-Square One-

"..so you see, Benedict, we don't really make a lot of money from the rentals; the only reason why we took this one on was because of the exceptional quality of the apartment. It was perfectly restored, and completely updated." -Oh, I know..- "But when your employer didn't immediately return our calls and verify your employment, we couldn't hold off the other renter any longer." -Yeah, thanks for letting me know about the obstacle, albeit after you'd given the place away.- "New places are opening up all the time. So I recommend that you start looking in the paper, calling the numbers on signs.." -Wow, I've never tried that before, thanks!-

My irritation with the realtor and my employer didn't last an hour after I got the bad news Friday afternoon. Starting over? I can do that. But now I've got a more serious problem: my folks have contacted a family friend to get his input on buying, not renting. For all I know, he may be working on it now.

I guess this debacle did make me look like the amateur I am, but it wasn't nice of fate to point that out to the people around me. As a result, this is causing some contentious arguments with my mother. Refusing their aid isn't mature, she says. It's egocentric.

-Can't it be both?-

-Another session so soon, preparation was a snap-

When the instructor came in at 9:15, I greeted her without the smallest comprehension that she had scheduled a session for 9:30. I'd written this down last week, and hadn't thought about it since. - Despite every opportunity, not a glimmer.

So I shuffled papers at my desk (what a tell that is!) and told her to take her class right in. Less than fifteen minutes to find my presentation where the sun doesn't shine. Checked some internet sites I wouldn't have time to skim, much less verify authority. Shuffled more papers.

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by ernie.

I've never been a good cram artist.

With five to go I stopped trying and pulled my legs up on my chair in a semi-lotus position. Closed my eyes, touched my temples, ignored the papers and web pages and just tried to find some clarity.

Enter the circulation assistant, wanting, needing to tell me about reality TV and Carmen Sandiego and (this is a new one) quotes from 'The Hunt for Red October.' She's something of a savant, I can't think of a worse time for the girl to unload.

Once I heard her do the same thing to my boss at a moment of high activity. I think my boss said to her: "I love you, dear, but I need to work on this now." I can't do that, but I could send her off on another task, and I did so.

When the circulation assistant clocked out that afternoon, I stopped her at the door with a pseudo-Sean Connery voice. "Some things do not react well to bullets." She appreciated it, and to my knowledge, the class and instructor from the morning appreciated our session.

I'm overappreciated on both counts.

-Insults for the Boardroom-

Hey, is it possible for the phrase “with all due respect” to be used as anything other than a prelude to a haymaker?

-3 BR APT, 1ST FLR; HEAT, GAS, WATER, HERO-FREE-

No heroes today.

Commuting to work has been an uphill slalom lately, but today took the yellow-snow cake. You can feel the loss of leverage, can't you, when you're sneaking in ten minutes late to avoid the evil grins of coworkers morally obligated to store news of your tardiness away until they need to deflect attention for some misdeed of their own? Can't you?

Oh, I didn't even get my coat off before the bad old veteran stomped in saying "I have a request."

"When I am dealing with a patron, I would prefer not to be interrupted. I am fully capable of dealing with the issues that come up, and fulfilling my duties. When other people come up and take over - and I know this isn't just you - it's rude."

Now, this request is motivated by the resentment non-professional staffers legitimately feel in the presence of overbearing professional librarians. I am not by nature overbearing, but feel the need to become so in the early stages of a new assignment when information about my duties is sparse. This I explained to him, and encouraged him to come to me immediately if he felt his role in the library was not being respected. Then I did something rather deceitful; I played on his greatest generation machismo, suffering so long in a previously all-female library:

Centering all of my energy in my Mind's Eye, I stood up straighter than normal and sank my voice one octave. 'Smiled as sharp as a raptor's beak. "We are both men" I rumbled, relishing my extra inches. "We can talk to each other without becoming offended."

He rocked back on his heels and made some awkward small talk for the next few minutes. Benedict - 1, Veteran - 0; but I don't feel entirely good about it.

Later, my boss (approaching retirement) was confronted by the library director about work she hadn't done, didn't know how to do, because she is all but computer illiterate. In this situation I am an observer, but you can feel it, can't you, the shame and empathy, seeing a kindly, grandmotherly woman getting dressed down for not understanding something they probably never trained her for anyway. I've only been at this site for two and a half weeks, but I already find myself attempting to take on parts of her workload to avoid scenes like this.
And unlike the veteran, she is all too willing to part with some of her duties.

-2 BR APT, 2ND FL; HEAT, GAS, WATER, SYMMETRY-FREE-

Perfect lodgings for a minor hero.

My argument with my wife started last night in bed. Nothing smutty, everything was Hayes code happy in our house; me in flannel pajamas, she perched at the end of the bed with one foot on the floor.

Unknotted
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

Her job was the catalyst for the fight. For ten years, she has taught art to third graders in lieu of the gallery life she once promised was her destiny. Over the past decade, the free-spirited woman I had married struggled to teach something, anything, to the elementary artists. And every year, she held their attention only long enough to teach symmetry.

This affected her deeply. Drained her creative juices so much so that she sought solace in routine, rigidity, and more symmetry. Fatal for an artist, and our marriage, which fed on the asymmetry of our temperaments. When we'd met, she was the wild one, unpredictable and irrational. Consequently, she was irresistible to a staid mathematician like me.

But now she was more me than I had ever been, and took unkindly to my barrage of unhelpful suggestions. Relax Chill out Don't worry about it Let it go.

So it shouldn't have been a surprise when I woke the next morning tethered to the bed in a symmetrical spreadeagle. The ties connecting my wrists to the bed posts would be familiar to any dom. But we don't have posts at the foot of the bed. In the first display of ingenuity in years, my artist wife had lashed each ankle to a stout chain that ran between mattress and the frame, and under the boxspring. To keep the chains from sliding out, she had attached a heavy lamp (minus the shade) to one length and a statuette to the other.

What a fascinating puzzle, I thought. The wrist chains won't move. The leg chains, however, could move back and forth, even cross each other, but risk entanglement.

My predicament resembled one of those 3-D iron and wood puzzles that ask the user to remove the shuttle, or free the wine bottle. Any one of them could be solved with the proper equation.

It is the symmetry of the trap that keeps me here. If I make my ankle-bonds asymmetrical in just the right way, I should be able to pull them free and then loosen the wrist bonds. But if I do it wrong even once, I may not be able to untangle the leg restraints.

So I lay there for several minutes before my mathematical brain came up with a viable sequence. A few twists later, the lamp and statuette were on the right side of the bed, and I was in the fetal position. As I easily lifted my wrist nooses from the headboard, I realized we would make it after all. We had simply changed places: she was now the solid one, and I was the freethinking artist. I just couldn't decide whether our relationship worked because we were symmetrical, or asymmetrical.

-1 BR APT, 4TH FL; HEAT, GAS, WATER, ZOMBIE-FREE-

Perfect lodgings for a minor hero.

I suppose things look more desperate from the balcony. Graveyards on the north and west sides, a Russian Tea House on the east. To the south, a middle school. And looming largest on the horizon, the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant.

A few years ago, I would have turned up my nose at this apartment, no matter how many utilities they promised to cover. But ever since the fateful breakfast that became the origin of my powers, I'd only worked half-time, constantly struggling to cope with the great blessing and curse that would eventually find its calling. When, I didn't know, but until then, I needed to save money. Besides, as inapplicable as my abilities were to most life situations, I figured out small ways of using them to dull the harsher aspects of a short-term leasing.

For example:

No pet with fur or feathers is allowed in this building. And yet, I'm taking care of a mink named Philip. How? Well, every time the landlord comes creaking down the hall on his geriatric scooter, I set off a landlord's smoke detector using powers I will explain later. The result is two-fold - the normally friendly Philip hides deep in the closet, and the landlord is stuck for a good hour convincing his wife that he has not started smoking again, he can't imagine why it went off.

I suppose I should explain the powers.

A few years ago, I ran a futile campaign to change the relationship between myself and an uber-platonic girlfriend. One morning she'd passed out on my couch - choosing my couch because I was the type of 'gentleman' who would nurse her with a bucket until the sun came up. In retrospect, I should have lifted a page from the man she married and divorced this year, and simply dumped her on the bathmat facing the toilet. Apparently that made him irresistible.

But at that deluded time, I thought putting together a hearty breakfast for her would get her attention. In a hurry to finish the muffins at the same time as the hollandaise, I crammed four pieces in a two-slot toaster. I thought the slots were wide enough, and I was wrong. Just as I was peeking in and poking around with a butter knife, the burning muffins and a pillar of smoke hit me right in the face. When I woke, she was gone, although I noticed that she had vomited once more, into the eggs benedict.

From that day forward, I learned that I could stream smoke - no fire, just thick bread smoke - from my nostrils, and even mold it to my liking. The trouble is, sometimes it comes out on its own.

-Day of Introductions-

Friday was a great day for introductions at the college.
New guy like me could press flesh all day and never reach every last janitor, guard, word processor, accountant, professor, coach, vice president for student affairs, and systems administrator, but still I tried, and consequently remembered almost none of their names, wondering all the while which one would become my closest ally and which one, my deadliest enemy.

The guy who fusses over change in the bookstore would do a great job in either role, I think.

-You sicken me, yet I can't leave-

echinacea
Originally uploaded by benedict monk.

I don't go for pills, no matter how sick I get. But now I've become facinated with chewable Echinacea.

It's a flower! I'm eating Sunflowers, and the American Herb Association (AHA) approves.

-Oops. I used it today-

Guess we won't be dating then, love, since we could be related.

What can I say, except that the material has a mind of its own.

-Zincum Aceticum-

Two days on the job with one hell of a headache, pressing flesh as per introduction with poetic tissues in each coat pocket: clean on the left, soiled on the right.

Trying hardest not to sneeze on patrons and coworkers, entering records and providing reference until the human resource wonks bring new forms to sign.

All of the hall media screens flash a message from the nurse: "To stave off the flu, avoid crowded, smoky places with alcoholic beverages..' Too late.

And then one of the young administrators looks right into my red eyes and says:
"'Monk?' I know some Monks in New York - My uncle."

Guess we won't be dating then, love, since we could be related.

I didn't say that out loud. That strikes me as more of a second week conversation.

-Thought I could use a full week is all-

[Filler]

-The Sad Sacks of New Years-

Discovered on two cocktail napkins in my coat pockets. Oddly, the rhythm nearly matches 'God Rest ye Merry Gentleman'

Among the happy revelers there sat a man so grey,
of indeterminate race and certain middle age.
He nursed a beer, his fifth I hear,
-and never glanced away.

Until I spoke he never turned, but after he did say
'my life is almost over, but I hope you liked this day.'
I brought champagne right to his hands,
and pressed for a happy thought.
He would not be prodded, he's a sad sack that won't be taught

Two minutes to the great ball drop,
and I wait with all my warm ones.
He clasps my hand and shuffles off
before the countdown's due.
If I think what he is thinking now, I'd shake my head in two.