Suzy Says

You know you had a bad day at work when:

– You don’t even have time to complain about it until the following day, your every waking minute and atom of energy on the day in question being completely sucked up by work.

– By 8 a.m., you have had the following sartorial embarrassment: you move the water glass which you are holding and which you have recently used from your hand and hold it against your chest to answer the phone*, resulting in a smear of lipstick on your left breast, close to your heart, which, like the Grinch’s, is three sizes too small. You repair to the ladies’ room and scrub it off your pale apple green linen top, but are left with a damp spot for the next half hour, looking suspiciously like the aftermath of a physically impossible lactaction accident. *shudder*

– You work almost 12 hours, yet your to do list is as long, if not longer, than it was at the beginning of the day. The truth about being a grown-up, or a convincing facsimile thereof, appears with blinding and sudden clarity: it’s an endless procession of obligations, personal and professional, and you’ll never get caught up. You do not realize this when you are, say, 18, and all you want is to grow up, thinking it to be a paradise of doing whatever you want instead of what your parents and teachers want you to, but in fact teachers are merely replaced by bosses, and you and your parents switch roles with you as you get older, and it’s a lot less fun than you would think.

– You have dozens of unanswered e-mails, not having time for such things. When my niece takes a few days to get back to me, it’s because she’s having so much fun. For me, it’s the opposite.

– You don’t get paid overtime, since you supposedly already make enough money, even though you can’t afford to rent a parking space for your car, and the monthly mortgage payment on your one bedroom apartment with neighbors above and below you and without benefit of parking space would shock and horrify anyone other than a fellow San Franciscan or a New Yorker.

Added to which it was a record-breaking 90 degrees when I finally escaped from the treadmill. I hate the heat, and if I wanted real weather, I wouldn’t live here.

I can’t believe that I’ll have to do it all over again on Monday. Why can’t we win the lottery, which is almost $50 million? Then I could finally achieve my life-long ambition of being idle rich. At last, something I’d actually be good at!

* How I long to be like the heroine in Salinger’s “A Good Day for Bananafish”, of whom the great J.D. writes, “She was girl, who for a ringing phone, dropped exactly nothing.”