If one of them wishes to cross the river, you will die until your bodies form the bridge!
Yesterday afternoon just sucked. From 1 pm to 5:30 pm there was hardly a break in the sucking. Actually, it started slightly earlier, but lunch has to be considered a nonsucking break. For purposes of this entry we shall only consider the afternoon hours in their unrelenting suckery. We shall also exclude the half-hour from 5:00 to 5:30, when the prospect of going home for the weekend substantially lessened my perceived suckishness level. Simple subtraction therefore leaves us with four hours which, ultimately, weren't all they could have been.
At $13.75/hour, those hours earned me $55. At a rough estimate about 20% of each of my paychecks is removed for a combination of taxes and health insurance. 20% of $55 is $11, leaving me with $44 in payment for the aforementioned four hours. That's 18.3 cents per minute, but that's not really important.
$44 happened to be precisely the amount of money that I had in my wallet this evening when, after a reasonably productive afternoon, I decided to take a stroll to Industrial Strength and drool on the jewelry cases for a while. I had wood in mind: I've recently remembered that I used to have a nice pair of ebony tunnels that would still be my size, if only I had the faintest clue where they were. I haven't. After considerable searching I've given them up as lost, probably in one of my last two house-moves. To a mind such as mine that conclusion manifests as a floating blank check behind my eyes with the words "new jewelry" scribbled on the memo line. Thus, the stroll.
What I found wasn't quite what I was looking for, but who can say no to love? It was a pair of goldstone plugs, deep honey-colored and shimmering as though made of glitter. Fact: they are made of glitter. Goldstone is a man-made glass "stone" and they can put as much glitter in as they damn well please. They're almost the same shade as the medium-dark wood I had in mind, but glassy-smooth and with that gleaming shimmer to them instead of a grain. One of them, as a shop employee and I noticed with appreciative ooohs, has a tiny flaw in it: a thin line that does look like wood grain, straight and delicate, cutting across both faces and down the sides. And, to tie this back in to the math that started this entry, they cost $43.50 with tax. There's no arguing with that; they're mine by right by virtue of my four sucking hours.
Of course, since they're 1/2" plus flares and I've been wearing old, smaller jewelry lately, I can't actually wear them yet. I'll just have to wait until I earn a 9/16" taper with another couple of hours of sucking (talk to me again on Monday afternoon), since I refuse to go to Gottsi for the first time in months only to have them help me put in jewelry that I shamelessly bought at a different shop. Faithfulness he talked of, madam, your enduring faithfulness!
Posted by dianna at August 27, 2005 10:29 PM