It all started in Frau Sundeen's sixth-period German class. As a former member of International Club, I can picture it clearly: map of Deutschland on the wall, “Velkommen!” sign above the door, and the good Frau herself, with her blonde coiffure and Christmas cardigan. It was mid-December 1994, and the class was having a little Weinachtsfest to celebrate the last day of school before winter break. At the party, over some homemade strudel, they learned about Knecht Ruprecht--an evil elf that fills the shoes of naughty German children with horrible presents.
I wasn't in that class at East Grand Forks Senior High; I was in far away Moorhead, studying plagal cadences and suspended seventh chords. My brother Andy, however, was in that class.
The gears in his brain began to turn.
A plan formed...a diabolical plan, a plan that would pay off beyond his wildest dreams--in fact beyond the wildest dreams of younger brothers everywhere; younger brothers that yearn for new ways to torment their older sisters like a wino yearns for a fresh bottle of red.
Fast forward to Christmas morning.
Home from my freshman year of college, I was having trouble sleeping in the relative silence of the house. I woke up around five a.m., and unable to relax, decided to check the Christmas tree for presents. I couldn't find my glasses, so I tiptoed downstairs without them. I am legally blind without glasses or contacts. This is important.
I could hear my mother snoring from the couch in the living room, so I approached the tree with the stealth of a ninja. Merry strings of colored lights dimly illuminated the scene. I crouched in front of the fragrant pine...every gift was wrapped in cheerful paper; snowmen and Santas winked back at me in the muted light. I spied a present that didn't match the others. It wasn't wrapped, and the box was darker in color. I picked it up.
“JILL--OPEN ME!” it read.
So, I opened it.
When my mother tells this story, she describes waking up to the tree branches shaking, ornaments clinking and rattling, and my tremulous voice from somewhere in the darkness calling, “Mo-o-0-0-OM??” I then came lurching out from behind the tree, half walking, half crawling, tripping over my robe and nearly face-planting into the carpet. I was so panicked I was almost hyperventilating. “Mo-o-om!”
She sat up and flipped on the light, took one inside the box I held clutched in my hand, and burst out laughing.
“What's so funny?” I demanded breathlessly, almost in tears. “I think someone went CRAZY!”
She shook her head, tears of laughter coming down--a reaction that my addled brain failed to comprehend. “I wondered what your brother was doing with all those Halloween props!”
The horrible box? Was FULL of very lifelike severed fingers and Heinz ketchup. When I say lifelike, I mean LIFE. LIKE. I don't remember one single solitary real present I received that year, but I can picture the contents of that nightmarish box like it happened yesterday. OH, TENENBAUM OF UNHOLY TERROR! I was traumatized for days afterwards.
I knew there was a reason I took Spanish.
Over the next few years I let several opportunities for retaliation slip past. I had one semi-brilliant, if time-consuming idea—to mix up the CDs, cases, and booklets of my brother's entire precious music collection—but Andy somehow sensed what I was up to and kept his bedroom door locked when he was not inside. “Rats! Foiled again!” I hissed when it came time to go back to school.
The first Christmas after the great Red River Flood of 1997, donations from all over the country were still pouring into Grand Forks/East Grand Forks faster than they could be distributed. Our church delivered a box of lovely items to our doorstep—mostly quilts and non-perishable food items, with one exception: a mangy, well-past-their-prime bag of whole carrots. I had friends and family that lost nearly everything to that flood and were still living in FEMA trailers months later, and I still can't fathom any of them were hard up enough to consume brown, musty, mummified carrots. It's the thought that counts, right?
My mom was about to toss them in the trash when I stopped her. “Knecht Ruprecht,” I whispered. Then, “Revenge.”
I found a large box and stuffed it extravagantly with festive tissue paper and confetti, burying the carrots deep inside. I wrapped the gift in glossy paper, taking care that the taped edges were as smooth and flawless as a department store display. I tied bolts of colorful zip-ribbon around the package, curling the ends into fistfuls of luxurious spirals. Lastly, I chose the biggest and brightest gift tag I could find, and in buoyant script wrote, “Andy! OPEN ME!”
Cackling with glee, I placed the box beneath the tree, and waited for showtime.
When he saw it, and saw it was for him, his eyes lit up. He seized the package and shook it, listening carefully. “Ooooh. What IS it?” he wondered aloud.
I remained aloof and silent. Catlike, in my stealthy plotting ways.
“I bet it's something good!” he exclaimed, rattling the box again.
I had to bite my fist to keep from chuckling out loud.
“What was that?” he asked, whipping his head around to look at me.
“Nothing,” I said innocently. “Just, uh, thought I might sneeze.”
He turned back to his present, holding it up to the light for examination.
When it came time to open gifts, Andy saved the best for last. The entire family watched as he tore into my present. Shreds of paper and shimmering tinsel flew everywhere. He flung the lid aside with gusto, and dove into the tangles of stuffing, pawing through it with one, then both hands. Near the bottom of the box, he paused. His expression changed from elated, to puzzled, to alarmed. He lifted the cellophane bag containing the decrepit root vegetables high, squinted at what he held for a disbelieving moment, and said: “Carrots.”
A moment of stunned silence followed.
Then he started to laugh. And the rest of us joined in. Before long we were howling, knee slapping, and rolling on the floor, and it felt great. The carrots are the only gift I remember giving or getting that Christmas, which was otherwise not exactly the best one of any of our lives. Baby Jesus might have warranted gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh; for my money, those carrots were a Nelson family Christmas miracle, bringing us all together in a shared moment of (admittedly perverse) joy.
This launched my family's semi-annual Disappointing Gifts tradition. I highly suggest you try this—though maybe not if your brethren are easily offended. It is often the best laugh we have all year. There is a five dollar limit, and the goal isn't just to find something bad or worthless; it has to be disappointing, which takes a certain amount of finesse.
For instance: poster of a person skiing--lame. Large, ugly poster of a person skiing off a cliff, with an enormous caption reading, “OH SHIT”--disappointing. (To my mother. I would think it was awesome, obviously.)
Dollar store makeup set--lame. Expired Wet N' Wild Makeup Set with greyish pearl nail polish (separated), red lipstick (waxy), and blaze orange lip pencil (broken) with the “HALF OFF” tag still attached? Disappointing.
Here's where things can backfire: the ULTIMATE disappointment is when a carefully chosen disappointing gift is mistaken for a real gift by its recipient. My brother once sent Jeremy a cheap hand soap dispenser in the shape of a piece of pie. I totally see what Andy was going for--I mean, who would want that?—but to his chagrin, Jeremy thought it was the coolest thing ever. “How did he KNOW I love pumpkin pie? Did you TELL him?” Jeremy crowed, as he proudly set his present next to the kitchen sink, then stepped back to admire it. My brother was crushed. It was amazing! Not “carrots” amazing, but pretty damn good.
In conclusion, as the Halloween decorations go on clearance and the Christmas tumor metastasizes in your favorite store, don't walk past those seasonal leftovers. If your family is anywhere near as delightfully twisted as mine, you may just discover the spirit of Christmas next to the discount cobwebs on aisle nine.
Showing posts with label Story Hour. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Story Hour. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Jill vs. the French horn
When I was in seventh grade, one of our English class assignments was to write a letter to our twelfth grade selves, which we would receive at our high school graduation. In my letter, I said I wanted to go to Harvard and major in Trumpet. I was not joking.
[Stares into your eyes for a long awkward moment.]
Needless to say, I did not follow this path, and there were two main culprits: braces and band camp. At a time where I would sit and actively think about things like embouchure and spit valves and Maynard Ferguson, a critical time in any twelve-year-old girl's life, my crooked, crooked teeth betrayed me. Do you know what happens when you practice scales for hours, a cold steel mouthpiece on one side of your lips and a garland of hideous metal brackets and wires on the other? Well...it's somewhere between a paper cut and forty lashes, except inside your mouth.
Full of adolescent zeal, I forged on. I listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis; I daydreamed about Carnegie Hall and Variations on 'Carnival of Venice'. I blazed through Arban's Complete Conservatory Method like a tornado through a trailer park. I lugged my trumpet case and music stand everywhere, including on our family vacation to the lake—Harmon mutes, valve oil, Jerry Coker's Method for Improvisation, and all. Surely people from the surrounding cabins were surprised to see a fourteen year old girl with a bad perm and a neon Gitano sweatshirt standing at the end of the dock, playing Taps for a stringer of walleye. True story, by the way.
Behaviors like this did not endear me to people in my age group, just in case you were wondering.
One of the proudest moments of my junior year occurred at the Spring Pops Concert. A handful of scholarships to International Music Camp were handed out...and my name was called! I felt like Miss America in an acid-washed jean skirt! In just a couple of short months I would be whisked away to scenic Dunseith, ND (the geographical center of North America!) to spend a full week honing my craft with teenage jazz fiends from all over the world—people just like me! Weird and ungainly people who knew the difference between a major, a minor, and a minor-major 7th chord! MY people!
Bursting with ambition, I practiced every day that summer. And as I practiced, I made some subtle adjustments to my technique, to accommodate my shiny new retainers. I started to play slightly off to one side of my mouth, which, as it turns out, is a Very Bad Thing if you want to be the next Clifford Brown.
The network of tiny muscles surrounding the mouth is delicate, and if the balance is upset, the entire mechanism can collapse like a house of cards. The damage is not necessarily reversible. Sometime in the middle of my week at IMC, this happened to me. Air (and if I'm being honest, spit) started to escape from one side of my mouth, and my range was reduced by half. My lips felt like bruised cardboard. The harder I tried to produce a brilliant tone, the more my playing sounded like the caterwauling of a dying moose. Quite literally, I busted my own chops.
The Ivy League would never know what it had lost.
Several months of soul-searching followed. All I wanted to do was play my trumpet, but every time I tried it was like running a marathon with a torn ACL. I needed a new “sport,” and my high school band needed a new French horn player. I gave it a try, and the mouthpiece was different enough that I could handle playing it, at least for short periods of time. But...French horn, you know? French horn. A French horn wishes it sounded like the caterwaul of a dying moose.
JUST LOOK AT IT.
If the trumpet is a sleek and shiny Porsche convertible, the French horn is a station wagon with faux-woodgrain paneling. You spend so much time going oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah, that by the time you get a measure and a half of glory, an actual fragment of the melody line, it is guaranteed that the instrument will crack and bray like Peter Brady on 'Time to Change.' This is why there are no famous French horn players: they are all too embarrassed to leave the house.
I will leave you with this food for thought:
I like this person! This person is using the French horn to its best advantage, as a weapon of musical mass destruction.
Join me for the next installment of Jill vs. the French horn, where I will tell you about the time I was in a brass quintet, and how when we rehearsed, my favorite teacher would drop everything to stand behind me and laugh at my horrendous playing until tears came down. I did not mind this, as I was in on the joke...after all, I had ears...and if I started laughing into my mouthpiece while I played, well, nobody seemed the wiser.
[Stares into your eyes for a long awkward moment.]
Needless to say, I did not follow this path, and there were two main culprits: braces and band camp. At a time where I would sit and actively think about things like embouchure and spit valves and Maynard Ferguson, a critical time in any twelve-year-old girl's life, my crooked, crooked teeth betrayed me. Do you know what happens when you practice scales for hours, a cold steel mouthpiece on one side of your lips and a garland of hideous metal brackets and wires on the other? Well...it's somewhere between a paper cut and forty lashes, except inside your mouth.
Full of adolescent zeal, I forged on. I listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Wynton Marsalis; I daydreamed about Carnegie Hall and Variations on 'Carnival of Venice'. I blazed through Arban's Complete Conservatory Method like a tornado through a trailer park. I lugged my trumpet case and music stand everywhere, including on our family vacation to the lake—Harmon mutes, valve oil, Jerry Coker's Method for Improvisation, and all. Surely people from the surrounding cabins were surprised to see a fourteen year old girl with a bad perm and a neon Gitano sweatshirt standing at the end of the dock, playing Taps for a stringer of walleye. True story, by the way.
Behaviors like this did not endear me to people in my age group, just in case you were wondering.
One of the proudest moments of my junior year occurred at the Spring Pops Concert. A handful of scholarships to International Music Camp were handed out...and my name was called! I felt like Miss America in an acid-washed jean skirt! In just a couple of short months I would be whisked away to scenic Dunseith, ND (the geographical center of North America!) to spend a full week honing my craft with teenage jazz fiends from all over the world—people just like me! Weird and ungainly people who knew the difference between a major, a minor, and a minor-major 7th chord! MY people!
Bursting with ambition, I practiced every day that summer. And as I practiced, I made some subtle adjustments to my technique, to accommodate my shiny new retainers. I started to play slightly off to one side of my mouth, which, as it turns out, is a Very Bad Thing if you want to be the next Clifford Brown.
The network of tiny muscles surrounding the mouth is delicate, and if the balance is upset, the entire mechanism can collapse like a house of cards. The damage is not necessarily reversible. Sometime in the middle of my week at IMC, this happened to me. Air (and if I'm being honest, spit) started to escape from one side of my mouth, and my range was reduced by half. My lips felt like bruised cardboard. The harder I tried to produce a brilliant tone, the more my playing sounded like the caterwauling of a dying moose. Quite literally, I busted my own chops.
The Ivy League would never know what it had lost.
Several months of soul-searching followed. All I wanted to do was play my trumpet, but every time I tried it was like running a marathon with a torn ACL. I needed a new “sport,” and my high school band needed a new French horn player. I gave it a try, and the mouthpiece was different enough that I could handle playing it, at least for short periods of time. But...French horn, you know? French horn. A French horn wishes it sounded like the caterwaul of a dying moose.
JUST LOOK AT IT.
If the trumpet is a sleek and shiny Porsche convertible, the French horn is a station wagon with faux-woodgrain paneling. You spend so much time going oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah, that by the time you get a measure and a half of glory, an actual fragment of the melody line, it is guaranteed that the instrument will crack and bray like Peter Brady on 'Time to Change.' This is why there are no famous French horn players: they are all too embarrassed to leave the house.
I will leave you with this food for thought:
I like this person! This person is using the French horn to its best advantage, as a weapon of musical mass destruction.
Join me for the next installment of Jill vs. the French horn, where I will tell you about the time I was in a brass quintet, and how when we rehearsed, my favorite teacher would drop everything to stand behind me and laugh at my horrendous playing until tears came down. I did not mind this, as I was in on the joke...after all, I had ears...and if I started laughing into my mouthpiece while I played, well, nobody seemed the wiser.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
On German words with no direct English equivalent.
Picture yourself, for a moment, in your grade school cafeteria--with its plastic trays, milk cartons, and hot lunch line, all steamy and smelling of taco hotdish and shattered dreams. You slide your tray down the steel bars, holding it up to accept an ice cream scoop of "mashed" "potatoes" from a hairnet with a smoker's cough, and then raising it again for a ladle of ominous looking Turkey Tidbits in Gravy, served by the lunch lady with the hairy mole.
Your movements are automatic. All you are thinking about is catching a little Scooby Doo after school, maybe playing some kickball...but the universe has other plans. After today, nothing will be the same, at least not until summer vacation helps fade the collective memory of your classmates. Today you are a marked man.
As you turn around to find a seat, absentmindedly scanning the sea of faces for those of your friends, the untied shoelace of your left Reebok catches on the cutlery cart. By the time you realize what is happening, it's already too late.
[cue Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings]
You take a step, trip, and begin to fall.
As it often will during traumatic events, time slows to a crawl, and every pulse beat echoes in your head like muffled gunfire in a canyon.
Frame by frame, your tray floats from your hands, spiraling as gracefully as an Olympic diver, catapulting its contents through the still air towards the waiting floor below. Your milk carton explodes like a grenade. Fruit cocktail ricochets off the side of its beige plastic bowl, which bounces twice before coming to rest upside down near the lunchroom monitor's sensible flats; her mouth forms an O of surprise as syrup splatters her support hose. Gluey gobs of potatoes, Turkey Tidbits, and gravy (what kind of gravy? you know, they never do say) slap against the tile, mingling with greyish green bean shrapnel and cubes of canned pear.
Later, in your room--as you analyze the physics of this event--you'll wonder how you had time, on your descent, to watch that sixth grade testosterone case with the full beard nod approvingly, making the devil sign with both hands while his jeering buddies high-fived. Or how, as you braced for impact--scenes from your short life flashing before your eyes--you perceived your paper napkin drifting gently down from the sky, coming to rest by your outstretched hand like a white flag of surrender.
Time returns to normal speed.
The entire cafeteria erupts into applause.
As you attempt to pick yourself up--along with the last tattered shreds of your dignity--three hundred students share a rare, unified moment of undiluted Schadenfreude*, whooping, cheering, and stomping their sneakered feet. The mess from a dropped school lunch is awesome to behold, and pratfalls are a signature of juvenile comedy; but mainly, the other kids are rejoicing because this happened to you and not them.
In a way, you are a little bit of a hero--not that it feels that way, as Mrs. Erickson leads you to what she insists on calling the “lavatory” to clean the gravy off your Levis. There's a reason that a lunch tray gets dropped on average once per school, per school year. Tomorrow, while the other kids yell, “Hey, how was your TRIP?” and pretend to duck and cover as you make your way through the cafeteria, they will be gripping their trays of rectangular pizza, soggy California Mix, and apple slices with raisins just a little...bit...tighter.
* Not familiar with this marvelous and highly useful word? Here's all you need to know, courtesy of singing puppets!
Your movements are automatic. All you are thinking about is catching a little Scooby Doo after school, maybe playing some kickball...but the universe has other plans. After today, nothing will be the same, at least not until summer vacation helps fade the collective memory of your classmates. Today you are a marked man.
As you turn around to find a seat, absentmindedly scanning the sea of faces for those of your friends, the untied shoelace of your left Reebok catches on the cutlery cart. By the time you realize what is happening, it's already too late.
[cue Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings]
You take a step, trip, and begin to fall.
As it often will during traumatic events, time slows to a crawl, and every pulse beat echoes in your head like muffled gunfire in a canyon.
Frame by frame, your tray floats from your hands, spiraling as gracefully as an Olympic diver, catapulting its contents through the still air towards the waiting floor below. Your milk carton explodes like a grenade. Fruit cocktail ricochets off the side of its beige plastic bowl, which bounces twice before coming to rest upside down near the lunchroom monitor's sensible flats; her mouth forms an O of surprise as syrup splatters her support hose. Gluey gobs of potatoes, Turkey Tidbits, and gravy (what kind of gravy? you know, they never do say) slap against the tile, mingling with greyish green bean shrapnel and cubes of canned pear.
Later, in your room--as you analyze the physics of this event--you'll wonder how you had time, on your descent, to watch that sixth grade testosterone case with the full beard nod approvingly, making the devil sign with both hands while his jeering buddies high-fived. Or how, as you braced for impact--scenes from your short life flashing before your eyes--you perceived your paper napkin drifting gently down from the sky, coming to rest by your outstretched hand like a white flag of surrender.
Time returns to normal speed.
The entire cafeteria erupts into applause.
As you attempt to pick yourself up--along with the last tattered shreds of your dignity--three hundred students share a rare, unified moment of undiluted Schadenfreude*, whooping, cheering, and stomping their sneakered feet. The mess from a dropped school lunch is awesome to behold, and pratfalls are a signature of juvenile comedy; but mainly, the other kids are rejoicing because this happened to you and not them.
In a way, you are a little bit of a hero--not that it feels that way, as Mrs. Erickson leads you to what she insists on calling the “lavatory” to clean the gravy off your Levis. There's a reason that a lunch tray gets dropped on average once per school, per school year. Tomorrow, while the other kids yell, “Hey, how was your TRIP?” and pretend to duck and cover as you make your way through the cafeteria, they will be gripping their trays of rectangular pizza, soggy California Mix, and apple slices with raisins just a little...bit...tighter.
* Not familiar with this marvelous and highly useful word? Here's all you need to know, courtesy of singing puppets!
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
In which I am an anger-monger.
You know those days when you look and feel like sh*t on a Triscuit, the unjust application of gravity causes breakable objects to spiral from your useless grasp like whirligigs, and basic social interactions make you feel like a rabid honey badger in a hole, ready to saw off errant human limbs with your razor-sharp incisors? Yeah...so today was one of those.
My brother and I used to call this Being Foul.
It started the year we did summer theater in the far flung village of Walhalla, ND. Night-owls by nature, we would stay up until 4 a.m. watching VHS tapes of old Tony Awards shows and scaring each other by pointing out the window and screaming (you know, like you do...). This would have been a perfectly fine Friday night activity if we didn't have to be on the road by sunrise to make our curtain call.
One particular Saturday we hit the highway on less sleep than usual, feeling like the love children of The Machinist and Yosemite Sam, and we were so surly that we couldn't even converse...we just made guttural noises and gnashed our teeth like pissed-off wolverines. Now mind you, we were on our way to a place called FrostFire Mountain to dance and sing for busloads of elderly Canadian tourists, nice Manitoban couples who forked over handfuls of Loonies to see us whirl and grin like jazz-handed freaks...so we needed a remedy, and fast. But what (non-chemical) salve could there be for a night of poor choices and a prickly bleary rage for which we only had ourselves to blame? WHAT WOULD SAVE BIG RIVER, THE MUSICAL FROM TURNING INTO AN IMPROMPTU SWEENEY TODD?
Eminem. That's right: the real Slim Shady. I mean, duh. Listen...Eminem knows foul. He lives it. He's a white-trash hornet buzzing in the ear of good taste and reason. I am hardly a Marshall Mathers apologist, but to everything there is a season, and the season for "Kill You" is seven a.m. in a Ford Focus with miles of highway ahead of you and three hours of sleep behind you. No matter how bad things seem, Shady understands, and not only does he understand, but he'll sample some Dido beneath your trembling angst and spin some fly rhymes about it, throw in a few f*cks and sh*ts for good measure, and offend everyone you have ever known or ever will know, just for playing! Instant catharsis!
Applying this this line of reasoning to my current situation, I listened to the Office Space soundtrack (the only gangsta rap on my iPod...I save it for special occasions), followed by a chaser of the Replacements' "Goddamn Job" and a little Rage Against the Machine "Bombtrack"...and you know what? I didn't experience a complete bad mood turnaround, but it helped. So in a (very) roundabout way, Eminem just did a nice thing for the ladies and the gays--i.e., my coworkers who have to deal with it when I go all snarling honey badger--for I came back from my lunch break transformed into something far less threatening: say, a mildly inconvenienced raccoon. Metaphorically speaking.
Isn't life a mystery?
My brother and I used to call this Being Foul.
It started the year we did summer theater in the far flung village of Walhalla, ND. Night-owls by nature, we would stay up until 4 a.m. watching VHS tapes of old Tony Awards shows and scaring each other by pointing out the window and screaming (you know, like you do...). This would have been a perfectly fine Friday night activity if we didn't have to be on the road by sunrise to make our curtain call.
One particular Saturday we hit the highway on less sleep than usual, feeling like the love children of The Machinist and Yosemite Sam, and we were so surly that we couldn't even converse...we just made guttural noises and gnashed our teeth like pissed-off wolverines. Now mind you, we were on our way to a place called FrostFire Mountain to dance and sing for busloads of elderly Canadian tourists, nice Manitoban couples who forked over handfuls of Loonies to see us whirl and grin like jazz-handed freaks...so we needed a remedy, and fast. But what (non-chemical) salve could there be for a night of poor choices and a prickly bleary rage for which we only had ourselves to blame? WHAT WOULD SAVE BIG RIVER, THE MUSICAL FROM TURNING INTO AN IMPROMPTU SWEENEY TODD?
Eminem. That's right: the real Slim Shady. I mean, duh. Listen...Eminem knows foul. He lives it. He's a white-trash hornet buzzing in the ear of good taste and reason. I am hardly a Marshall Mathers apologist, but to everything there is a season, and the season for "Kill You" is seven a.m. in a Ford Focus with miles of highway ahead of you and three hours of sleep behind you. No matter how bad things seem, Shady understands, and not only does he understand, but he'll sample some Dido beneath your trembling angst and spin some fly rhymes about it, throw in a few f*cks and sh*ts for good measure, and offend everyone you have ever known or ever will know, just for playing! Instant catharsis!
Applying this this line of reasoning to my current situation, I listened to the Office Space soundtrack (the only gangsta rap on my iPod...I save it for special occasions), followed by a chaser of the Replacements' "Goddamn Job" and a little Rage Against the Machine "Bombtrack"...and you know what? I didn't experience a complete bad mood turnaround, but it helped. So in a (very) roundabout way, Eminem just did a nice thing for the ladies and the gays--i.e., my coworkers who have to deal with it when I go all snarling honey badger--for I came back from my lunch break transformed into something far less threatening: say, a mildly inconvenienced raccoon. Metaphorically speaking.
Isn't life a mystery?
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