Happy!

My iPod is no longer missing.

My coworker, sick of my constant bitching and moaning, used the magical powers bestowed on her by the pilgrims to find my iPod.

She just walked by, tossed it on my desk, and kept walking.


HOORAY!

I was having such a good day, too.

I love my new job and I love everyone I work with, which is why I am eternally pissed off.

Let me tell you a little story about an iPod.

I've had the same iPod for literally five years. It is full of music from a hard drive that I have sitting in a tower I can't use until I get a new power source, so it's stuff I don't generally have access to at home. Yes, it's my own fault for not fixing this little problem faster.

My iPod is old. It's big and clunky, and as far as iPods go, it's kind of  a dinosaur. It's seen a lot in it's time: college finals, three jobs, two moves, four published magazine articles, about seven different flights and the worst breakup of my life.

It has survived me dropping it in a puddle, accidentally throwing it across a parking lot, and being carried around in my purse with everything else I own. It carried me through numerous workouts, and a broken heart I thought would never heal.

It's old, it's beat up, but I still love it, even if it only holds a charge for about an hour.

Work has been ridiculous lately, so we've been pulling a lot of hours. Thus, the trusty iPod comes out. Somehow, a little heavy metal makes 15 hour days just go faster.

So you can try to imagine the pure joy I felt when I walked into work today and realized it was gone.

Last night I was in such a hurry to go the hell home, I forgot to bring my iPod with me. I left it plugged in, sitting on my desk. Which I admit is my own fault, but we've all accidentally left things at work.

I came in this morning, at 7 in the fucking morning, and found the headphones laying next to the charger, with no iPod in sight.

How thoughtful, they left me the fucking charger and headphones for an iPod they stole.

I hope they needed it more than me. I really do, because there are songs on that thing that are irreplaceable (some from a friend of mine that he sent to me in college. I can't exactly buy that on iTunes).

Obviously, I don't think work is an appropriate place to leave expensive pieces of technology. But I also like to think that we live in a world where if someone was to accidentally forget something at work, it's not considered open season for whoever happens to wander by. I guess I was mistaken. Thank you for ruining what little faith in humanity I had left.

Enjoy my iPod, you sack of shit. Happy fucking Thanksgiving.

I am not a nice sick person. I've never been a nice sick person. I'm a "leave me alone" sick person.

I am fine with that.

I am sicker than hell right now. It's put me in a chipper mood to say the least. When I say sick, I don't mean like "oh, Clare has a cold". I mean, I have fluid in my lungs, a fever, and this is the first time in two days I haven't been totally out of it. I've got a cough that can rattle windows, and the sheer amount of steroids I have surging through my system either make me a shoe in if anyone needs a Lou Ferrigno impersonator or if any Major League Baseball teams are hiring.

Today I finally got off the couch, and managed to somehow make it to Walgreen's. It was a quick mission: More soup, some orange juice, a box of Kleenex, and despite my thinking its hippy crap, a vaporizer. I've never been a huge fan of vaporizers. With my lungs, a vaporizer is kind of like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound. It's not going to do much good, and you look like an idiot. That, and I rank it's medical usage right up there with magic crystals and herbal supplements. Some people swear by them. I prefer my drugs to be prescription grade controlled substances that are quality assured and handed to me by a professional with an incredibly expensive education.

But what the hell, I'm desperate.

So, I'm standing (or doing my best) in line, holding my arsenal of medications and coughing and hacking up a lung. The problem with having even a little fluid in your lung is that it makes an obnoxious rattling noise, and leaves me with a cough that sounds like it belongs to a 400 pound man.

I was waiting for my total, when the most uppity cunt I have ever seen stepped up behind me. She looked me up and down and then started whispering loudly to her husband about how I have no business being out in public with what is obviously the swine flu. She prattled away about how I am the example of everything that's wrong with our world, that people only care about themselves and we are all selfish.

And honestly? I'm just not in the fucking mood to listen to this shit.

I turned to her, and said "Excuse me? In case your wondering, my doctor diagnosed me with pneumonia. Which isn't contagious. Just incredibly uncomfortable. In the 24 years I've seen this particular doctor, he has never once misdiagnosed me. However, you are right people are selfish. And on the off chance that he is mistaken, and I do have the swine flu, I'd like you to be the first I celebrate the occasion with."

At which point I coughed into my hand and proceeded to blow it into her face.

I would be lying if I said that at the moment, I didn't wish I had Ebola.

I have never been a particularly good sick person.

Even when I was little, I'd tell whoever it was that was trying to take care of me to leave me alone and go back to bed. I'd be so insistent that eventually even my mother had no choice but to actually leave me alone.

The problem about my fancy new job in the city is that it is in the part of Chicago that everyone thinks about when they think of Chicago. It's right by all the notable things that you see in movies. Just in my commute I pass numerous landmarks that are famous. The Chicago Theatre, Millennium Park, Navy Pier, and State Street are a couple of them. Most of it depends on the traffic and time of day.

But my all time favorite street to pass through is Michigan Avenue. It's hands down my favorite part of Chicago. I could sit here and lie to you and say it's the spectacular buildings in the area. That it is just a beautiful and convenient place to get to. I would be lying. The buildings are beautiful, but so are half of the buildings in Chicago. And anyone who believes that anywhere in Chicago is easy to get to has obviously never had the pleasure of navigating our public transit system.

The reason the Magnificent Mile is my favorite place in the city is the sheer abundance of ridiculously priced luxury brands. Nowhere else in the city can you be surrounded by Tiffany and Co, Gucci, and Prada. You can walk from Louis Vuitton to the Coq d'Or at the Drake Hotel for a drink. I could spend hours at Cartier, staring at jewelry that is fit for a movie star or queen, and then wander over to Ferragamo. After that I can wander over to the Intercontinental Hotel and munch at Zest while gazing at people who make four million times the money I do.

It's a nice little slice of retail heaven right here in Chicago. Even if I don't shop there for fear that a purse will throw me into a debt that is rivaled only by my student loans, I still love it and can't think of a single place I'd rather be. It's an adult game of dress up. No one there knows that I can't afford a single thing I look at in the stores. Until they read this anyhow.

The problem with passing these things on a daily basis is that they become ordinary. Things seem to lose a bit of their magic when you are shuttled past them every day on your way to or from work or school. So when I left work early yesterday because I wasn't feeling well, the Magnificent Mile was more like "the Longest Street Ever Between Me and Home".

Being a shitty sick person, I hailed a cab to take me to the train station and settled in while my cab driver, who looked like he came straight from a police line up drove down Michigan Avenue.

We were almost at the Drake when I realized how sick I really was, and it dawned on me.

I had the cabbie pull over just past the Drake hotel, where I proceeded to, at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, hang out of a cab and throw up on to the Magnificent Mile.

It was only when I looked up to close the car door that I saw the group of Asian tourists standing six feet away from me, staring open mouthed in my direction.

I did the only thing I could think to do in that situation. I smiled, waved and said "Welcome to Chicago!"

I'm sure the pictures will be showing up on the internet shortly.