Yesterday was my first post-layoff job interview. The email confirmation I received from them gave me the time and address of the meeting as well as reminder that it is a ‘casual office’.

Hm, this means I can’t wear a suit. But how casual is casual? I assumed that they would be in jeans, but I can’t wear jeans. Maybe black pants? Ok, except that my black pants need to be ironed and I don’t do that very well.

Ok, so a dress, but which one? A ‘casual’ dress? Those make me look like I’m headed to a party or out for date night. A business dress? It’s practically the same as a suit but without the jacket.

Ugh! Why are you messing with my head! I tried on 7 dresses and one skirt, two different colored tights and three pair of shoes.

In the end I had about 2 and a half minutes to get out of the house and grabbed the first dress I had tried on, threw on my coat and tried not to obsess over it.

My meeting was with two women both in jeans, I confessed that I had changed about 5 times to be casual but not too casual and they also confessed that they were pretty dressed up, but they didn’t want to dress up too much because they had told me they were casual.

If I get this job, I’m pretty sure it will be because of our shared fixation on fashion. This seems like as a good a reason to hire me as any, right?

Footnote to this story: Last night I had a dream that I got this job and showed up this first day in a t-shirt, just a t-shirt, no pants, no underwear. It was not a long t-shirt. No one seemed to notice.

The last post that I wrote really got me to thinking about things that I hate. Not regular things like terrorism or cancer or trying to call your insurance company to get conformation about what your policy covers (that shit is terrible). I mean the seemingly everyday things that most normal people have no problem with. Here are my top choices in no particular order:

SOUP: Why do people consider soup food? To me soup is just a hot beverage, and if I want a hot beverage I’ll drink coffee thank you very much. But seriously, there are millions of people out there that “eat” soup as a meal. Personally I like to chew my meals and if I’m going to invest in the calories (and some soups are calorie laden) I want to chew them. I know most of you are thinking, what about when you are sick? No, not even then, the entire point of getting sick is to lose weight (Isn’t it?) so why fill up on stupid empty soup calories? East some dry toast, go back to bed and when you are better you can have some coffee (coffee= warm caffeinated soup in a cup!)

VESTS: I hate vests, and I don’t mean the kind that men (and sometimes women) wear under a nicely tailored three piece suit. No, I’m referring here to vests that people wear to keep themselves warm, fleece or down vests, anything meant as “outerwear”. First they just look stupid, they made you bulky in the places you don’t want to be bulky. But besides being aesthetically unpleasing they are also useless. Physiologically speaking* when a person gets cold they feel it most in their extremities, don’t your fingers gets cold before your boobs? Why wear a garment that is only going to keep your boobs warm, not your hands, and as a bonus make you look fat in the process? Vests, I hate you, get sleeves and turn yourself into a coat.

THE MATTHEW MCCONAUGHEY LINCOLN COMMERCIALS: Not only is this like the definition of pretentious actor buyout, but the sound of his voice makes me illogically angry. Also his face, there is something super irritating about his smug stupid face. When his commercials come on I feel a deep seated rage well up from somewhere deep inside me, I can’t explain it, this is just the way it is. Matthew Mcconaughey, you are right it isn’t about hugging trees, it’s about getting you off of my TV. Also your last name is ridiculously hard to spell. Go away.

• I am not a doctor, I’m really not even sure what physiologically means

WTF is up with Fall? And by that I mean when did the season of autumn become an event? Did I miss something? My daughter has had her face painted EVERY weekend since Labor Day.

When I was a kid we each got a pumpkin for carving, we hung some Indian corn on our door, we spent one day trick or treating and then we hunkered down and waited for Christmas. Now it seems that suddenly the entire months of September, October and November have become a giant pumpkin eating hayride of harvest festivities.

And what really makes me stay up at night* is what came first, did I miss some kind of universal change in humanity when sometime in the mid aughts everyone woke up craving pumpkin flavored pastries and the opportunity to pick their own apples? Or did one group of farmers accidently plant so many pumpkins** one year that they were forced to conspire with bakeries and Starbucks across the country to get rid of their product?

Either way it happened I am fascinated by it and how everyone seems to be on board. Nary a weekend has gone by where someone hasn’t texted me with “you want to go pick some apples on Saturday?” and the thing is I like to go apple picking, I like being out in an orchard when the trees are turning and the smell of apple ciders in the air and all of that, but it’s really easy to pick apples ( I mean on a small scale, I certainly wouldn’t want to do it for a living) while meandering down rows of loaded apple trees dropping those within easy arms reach inside of a paper Trader Joe’s bag I can gather enough apples to get my family of three through the winter in about 10-15 minutes. So why do I need to go apple picking every single weekend? Maybe I can set up some kind of 2^nd run apple stand for people who are too lazy to get in their cars and drive to an orchard to lift up their arms? I don’t know maybe I’m on to something here, but I feel like the people who invented grocery stores might have already figured out this business model.

Also, while we are on the subject of seasonal festivals, why just fall? Why not have spring festivals and summer festivals and maybe one smack dab in the middle of Winter, I feel like that would really help people get through February if the entire month was devoted to “Mid Winter Fiesta!” we could use the old apples that never gotten eat from all of the apple picking in fall to make mulled apple cider, or maybe we could just throw them at snowmen as we primal scream to let out our frustration that its only fucking February (with sparklers, cause nothing says Mid Winter Fiesta like apple chucking and sparklers).

*This is a lie, nothing keeps me up at night (except maybe an ill timed double espresso) I’m so tired that by 10:00 rolls around I couldn’t stay awake even if the house caught on fire and I was forced to leave. I’d probably just stay in bed shouting “tell me family I love them!”

** This is easier than you would think. Watermelon and pumpkin vines look a lot alike. This past spring I planted both of them in my garden and around the first of August my husband excitedly told me one day that our first watermelon was growing big and nearly ready to be picked. A few weeks later he picked and (fortunately) before cutting into it examined the underside and realized that it was orange, it wasn’t a watermelon at all but a not-yet-ripe pumpkin. See, if it can happen to us it can happen to anyone.

I have spent a life time answering stupid questions, perhaps it’s because of my career path and all the years I worked in customer service, but now that I am a librarian it’s gotten 100 times worse. People come to me to ask me all manner or bizarre and often times droll questions (i.e. “what’s a synapsis?” “what’s a thumb drive for?”) and it makes me wonder what they are teaching in high school these days.

But, last week I got one that made me do that double look “Whaaa?” face. A student was in the library buying hair extensions on-line when she turns to me and asks, “How come they are still making iPhones if that guy is dead?”

Hm. What?

So, I saved the retention report I was working on and took a moment to explain how Apple is a huge corporation that still employs many people who are working on manufacturing and developing the iPhone. I tell her that it wasnt just Steve Jobs sitting in his dining room constructing each phone by hand.

A look of pure shock & revelation came across her face and says “Oh, I never thought of that before I thought it was just him doing it.”

It makes me want to revive my love of calling random strangers and look up the number to the Philadelphia Public School system and call them and ask them where they went wrong.