I fidget a bit with my tie. Even after two weeks it feels awkward.

“Excuse me, are you in line?” someone asks.

“What? Oh, yes, sorry. I’m in line.” I say, stepping to my left and aligning myself with the gentleman in front of me. I look over the notes I’d been given by my new coworkers. Beth’s order makes me squint. ‘Decaf tall four pump Valencia percent no whip latte’?

I look up and am suddenly face to face with a rather portly, smiling Starbucks cashier, her hair a wild, unkempt hedge of blue spikes.

“Hello sir, what can I get for you today?”

“Hi… yes, I’ll have a regular coffee, please.”

“Grande drip? Would you like our bold selection, or our milder breakfast blend?”

“I would just like a coffee, thanks. With a little room for cream.”

“Ok sir, one grande with-room drip. I’m sure you’ll enjoy our Sumatra.”

“Who?”

She smiles like I’m five.

“It’s a type of coffee.”

“Oh. Well, um… I would also like… let’s see…” I laugh nervously. “I apologize, my coworker’s handwriting is horrible.” An awkward smile spreads across my face.

The room feels warm. Somewhere behind me a woman coughs. The woman making drinks asks the next customer if he can get a drink started.

“Will that be all, sir?” asks Spiky Hair.

“No, like I said… I’ve got this list, so. One large –” Her blank expression hasn’t changed so I make a sweeping motion with my arms. “- mocha with vanilla, please, and a - ”

“Whip?”

“What?”

“Would you like whipped cream on that, sir?”

“I suppose not.”

She scribbles on a cup - “One venti vanilla no-whip mocha,” - and places it to the side. “Anything else?”

“Yes, can I have… ” I carefully recite Beth’s order.

She repeats it back in a cheery rapid-fire. “One decaf tall four pump Valencia percent no-whip latte! Would you like to try one of our raspberry scones?”

“No, thank you.”

“Perhaps a chocolate cream cheese muffin?”

“That’s fine.”
(more…)

I had my semi-yearly dentist appointment yesterday. Let me tell you - it was a blast.

Going to the dentist is like showing up for an exam you haven’t adequately studied for, except instead of getting the answers wrong, your mouth bleeds. And the test isn’t conducted with a pencil and paper, but with sharp, disinfected tools designed to induce pain and anguish.

The dentist’s office is what I imagine hell would look like if only Satan believed in antiseptics. My gums may have bled a bit when I was a kid but at least the dentist would give me a toy after we were through. Now my mouth still bleeds, but instead of a toy I get a toothbrush, a souveneir-sized tube of toothpaste, a small packet of dental floss and a scathing tongue lashing for exhibiting the early symptoms of Gingivitis.

When we go to see a doctor it’s usually because we are ill and want to feel better. The dentist is the only doctor you visit feeling well and leaving in a state of pain. It’s like if you went in for your yearly physical and the physician punched you in the face and smashed your groin with a metal bat. And made fun of your mother.

The dentist’s chair is a medieval torture device reincarnated. Instead of being physically strapped in, you are held down by an invisible sheath of fear, guilt and embarrassment. You lie there awkwardly while the sadistic pseudo-doctor pokes and prods you with his wide array of sharpened miniature scythes. You want very much to close your mouth but instead you squint your eyes. In a fleeting fit of faux sympathy, the devious dentist smarmily informs you that,

“You wouldn’t bleed so much if you just took better care of your teeth and gums.”

And you say,

“Perhaps I wouldn’t bleed so much if you weren’t dissecting my mouth with those shimmering silver scimitars, you torturous tyrant of teeth!”

But your mouth had just been sprayed by that omnipresent little water hose so it comes out as more of an extended gargle.

“So, any big plans this weekend?” I asked the pretty brunette sitting across from me at a small West Hollywood restaurant.

“Nah, not really. Probably going out with the girls on Saturday night. Not sure where yet. I have some errands that I haven’t been able to get around to, so I need to do those. And then maybe I’ll try and squeeze in some Pilates.” She rested her chin on her hand.

“That seems to be the big craze these days,” I said, fiddling a bit with my dessert spoon. A light breeze blew in from the outside patio.

“Running errands? Yeah, it’s a pretty popular pastime.” She smiled at me and winked. A few of her curly brown locks fell beside her face. They almost glimmered in the early evening light.

I grinned back, trying desperately to think of something, anything. She was gorgeous and it was taking everything I had to force words out of my mouth. I covertly wiped my wet palms on my jeans.

“So… do you only do Pilates or do you do a traditional workout as well?”

Her eyes lit up. “Actually, yeah! I meet up with a trainer three times a week. His name’s Tony and he’s this ex-marine guy. Six-foot four and just huge.” She extended her arms out to emphasize Tony’s ‘hugeness’.

“He must be really good!” I said, taking a sip of my latte.

“Oh, he is! He totally punishes me.”

I set my cup back on the table. “Punishes you?”

“Oh, you know - screaming into my ear, calling me names, putting me down. All that stuff. He really goes to town and it just motivates me.” She smiled with perfect teeth as she lifted a small scoop of ice cream from her plate into her mouth.

“So…” I wanted to find a good way to word what I was going to say next.

No luck.

“You’re motivated by verbal abuse?”

“It just pushes me to do that little bit extra. You know what I mean?”

No. But I nodded and returned to sipping my coffee.

“I’ll be lying on the floor completely exhausted, absolutely sure I can’t do anymore, when he gets down right next to my face and yells,

‘Give me five more crunches you lazy whore!’”

The coffee went down my windpipe. I could feel the eyes of nearby diners glaring. I began coughing violently, struggling to breathe.

A sheepish grin crept across my date’s face. “Sorry, Mike. I get a little riled up when I start thinking about Tony’s routines.”

She scooped another dose of ice cream past her perfect teeth.

There was a woman at the gym today with inkblot sweat patterns. When she first got onto the elliptical machine in the row ahead of me there were two fairly large circles of sweat on her shoulder blades and one (and I don’t know how this works) donut-shaped sweat mark on the middle of her back. All together it looked like a surprised emoticon.

I zoned out for a little as I crosstrained, and when I looked back ten or fifteen minutes later the donut-shaped mark had filled in and expanded to a very large circle covering the entire middle portion of her back. The two circles on her shoulder blades had expanded upward and downward, transforming into ovals which now connected to the large circle below. A giant bunny rabbit’s head was now dominating the back of her shirt.

While that woman’s sweat was metamorphizing into different Rorschach patterns, the woman directly to my left was busy performing her own little personal Broadway dance routine. You know how you can kind of tell when someone near you is moving even if you can’t actually see them? Well I could feel her doing something on the machine next to me, so I glanced over to scope out the situation. Sure enough, she was striding along at a brisk! pace to what I can only imagine was a 1999 Jock Jams CD she had ripped onto her iPod nano.

You have two sets of handles to choose from when using the elliptical machine - an unmoving horizontal set directly in front of you that comes up about waist-high, and a set of vertical bars on the sides of the machine that move with the rhythm of your movement. This woman was taking advantage of neither option, opting instead to pump her arms at her sides. This works just fine on a treadmill. On the elliptical, because there is no impact, you appear as though you are running atop a field of clouds. Or cotton candy. Or fiber glass. I wish in this case it were fiber glass.

But wait! Lest we forget the jazz hands.

Some people choose to run with their hands balled up into fists. Others prefer the open-palmed method. You could say this woman was utilizing a “modified” version of the open-palm. Her hands were indeed open, but she was shaking them and twisting her wrists as if at any moment she might just jump off the machine, triumphantly throw her iPod to the ground and burst into a solo rendition of “And All That Jazz!”

I wanted to either

a.) Politely tap her on the shoulder and ask her to ” kindly stop because you are distracting me from my simulated no-impact crosstraining routine”

b.) Punch her on the shoulder and yell loudly over my iPod, her iPod, everyone else’s iPod, The Price is Right playing on five of the twenty nearby televisions, and The View playing on the remaining fifteen, “STOP WITH THE DAMN JAZZ HANDS! YOU’RE A HUNDRED YARDS PAST THE HILL YOU CLIMBED OVER TEN YEARS AGO, YOU’LL NEVER BREAK INTO SHOW BUSINESS WITH EPILEPTIC EXTREMITIES OH AND BY THE WAY YOUR CELLULITE IS SCARING THE CHILDREN.”

c.) Kill her and stash the body behind the vitamin display because no one ever buys vitamins at a gym because last time I checked thirty vitamins don’t cost sixty goddamn dollars.

By the time I had entertained option C to the satisfaction of my sadistic imagination, the sweat stains on the woman ahead of me had morphed into an animated GIF that was moving along jerkily to the awkward syncopations of Bob Barker’s bombastic barritone.

“So what can I do for you today?”

“Oh, you know. The standard trim.”

“Standard trim?”

“Yeah. The usual.”

“Sir, I’ve never cut your hair before.”

“What?

Beat.

“Oh.”

Beat.

“Buzz the sides, trim the top, please?”