I know it’s terribly nerdy to link to articles in The New Yorker, but this one just about sums up my entire life’s mission: A hatred of Microsoft products and a love for the tedium of grammar. Of course, what’s even nerdier than posting about The New Yorker in your weblog is emailing articles from The New Yorker around the office, but that’s exactly what I did this afternoon, after assuring myself that I wasn’t the only person that would find it funny, and that it might, perhaps, deem me a savvy new employee. I am that self-centered.

Oh yeah, I have a job now. Perks include: free coffee, free hate mail, free tampons and cheap books, and I can’t really beat that with any freelance gig I’ve held over the past two years. In a few months, I’ll even have health insurance, which means I can finally get this two year ear infection looked at. So, yeah, it’s been two years since I held down any sort of office job where one is required to bathe regularly and change one’s clothes on a day-to-day basis. The prospect of not wearing the same jeans every day scared me to such a degree that I’ve actually been out shopping for several days in each of the three weeks that I’ve been employed. I’ve managed to incorporate a lot of new duds in the wardrobe, but the food-stained, self-altered items of yore are really hard to weed out. Even Beacon’s Closet didn’t want them. (I still have no idea what they did take. They gave me a nice chunk of cash to spend in the store, yet I walked out with most of the clothes I’d brought in. And isn’t that place getting a little too snobby for its own good anyway?) The good news is that taupe has finally left the racks at H&M, and now everything is checkered like a Ska nightmare from 1993. Truthfully, though, I’ll take black and white over camel any day.

My darling Lina is coming into town this weekend, and I’m hoping she’ll indulge me in another shopping bonanza in which she convinces me to purchase either a) some stylish new office-appropriate, “I do not look like a 16-year-old girl, goddamnit” shoes, which, if necessary, will be pointy; or b) a pair of expensive jeans that make my ass look hot.

That’s all I really ask of in this world. Other than proper grammar and the demise of Microsoft Word.