Why she had convinced herself that I had somehow stolen her remote and hidden it somewhere when I hadn’t been in my own room in hours, and ESPECIALLY since she flipped out about leaving the TV on the wrong channel, I had never used her TV again.

I guess that was the end for me. I couldn’t handle walking on eggshells around this country bumpkin of a girl with no life and no winning attributes at all. I couldn’t stand her, couldn’t handle all of her control issues, and didn’t really want to do it anymore.

I all but moved out, moved home at the end of the semester, and only thought of her again when Stimpy and I would get together and make fun of her.

———-

5 or so years pass, and on my wedding day, my bridal party and I went to the salon to get our hair and makeup done. I was on complete edge, running on adrenaline, and freaked the fuck out.

My mother had showed up to get her hair done completely wasted and I promptly cried off all the makeup that had been applied. The makeup artist was so sweet to me, redid it all, and talked me down (along with some of my girls, of course).

When it was time to go to the church and put on the pouffy white dress, so I hopped off the salon chair, gabbing with Stimpy and Ashley and this girl walks by. Literally the last person I’d expected to see on MY WEDDING DAY was right there. I’d have frankly been less surprised to see Vincent D’Onofrio or Anthony Bourdain walk in together, with their dicks dancing in unison to a Janet Jackson song.

That’s right, it means butterfly was there, at the salon, on my wedding day.

We said perfunctory hello’s to each other, I explained that I needed to go to MY WEDDING and had to leave, and I haven’t seen her again.

I can’t, however, pass a bottle of wax without remembering the day that she burst into Stimpy’s room with her used wax to display how much hair she’d gotten off her lip.

Fucking Sasquatch.

I was suitably hung over the morning after I’d moved in, and since I had tried to block out the worst of the decor in my new room, I’d almost forgotten where I was. That is, of course, until I opened my eyes and all of the colors swirled together into one gigantic mess. Reality came crashing back in, so I got up, smoked a cigarette alone and decided to see if the rest of my floor was so creepy.

I walked in the square shaped hallway all the way around until I got about two doors down from my own, where the door was open. I popped my head in and said hello to the two girls sitting on the floor. They promptly invited me in, where I noticed an ashtray and became overwhelmed with glee.

“Can I SMOKE in here?” I asked them happily.

“Sure,” said the taller of the two. “We don’t smoke, but you can.”

So I scrambled back to my own room to grab my smokes, and when I returned the taller one bummed a smoke from me. We both smoked cheerfully as we talked, unaware of how often we would repeat this ritual for the next ten or so years.

The tall one who had spoken to me first is my friend Pashmina, aka Stimpy, and the person responsible for the Dave-Becky Union, and I shouldn’t need to tell you that we became instant friends. I also shouldn’t need to tell you that I desperately wished that I’d lived with both of them, in surveying their less cloying decor and wishing it were my own.

We chummed around together for the rest of the weekend, Stimpy, Her Roommate and I, and on Sunday night, when we were sitting on Stimpy’s floor smoking yet another cigarette, my roommate, it means butterfly walked back in lugging a huge thing of water bottles.

I rolled my eyes, as we’d already spent quite a bit of time in my room mocking her stupid decorations and my misfortune, got up and went to see her. It appears that even then I was stupid and masochistic.

When I finally rolled back to the room, I greeted her as warmly as I could and she told me that she was making a book for her boyfriend, Dave, who went to SIU. I sat there, rooted to my desk chair while I watched her gather supplies, wondering what kind of book someone would make for a 19-year old dude.

Construction paper, markers, and stickers. A butt-load of stickers.

Stimpy and her roommate came down while this was going on, as I’d begged them to come and rescue me if I didn’t come immediately back. It means butterfly greated them somewhat cooly, but fascinated, we all took a seat to see what the hell she was doing. It was like watching a rhinoceros at the zoo, waiting to see what it would do next.

It means butterfly began to decorate page after page of colorful construction paper with different things that she and her boyfriend had done. No, not like “We had butt sex in the back of your Pinto” but “Remember when you got lost coming to my house?”

I began to wonder just how old her boyfriend REALLY was, because although I was newly single–having just walked in on my boyfriend of two years with an ugly UGLY! friend of mine–I didn’t ever see myself doing something so stupid for a dude. And if I did, I’d imagine that he would run away screaming, rightly so.

She spent a good couple of hours on this book, so we left to go grab coffee and smoke, and when I returned, she was on her computer chatting with her boyfriend. This was before I had an IM program, before I knew what one was, and before I thought that it was a handy way to talk to someone.

At this point, it sounded so stupid. Pick up the fucking phone and call him, I thought.
But there she sat, clacking away on her keyboard and occasionally hooting at stuff that Dave said.

When she saw me there, she took a moment to talk to me about the room and her stuff. Because I was a dude–not really– myself, I didn’t come equipped with a bunch of decorations and other frilly shit. I’d packed some clothes and some booze, hastily mixed in together.

She informed me that I was welcome to use any of her stuff, including her body wax (for waxing, not for sculpting), her lotion, her computer, her clothes, anything I wanted I could use.

But not really.

One day I did happen to borrow her lotion, and didn’t return it to the right spot in her drawer (it was in the teeny drawer, but not precisely where she’d left it–a millimeter or so to the right) and she had a fucking fit. OH! The HUMANITY!

Then she refused to talk to me for a couple of days.

A couple of days later, a friend of mine was over and turned on her television, which caught all of 4 channels (she was too cheap to pay for cable), and apparently my friend didn’t leave it on the right channel when she turned it off. As you can imagine, this was a big.fucking.deal. for no reason whatsoever, it’s not like the channel was secret or something.

But to it means butterfly, this was the end of the fucking world.

Over the next month or so, I realized that she never left the room except for to go to class. And because her classes were earlier than mine, she’d come back as I was waking up to go to class AND NEVER LEAVE. She’d go to the cafeteria to get lunch, and BRING IT BACK. AND THEN TALK WITH HER MOUTH FULL.

I never, ever had the room to myself. Ever.

It may surprise you as I’m pretty open and frank about myself, but I do happen to like a small bit of alone time each day to be, well, alone. It’s not like she sat and talked to me while I was there or anything, but she did talk to her computer. Oh yes, yes she did. Her boyfriend would IM her and she would sit and coo at THE COMPUTER.

I wanted to die.

I had brought some posters with me from home; a Pink Floyd one, a Janis Joplin one, and I had thus far been too lazy to put them up. It just seemed like too much work. So one day, it means butterfly asked me if she could put the posters up for me, and because laziness always wins out when it comes to me, I agreed.

When I returned, I nearly swallowed my tongue. Now my side of the room was also covered in colorful plastic tablecloths, and my posters were all hung at deliberately tilted angles. And one of her stupid posterboards was now dangling from my corner of the room.

Shit, I said to myself as I thanked her. Now I’m NEVER going to get laid! It looks like Crayola came and barfed in my room.

Shit.

So, I have a quick-ass question for all of you, my sweet internet friends. I ask you because most of you have blogs of your own and I genuinely want to know what you’d do.

Let’s say you came across a blog that is fairly new, but is almost the same name as your own. It’s got a couple of letter variations to it, but it’s pretty much almost your blog’s name.

What would you do? Would it annoy you? Or would you just try to remember that imitation is the highest form of flattery?

(I’m not finding it flattering, btw).

Edited to add, I would be shocked beyond get out if this were something that the other writer came up with on her own. For serious. Mommywantswhiskey would not be something I would be annoyed by, nor would Mommywantsabeer, or even, Mommywantsvicodin. But this is far too similar to be a coincidence.

Now before I get to the meat -n- potatoes of this post, I need to be clear about something. Although I never got along with this person myself very well, it had much more to do with our obvious personality differences and not because she was a bitch. She was not a bitch then, she’s probably not a bitch now.

She’s a nice girl, just not my kind of girl (do I ever really like nice girls?).

———-

My brother and I are 10 years apart, him being the older of us, so when I was 8 he went off to college in the big city.

When it came for my time to choose a college to attend, because I am highly unoriginal, I chose the same school. A couple of months before school started, I got a letter in the mail that was decorated with butterfly stickers and written partially in crayon. Figuring it was from my young cousin, who shares a name with me and at the time thought that I was perhaps the coolest person on the planet (she has since wised up), I tore it open.

It was not a letter from Rebecca, no, it was a letter from my future roommate in college, whose name meant butterfly (if you really are dying know her real name, go check the last two entries and/or the comments. I don’t really want to broadcast this, as this is the first time I have broken my “let’s not talk about people who don’t read this rule”). She lived somewhat locally and suggested that we meet up for lunch at some halfway between us location.

I sent a perfunctory reply (without the stamps or crayons, of course) and we eventually settled on meeting at a Friday’s. To make it a little easier on my nerves, I dragged my friend Evan along.

At the appointed time and location, Evan and I showed up and took a seat. A couple of minutes later, it means butterfly arrived and sat down with us. I can only remember two things about this meeting:

1. She smelled like raw meat

2. She had the sort of personality that is really sweet and nice superficially, but you can see underneath that there is something…else, underneath. Like she might bite you or something if you fucked up.

This was not perhaps the most encouraging meeting I’ve ever had with someone I was about to share a shoebox with, but hey, she didn’t seem like a serial killer, which I considered a bonus.

Several months later, the time to pack up and leave for school dawned upon me and I shoved everything I was going to take with me into my friend Scott’s purple Neon and he drove me downtown and helped me move in.

The weekend that I moved in happened to be one that it means butterfly was gone, presumably back home, but she’d already moved in. This afforded me the chance to snoop through her stuff without her there.

What I found….disturbed…me.

She was an absolute girly-girl, and although I have a tendency towards being slightly girly, underneath that I’m all dude (without the dangly bits). I’ve been called affectionately “a dude with boobs” and I think that fits. Her side of the room was covered in what later I learned was colorful plastic table cloths, and over that were some poster-boards covered in magazine clippings.

Like phrases and stuff “Play With Fire, Skate on Ice.” And pictures of hot hunky guys. Cut from magazines. I knew this because I’d done the same thing to decorate my locker in Junior High, before I realized how dumb it looked.

But there were 5 different poster-boards strewn about the room, hanging from walls, hanging from the ceiling, hanging everywhere and annoying me. Then I saw that the back of the door was covered in what looked like cellophane but more iridescent and sparkly, and upon closer examination, realized that she had started to write cute little phrases on it. Quotes from Jewel–the singer not the store– mainly about love and happiness, kittens and puppies.

Her desk had a calendar on it that, I shit you not, had Precious Moments people-creepy-things on it. She was obviously a 50-year old trapped in the body of an 18-year old.

I was quite underwhelmed and a little bit nauseous.
At this point in my life, well before I had kids, well before I was a mother or a wife or a homeowner or a nurse or even your Aunt Becky, I was probably more of a rocker chick than anything else–minus the minked hair and gravelly voice. I smoked often and happily, drank whiskey, and was known to dabble in The Pot.

It became excruciatingly obvious that she was nothing like this. And yet, in the tradition of making people who have nothing in common, live together in a teeny room, she was to be my roommate.

“Shit,” I said to my metal friend Scott, “FUCK! What now?”

He looked sympathetically at me, put his arm around me paternally and said, “Vodka. Lots and lots of vodka.”

That night we drank to my new roommate and the disaster that we both knew lay before me.

In my quest to turn my iPod into a portable dance party, I hit up the ole iTunes store to find some music to get my ass moving in the gym.

(as an aside, typically when I am able, I take out all of my frustrations on myself in a way that you wouldn’t expect. It’s either unbelievably healthy or unbelievably horrifying: I beat my own ass at the gym. I am telling you that I can get the hurt on myself. And that I love it)

So, today I downloaded some Prince (because I have single handedly destroyed my CD collection because I totally suck) and some Notorious B.I.G. and holy shit had I forgotten how good and dirrrrty Prince is.

That’s probably the most annoying part of becoming a grown up, you can’t sing snatches (get it?) of Pussy Control in public without offending someone. Nor can you pull up to pick the Notorious B.E.N from school while blasting “Gett Off.”

*sighs*

I think I need to revisit my teenage years again.

What music should I download to get my ass wriggling at the gym?

So, a couple of you suggested astutely that I vanity publish my essays. Besides the fact that I am a total cheap-ass, I just.can’t.do.it.

I can’t tell you the story, though, because I can’t do it justice. So I conned someone that could tell the story for you into guest posting for me. In turn, I owe her my firstborn son and the story of Vanessa, my she-beast roommate.

Without further adieu, I present to you Pashmina, my former blogmate, the Stimpy to my Ren, and a good damn friend of mine.

The first time I tried to order pizza in my very first apartment, the local pizza place hung up on me when they heard my address. When I called back, they told me that they didn’t want my business anymore, thankyouverymuch.

The very first thing the building manager said to me upon my arrival? “I need to check your walls and see if they’re up to code. Esther built that room, you know, the little one, for her cats.

My father (and the Realtor who found the place) said to me, “She put a grand piano in the living room. Can you believe it?”

I can’t say that I did believe it, really, until I had actually moved in. The place looked harmless enough during the walk-through: four walls and one outdated kitchen and bathroom. It was pretty typical Chicago Apartment fare in my college-student price range.

To tell you that I took on the living arrangements of a crazy cat lady would be an understatement.

This woman was THE Crazy Cat Lady, with a dedicated cat-room and all. After I moved in and had been living there for a while, I made a few discoveries of my own. Esther had taped dried flowers to the windows in lieu of curtains. Esther had several cats (and cat hair is damn difficult to get out of carpet).

Esther’s legal last name was ‘Lester,’ and she had not forwarded her mail. I received several bills in very red envelopes with her name on them. Finally, several months after I moved in, the Esther Lester mail abated and the neighbors had essentially stopped talking about her and her crazy cat room (which became my office).

All thoughts of Esther The Crazy Cat Lady/Former Occupant were gone from my mind and I could concentrate on far more important things, like finishing my English/Secondary Education double major and writing thesis after thesis on whether or not Percy Byshee Shelly was doing the nasty with John Keats.

(They were totally humping.)

Then, one day, completely out of the blue, I received a package from Amazon.com with her name on it. As I mentioned earlier, Esther had left no forwarding address and I was compelled to open it. You know, to see if it was worth trying to forward it her new place. It could be important! Who knows, really, until you open it?

Inside where three copies of the same book: One Woman’s-Reflections-Esther by none other than The Crazy Cat Lady Herself. Holy shit, I thought, She wrote a book! She wrote a crazy cat book.

I wish I could tell you that I kept the letter that came with the books, but I didn’t. I do, however, have a real-life enactment of the letter based on actual events:

Dear Crazy Cat Lady,

Here are the last two Earthly copies of your crappy book. It was so very crappy that we couldn’t continue to sell it on Amazon.com. Only one person bought it. Ever. Please keep your crap out of our warehouses.

Sincerely,

Amazon.com

Of course, you know what happened next: I called everyone I knew. “She wrote a book!” I laughed into the phone to anyone who would listen. “She wrote a fucking book of poetry!!! And it’s BAD!!!”

Indeed, the poetry was bad. There was a poem about Lake Michigan that was such an obvious metaphor for sex that it could only have been laughable. It went something like this:

The waves crash down over me

pounding, pounding

pounding me, pounding

o! the waves!

Apparently, to Esther, everything was a metaphor for sex, including her trips to the grocery store (I squeeze the melons to feel their flesh under my flesh), the feeling of driving her car (O! how it vibrates under my control!), the Chicago wind (It pushes me and forces me to resist!), and drunken students wandering by her window (O! to feel virgin flesh on virgin flesh/the weight. O!).

She had two other topics of poetry: her grandchildren (O! but they bring so much joy to my lonely life/because my children don’t visit!) and thinly-veiled attacks on her neighbors:

O! they complain!

Complain about the noise!

About the singing!

About the dancing!

Don’t they know how to live?

O, the shame. O, the hilarity. O, the search that showcased her second and her third book.

Come on, Esther. You make this too easy.

I’m not embarrassed to admit that many a drunken night was capped off with readings of Esther’s terrible, terrible poetry. Many a poem was paused midway through to fake an uproariously loud orgasm much to the delight of the audience, who was, by that point, having an asthma attack from laughter at the crap that passed for poetry from a vanity publisher.

(In fact, if I can side track for a moment, your own Aunt Becky does a hilarious reading of some of Esther’s better works. I bet if you ask her nicely, she’ll videotape herself doing this and put it up on YouTube for you.)

The most lasting impression, though, is how many people have asked me to relinquish the last remaining Earthly copy of Esther’s book. My answer'”depending on my mood'”ranges from a polite-but-firm ‘No,’ to a very threatening ‘Fuck no’ with a little more ‘No!’ on top. I guard the damn thing with my life. It’s tried to walk out at parties and my English Geeky friends are constantly trying to ‘borrow’ it for ‘entertainment value.’

To this day, I don’t know what happened to Esther, but she can rest assured; her message will live on in my house as long as there is sangria to be consumed within 100 yards and an audience to fake-orgasm for. Her memory also lives on at Giordanos, but for a far, far different reason, I’m sure.

I’m not a very creative person. Really, I’m not.

Yes, I post to my blog pretty religiously, but it’s really like I’m talking to you all, telling you a story. Honestly, I write just how I speak. And I tell the truth for the most part, so it doesn’t involve much creativity on my end.

Usually I just tell you something, reread it quickly for obvious typos (and have my sweet Manny to remind me when I misspell something) and throw it up. Voila! Instant feedback. And since my blog readers are some of the nicest on the planet (seriously, what did I do to deserve all of you?), what you tell me is always pretty nice.

A couple of weeks ago, I made the decision to start writing some essays. Again, because I have no real creativity they’re true stories about me and my life, so it’s not like I’m stretching too far with them. It’s a subject matter I’m comfortable with, I enjoy nothing more than telling a good story and they’re pretty good.

The essays are still pretty embryonic and rough and still need a lot more work (have I mentioned my comma addiction?) because they’re slightly more formal than my blog posts. I like ’em, I really do, and I’m proud of them.

But sometimes, like yesterday, I get pretty insecure about them. I like stuff that has real answers, a real right and wrong way to do things, and obviously creative stuff doesn’t have much of that. It’s whatever you think it should be.

That terrifies me.

It terrifies me, it makes me nervous and shy, and it makes me insecure. That is what you saw yesterday, and I wanted to thank each of you who reminded me that I’m not a failure at this stuff.

If I were someone totally crappy to read here on Mommy Wants Vodka, you wouldn’t come over, and I wouldn’t blame you. Since most of you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, I can’t even say that you’re just reading me because you feel sorry for me or because I pay you to. So, believe me when I tell you all how much it means to me to hear from you. Weird or not, you guys are my friends too, and you prop me up, dust me off, and get me back on my feet again. That’s what friends do for each other, right?

I don’t know what I’m going to do with these essays yet, I’m just not sure. Maybe they’ll just be saved merrily into my fancy hard drive on my new computer, where they will sit and rot. Who knows? Really, who cares?

Since I’m determined AND OCD they will be completed to the best of my ability, they will be edited by my good friend Pashmina–or whatever her blog name is– (she’s an actual real editor, can you believe I know such cool people? AND she introduced me to The Daver AND saved me from my hideous roommate in college. She’s a peach.) and The Daver, and then, who knows?

Giving up is not an option for me, because even if I try to not post to my blog or write part of an essay each day, I get really crabby and irritable–I think I’m addicted to writing– until I am able to. It’s really damn weird. I’m hoping that venturing outside the box will be a good thing for me, even if it’s for a small while.

Shit.

Is it always gonna be so scary? What should I do with them?

I’m having a day here in sunny Saint Charles. It’s one of those days where you rethink everything you’re doing and have done and wondering what the fuck you were thinking.

This turns quickly into feeling like you’re a failure but that everyone’s being too nice to tell you about it.

Shit.

How do you snap yourself out of this black hole of self doubt and loathing?

Another from the vaults, this one is from January 2006. I figured that rather than fluff up the archive on this blog with my old stuff, I’ll just repost the good ones here.

I’ll be back later with something more substantial.

————-

*ring, ring*

B: (excitedly) ‘œHey Daver, I had a great idea!’

D: (distractedly) ‘œYeah?’ (typing sounds resume earnestly in background)

B: ‘œWell, you know how we’re buying a new house?’

D: (warily) ‘œYeah’¦.?’

B: ‘œI think we should rescind our offer on the house on Adams. I found a better one!’

D: ‘œWhat?’

B: (talking faster now) ‘œI mean, I know we’re going to lose some of our earnest money, and that totally sucks but I just realized my dream house!’

D: ‘œWhere is this place?’

B: ‘œWell, you know that forest preserve that I love that we always pass on the way home that I always say ‘God, I love that forest preserve?’ and ‘Cantigny is so pretty!”

D: (warily and wearily) ‘œYes’¦’

B: ‘œI’ve decided that we’re going to buy the Cantigny Mansion. You know, the old McCormick house? I toured it once as a kid with my parents, and I LOVED it!’

D: (feels the dull thump of a migraine coming on) ‘œBecky, it’s not for sale. It’s property of the county.’

B: (triumphantly) ‘œWell, THAT’S why we have to go in with guns blazing; give them an offer they can’t refuse!’

D: (head resting on desk) ‘œOhno.’

B: (dreamily) ‘œThink about it, Dave. We can be Lord and Lady of THAT house. I mean, I already changed my name to Princess Grace of Monaco in my mind! It has a nicer ring to it.’

D: (banging head on desk) ‘œYou know she’s dead, right?’

B: ‘œSo she won’t mind that I’ve taken her name. Plus, I won’t have to explain to people, ‘I’m the OTHER Princess Grace of Monaco.”

D: (now irritated) ‘œYou got me out of a meeting for THIS?’

B: (sheepishly) ‘œWell, yeah.’

D: (tiredly) ‘œWHEN do you go back to work?’

B: ‘œJanuary 30th’

D: (under his breath) ‘œNot soon enough.’

B: ‘œOh well, I’ll call our real estate lady and tell her the news.’

D: ‘œYou do that.’

*both parties hang up*