Giving up Everything for Lent

I am honestly starting to wonder if there’s a hex on me. I unloaded my laptop case and started getting back to work this morning, and couldn’t find my authentication token (the doohickey that provides me with a constantly changing password for the secure systems on which I work – it’s kinda important).

Although it is quite simply not possible for it to have fallen out and equally not possible that I left it in the hotel…it is gone.

Oh, fraggle.

So I have to call up the IT desk and fess up and eventually I get to work using a temporary method involving a temporary user name of approximately sixteen thousand letters and numbers, which took five careful repetitions by the nice help desk guy before I got it right. Yeesh.

Headache: Right where it’s been for the last two weeks now, solidly placed between my eyeballs.

Hip: Very sore.

Back: Would rather be in bed.

Intelligence: AWOL.

Attitude: Crappy, thanks for asking.

I promptly begin spinning my wheels, having circular conversations with myself. If A is true, and B is true, then C…unless Bsub1 is also true, in which case C is actually D. Wait. If C is D, what is A? Hang on, wait. IF I have a B which is true and a C which is true, but D is not true…wait. I know this…start over. If A is going on a date with B…and C knows about it…wait. What was the question again?

I did that on my Most Important Task right up until the moment my boss called to tell me to work on something else, which is now my Most Important Task only except so is this other thing, which also needs to be done before Thursday.

Could he help me out here, because I really don’t understand what C has to do with A, and anyway – do we really care who B is dating?

Wellllllllll…let’s have you work on Thing #2 first and get it out of the way.

OK. You know what? Great. Because Thing #1 is driving me right up a tree. So I’m just going to sit back here and work on Thing #2 and have a nice atomic fireball.

People, I am going to give you some unsolicited advice around atomic fireballs. Ready? Here it is: Do not bite down on an atomic fireball. Even if it has been reduced to the size of an aspirin, do not bite down on it.

One odd noise later, I was spitting out a few slivers of Substance Which Used To Be A Porcelain Crown.

@*^&@!!!!!!!!!

Yeah. Broke a tooth. Well. Not a ‘real’ tooth, thank Dog. Because that would have hurt, a lot. It is a mere crown. A mere…$800…crown…

OW! MY WALLET!!!

And now I’ve got a sore jaw and a jagged edge on the broken crown that I suspect I could use to saw drywall and honestly the idea of going to the dentist so they can rip the broken crown out and replace it sounds about as much fun as having holes punched through my toenails AND YET REALLY…there isn’t a whole lot of ‘ignore it’ available on this.

I’ve got to just suck it up and walk myself into the dentist’s office and say, “Hello. I broke a crown chomping down on an atomic fireball AND I REALLY DO NOT CARE TO DISCUSS THAT ANY FURTHER.”

Because you know the entire staff is going to feel compelled to explain to me, with charts and graphs, what a really stupid thing that was to do. (Like I’m not already painfully aware of this.) My goodness, I shouldn’t be eating atomic fireballs in the first place, the sugar will chew holes in my teeth! Also, biting down on hard candies blah blah yadda yadda lecture lecture so forth and so on.

To hear a dentist talk, atomic fireballs should be on the banned substance list, right beneath ‘meth’. Yessir, the only thing that does more harm to teeth? Methamphetamine.

By the way…I can understand a lot of things. I can understand drunks and smokers and pot-heads and acid-droppers and, well, all kinds of silly things we do to ourselves. But meth is something I just can’t get. Have you ever seen what-all goes into that stuff?! I saw a show on it the other day and I was absolutely floored. I just can’t fathom how in the world someone who doesn’t have an active death wish, who isn’t actually attempting suicide, would put that into their body.

“Here, have some of this! I just made it last week, it’s great!”

“Wow, you’re right! This is great! Do I detect a hint of lemon beneath the piquant essence of Duralast battery acid?”

“Why yes, I used imported lemon-scented acetone. So glad you like it!”

UGH.

But I digress. (And also, I have now officially made myself queasy.)

All of this being duly considered, I firmly believe that what I ought to do is go back to bed and stay there until…Easter.

That's right.

I wanna give up EVERYTHING for Lent. Including the atomic fireballs, the dentist, the working...all of it.

Until the chocolate family arrives for Easter, anyway...