Self-Amusing, In an Amusing Sort of Way

The office is fascinating me tonight.

First, I find out that one of my colleagues won $16,000 on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” last year. She then says one of her “lifelines” was her fiancé—not the guy she’s married to this year, though.

Then things keep beeping.

Of course, there’s also the bizarre run-in I had earlier with a columnist who foisted his cell phone number on me unexpectedly. Flattering, although bizarre, considering. Considering the way he did it, the way people were watching, the way he really foisted it, even when I tried to avoid it.

Mostly, I’m just incredibly irritated at the reporter I’m sitting next to tonight (who is a young curmudgeon, truly), although utterly amused by the beeping, enough to laugh maniacally often enough that a nearby designer thinks I’m mad.

That’s fine.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you this posting on Craig’s List, merrily pointed out by Gawker:

“Whoever found my Rite-Aid bag that I left on the 6 is probably having a wonderful time with my Adderol prescription and box of condoms.

My guy is pissed because he's convinced that I used these condoms with someone else. I can't even pay attention long enough to explain to him that I left them on the train.

He can't get laid now. I can't take my medication, and I can't even get more because Adderol is considered a controlled substance, so I have to wait 30 days."

Welcome to New York, where sometimes things are free, and people are dumb enough to carry around bags of condoms and Adderol, leave them on the train, then post the whole situation to Craig’s List.

And wow, someone just created an explosive noise loud enough to cause everyone’s heads to pop up over the cubicles like little editor-gophers. I think the noise was created by a cleaning woman who dropped or banged a large, empty receptacle. Loud and thunderous, and again I’m cackling like a crazy person. (She looked sheepish at gathering so much attention. I'd like to write more about the people who clean this office. I'd like to tell you how unobtrusively they try to work, how one kind white-haired man is to me every day. Sometime I'll tell you about that.)

Onto a blibbit from the Times now. There’s a story today about how Mayor Bloomberg is sounding less like a Bostonian and more like a New Yorker. The one sentence of the story I want to point out, however, is this:

“In 2006, [a professor] said, Mr. Bloomberg used a lot more of what linguists call a post-vocalic 'r', the sound directly after a vowel in unstressed syllables (as in Harvard rather than Hahvaahd).”

I find this sentence amazing because of the parenthetical explanation: Um, the “New York” “way” of pronouncing “Harvard” is just “Harvard.”

Id est: Bostonians are freaks.

I leave you with these words I just overheard an editor say: “My gut usually is, ‘No.’”

Or, then again, there are these words, which I just overheard after the last words I overheard: “I’m getting peckish again.”