Stars! I’ve actually been busy this week. I guess it goes to show that miracles really do happen in December. This week, we conquered the sizeable task of getting several hundred Christmas cards out the door. I think this is some sort of karmic justice for me, since I have never sent more than two or three Christmas cards at a time in my life. This venture involved taking stacks of cards, signed by my boss (read: his secretary) and stuffing them into envelopes we addressed by hand. Lord. Since they were hand-addressed, it wasn’t possible to run them through the automatic sealer thing we have in the mail room. Luckily, someone produced a gluestick at the crucial moment so we didn’t end up licking any. That’s really spectacular, because I avoid licking envelopes at all costs. See, a tech at one of the local emergency rooms told me a story about a patient she had whose lower lip was unbelievably swollen. When they tried to lance it and nothing came out, they discovered that a few cockroach eggs had ended up in her lip from a papercut she received while licking an envelope. The eggs had hatched and there were several roaches in larval state living inside her lip. No joke.

Anyway, here’s the latest installment into the Things I Like/Things I Don’t Like list. Please adjust yourself to this format, as I will be utilizing it often for future entries.

Things I Like
• Amy’s Enchiladas. I hope the kind folks at Whole Foods never tire of seeing me in their checkout lines with a stack of Amy’s Enchiladas in my hands. These things are like the heroin of yuppie food: try them once and you’re hooked for all time and eternity. I’m particularly fond of the cheese variety that comes with corn and refried black beans.

• The staff of the Downtown Post Office. I’m not sure if it’s a commitment to good service or a continued effort to drop the disgruntled postal employee from society’s cultural memory, but the folks at this branch are downright chipper. I appreciate this, and I applaud them.

• Gonads and Strife. If you’ve never seen this lovely little Flash site, you should. Don’t bother if your computer doesn’t have speakers—it’s the song that will make you laugh to the point of pain. Note: contains a few four-letter words and a few, um, choice pictures from Gray’s Anatomy (hey, you never know what will offend people). http://www.frashii.com/wldo.swf

• State Farm Insurance. My agent and all of her staff are extraordinarily kind people. In the days following my recent vehicular incident, they have been most helpful and have demonstrated legions of patience while I figure out this whole claims process.

• The wonderful staff of Discover Leadership Training. To avoid all chance of plagiarism allegations, I don’t do ratings on anything in my lists (to see the world’s most comprehensive and hysterically funny collection of ratings, visit the Brunching Shuttlecocks as http://www.brunching.com). However, I’ll make one exception and give this crowd the highest grade possible—A+, four stars, 10 out of 10…whatever scale you prefer. They keep my light lit, and there’s very little that tops that. Noticed the rather profound absence of last week’s general misanthropic haze? I give significant credit to this past weekend with the Discover crew. Thanks guys, I needed that.

• Soup spoons. They are, by far, the cutest utensil. I actually stole a silver soup spoon from a B&B I used to work at. Oddly, I never had the nerve to steal it while I worked there but rather when I visited on a trip back to Philly a few years ago. I keep thinking about sending it back, but I happen to really like it, and I also happen to know that they have upwards of 350 and rarely serve soup.

Things I Don’t Like:
• My job. In case I haven’t mentioned this recently… (though I am taking strides to remedy the situation—more on this later).

• The smell of money. I freely admit that I have an extremely sensitive sense of smell, and that I am disturbed by odors that don’t register with many other people. Still, I challenge anyone to tell me with a straight face that new bills fresh out of a brick from the Bureau of Engraving and Printing smell anything other than awful. Granted, I probably have more interaction with such bills that most due to my place of employment. Come on over, we’ll cash a check and you can smell the nastiness, too. This stands as yet another reason I am in full support of a cashless society.

• Rental car companies. In the two days following my encounter with the South Loop Enterprise people, I have given great heaps of thanks that the recruiter from Enterprise chose not to hire me when I applied for their management training program in 2001. Gawd. Aside from being incredibly schmarmy, the fellow who (at long last) helped me into a 2003 Trailblazer came quite close to earning the Bag of Hair Award for the day (as in, ‘dumb as a…’). Apparently, no one who has ever rented from them before has been entirely indifferent as to which car they receive. Usually, I tend to keep my “I just don’t care” commentary to myself, but this situation provoked me to actually say it about a dozen times. Oy.

• Gender discrimination. I’d really like to earn as much as one of my (male) colleagues who has yet to graduate from college, works about 5.5 hours a day, and has yet to discover the presence of spell-check. Not to launch into a feminist fugue here, but really. It wasn’t until I started working that I realized “little lady” is actually a working part of many people’s (men’s) vocabularies. The funny part? I’m not that little. Go figure.

• The Real World. I spent many summers absolutely glued to this show. Now, it just makes me sad, though in a good-grief-ma way rather than a feel-the-pathos-with-me way. I will probably use hours and hours of footage for research when I write my book about my 50th percentile theory.

• Cottage cheese with fruit. I’m down with the fruit, I’m down with the cottage cheese. It’s the combination that makes no earthly sense to me.