I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl

Gun to the Head I can't believe it," my mother said from her end of the phone, "I simply can't believe it. First you got married, and now this. Who would have thought a year ago that I would be hearing news like this!" "I know!" I exclaimed from my end of the phone. "I'll get to go shopping for new clothes and everything!" "It's a big thing," my mother added. "It will change your whole life, you know." "I know," I said happily. "But I think it's time. That clock was ticking, and it was just time I did something about it." "You're sure this is what you want?" my mother asked. "It's too late to turn back now, isn't it?" I laughed. "I took the test, got a little pee on my hand, and everything says we're good to go." "I can't wait to tell my friends!" my mother gushed. "Well, maybe that's not such a good idea just yet," I suggested. "Maybe we should see if it sticks first. But you can tell Dad and the rest of the family." "He's going to be so happy to find out that you're going to have"--my mother paused, I believe to wipe a tear of elation from her eye--"a job!" A job. I really couldn't believe it either. A job. After I had successfully passed the drug screening test (simply and vaguely put, I was a freelance writer with a mortgage payment and a husband in college who barely had enough money for a generic box of macaroni and cheese, let alone a hit of X just so I could have a good excuse to wear a Dr. Seuss hat), the newspaper at which I had been a freelance columnist also offered me a job as a columnist for the newspaper's website--a full-time gig. I could hardly pass the offer up; it was a good salary, came with health insurance, my potential boss seemed cool, and after I discovered that the 401(k) was not an annual marathon that every employee was required to participate in, I nodded and then we shook on it. In all honesty, it was a relief. The last time I had held a steady job it was as an editor for a small magazine several years before. I worked for a man who commonly came back from business lunches with a big purple wine mustache and had the habit of uttering phrases such as "make that more better," "irregardless," "for all intensive purposes," and picking a five-syllable word from the dictionary then e-mailing it out to the staff as the "word du jour of the day!" which for an average drunk boss would be fine, but for an editor in chief was somewhat unsettling. After he called me into his office one day and slid two envelopes across the table--one for my last paycheck and the other for severance--he tried to soften the blow with the comforting words, "Don't look so upset! You're not being fired, your position has just been eliminated!" It wasn't a surprise per se, I had expected the Two Envelope Incident ever since I had freely used the phrase "blow your wad" in an editorial meeting when vocalizing an opinion about why it would be a mistake to name the murderer in the headline of an investigative piece about a longtime unsolved crime. From across the table, I had seen his purple mustache quiver, then collapse into a frown. Matter of time. Since then I had embarked on a series of freelance jobs that led me down the creative, soul-drenching path of writing about air conditioners with pollen-capturing filters; weaving prose about toenail fungus and the bacteria living happily in the track of your shower door that can kill at will; two hundred witty and classic-caliber-status product reviews of kitchen gadgets, including profiles of slotted spoons, rubber spoons, stainless steel spoons, serving spoons, and the good old spoon spatulas (spoonulas); a pamphlet aNotaro, Laurie is the author of 'I Love Everybody (and Other Atrocious Lies) True Tales of a Loudmouth Girl', published 2004 under ISBN 9780812969009 and ISBN 0812969006.