One man's treasure

In gathering my belongings at work in preparation for my move to a new desk, one that actually sees visible rays of sunlight for a period of 11-12 minutes in the later afternoons, May-August, I'm finding that my residence for the past two years has come to resemble those dusty old closets in which wizened old Chinese men keep their mogwai and cursed monkey paws. Some oddities:

For my job, I communicate with a large number of institutions, and often am required to send them prepaid packages with which to return documents to me, for which I select the postage. These are the supremely gay Legends of Hollywood "Judy Garland" stamps, which I use for institutions that I loathe more than the usual (institutions that I like/have yet to incur my wrath get the venerable "Baseball Sluggers"). The idea of a tightass, Old BoyVice President bringing an envelope covered in Liza's mom to the mailroom not only keeps me from puncturing major arteries with office supplies, but sometimes even turns my frown into a blank, neutral expression on mornings when I'm still particularly drunk.

This is a small pot made for me by a coworker taking "Ceramics I" as her elective when getting her Master's so she could leave this very job. While touched by the gesture, I was immediately informed that this was her practice pot, and that the glaze is highly poisonous, so it's not really suitable for, you know, use. I use it to store the cough drops I offer to people who reheat fish in the microwave.

These are the pictures on my bulletin board. Since I'm unmarried, my family avoids the camera with a Jackal-like consistency, and I have no pictures of friends that do not involve beverages or obscene gestures, I've appropriated pictures from other sources so as to appear normal.

1. This is a photomagnet of a lanky, awkward teenage girl and her trusty basketball, left by the previous owner of the bulletin board. I tell people it's my daughter (I'm 27) and she's a star power forward, then watch their faces as they privately wonder if their own teenager is having sex.

2. This is a picture sent in by a young man trying to get something published, following the ever-important seventh step to succeeding in business-"Make sure to include a photo of yourself topless". I think he looks like a dickhead. When people ask if he's my boyfriend, I say "No, he's a dickhead."

3. This came as a placeholder in a coworker's wedding album, and I put it on my bulletin board so that people will assume that I came from the hard-knock, tuberculosis-ridden streets of Limerick, and that when I say "If you could, please get back to me at your earliest convenience", they know that I fucking mean it.

This is my collection of miniaturized items brought back to me by a coworker that actually gets sent places for work (it included an impossibly adorable mini-Tabasco bottle until this past weekend, when I made a batch of impossibly adorable Bloody Marys). I 've never thought to ask where he gets sent that he's given so many tiny foodstuffs. Perhaps our company does a lot of business in Lilliput.

This is my jar of forks, soy sauce, and a shower cap. I had assumed most cubicle-dwellers have one, but upon further inspection last week, I realized that it's just me, and that this jar makes me look like I'm batshit insane.

This is the collection of highly-processed food I keep at my desk for when I need to eat dinner before going out, which coworkers tell me looks like the contents of a freshman boy's dorm room. I laugh goodnaturedly, but if ever we're all forced to live in a fallout shelter following a nuclear war that unexpectedly occurs between the hours of 9-5 M-F, I am so fucking not sharing.

These are the pumpkin-flavored Godiva chocolates sent to me by my grandmother around the holidays. They are without a doubt the most vile, putrid thing I have ever put in my mouth, and it was only out of sheer inflexibility that I did not immediately lick the bottom of my shoe to get rid of the taste. I keep these around for two reasons; one, in the hopes that someone will actually take one of these when I casually offer it to them, and two, so that on especially rotten days, I can say to myself "Hey, at least I'm not in the midst of swallowing a pumpkin-flavored Godiva chocolate", which really helps me put things in perspective.