quality seafood, the tax office and india

We ventured out to the tax office to renew Alan's registration. Visiting government offices is creepy. There are inevitably burned out, crabby employees in ill fitting garments with swollen ankles and permanent frowns. In the chairs there is a wide spread of normal and weird, like the older gentleman with the bald spot and ponytail wearing a beret and dressed like an early 20th century Parisian artist. Or perhaps the grungy fellow with sweat soaking the back of his shirt in a large circle, walking pigeon-toed and carrying a broken handicapped parking permit. There are always young women with small children running wild; white, black, Korean, Hispanic and always shouting.

On the way home, we had dinner at Quality Seafood. There is no other place in town where $20 will get you two plates of fried scallops, french fries, hushpuppies, cole claw and two stuffed crabs. A kooky old man coaxed a small girl into his lap, because she was shivering by the seafood cases. Her mother didn't notice for a moment, and then took away. I couldn't help but wonder about that. When I was a child, I didn't go within spitting distance of other strange people. If she was my daughter and I saw her in the lap of a stranger, I certainly would have been more harsh. Perhaps I am just overly cynical about the motives of others.

I did a good thing at work today. It allowed me to correct a mistake and shoot down someone in the India office. The HCL contractors are lazy, and it makes me angry. If they are going to take my work, they need to complete it. I wonder who the hell taught them how to research, because their work is half-assed and sloppy. It disturbs me that we trust them with big portfolio projects and overflow work, when I see so many mistakes and poor research every day just in my state. So today I took a major mistake by an HCL researcher and showed it to my supervisor. I'm compiling a file of other mistakes, minor and major.

(no subject)

Days of enforced nonsmoking have left me with curious little desire to smoke, and I have not had more than three or four in a day since. I hold them more than I actually smoke them. It's interesting. I am curious to see how that will hold up when I'm in a bar or in Metro. I should perhaps quit for health reasons. But part of me so utterly loathes all those sanctimonious, rude, whiny, bitchy non-smokers that I want to continue smoking out of spite. Some motivation that is. I never did claim to be above moments of pettiness.

It was rather toasty in the car this afternoon. Summer can't be far away.

scary advertising and talk of vaginas

The Chronicle has an ad just across from the table of contents this week from The Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation Institute of San Antonio. Um, whiskey tango foxtrot? The mere idea of a laser anywhere near my vagina gives me hives. The ad text reads, arranged over a nude female form and a row of smiling female faces:

New Comestic Procedures
Ladies! Experience how good life can be!
Our Board certified OB GYN, Troy Robbins Hailporn M.D., can completely resculpt and rejuvenate the vagina with a 1-hour laser procedure. These new GYN procedures help: tighten the vagina after childbirth, improve stress urinary incontinence, enhance sexual gratification. She also performs: labia reduction for large/uneven labia minora, reconstruction of the hymen

www.cosmeticgyn.net

Wha?!?!?!? The whole thing sounds hideous and very, very, very painful. The site has some graphic little diagrams, so you probably shouldn't peruse it at work. I am so very disturbed. Why the hell would you want your hymen back, unless you're playing sme shell game where you sell yourself for a lot of money as a prize virgin whore? Who the hell cares about the labia being symmetrical?

The grotesque desire for extreme plastic surgery to achieve some artificial and unnatural standard of beauty suddenly seems a whole lot more ugly now. The first person who tries to put a laser or a scalpel anywhere near my damned labia is getting a bullet in the eye.