Tuesdays with Murad

Chloe, having Tuesdays off from classes as it were, came to visit me at my lunch break and brought me chicken curry. Then we went to see the British library, which has among many other things in its treasure trove of relics the Magna Carta and the Gutenberg Bible.

The fact that we were able to see those wonders of history on a whim is my only comfort in the face of missing Snowpocalypse 2010 back home in Pittsburgh. While, that and the fact that I rode a red double-decker bus to work today. And everything else.

I actually didn’t have any choice in riding the bus to work since the tubes were absolutely abysmal this morning. Go on and shut down the Circle line, take the District if you must, but if you do all that AND abscond with the Hammersmith and City you’d damn well better not take the Piccadilly and Bakerloo too. Fun fact: you can take all of those brightly color-coded lines to basically the same places, with a little maneuvering. I take so many trains in so many directions that I’m often left with a minor panic attack when the peculiarly Andromeda-Strain-esque voice of the speaker system announces a stop other than the one I’d anticipated when I’d forgotten where I was going or how I was trying to get there.

Having finally completed updating the PR databases I’ve moved on to combing through every issue of some several dozen publications for traces of Murad media coverage. So much fun at first but eventually they all started to blur together into a hazy mess of celebrity gossip and feverish consumerism. I’ve picked a fine time to develop a taste for shoes and hand bags and eye creams, now when for the first time in years I don’t actually have any source of income, all this interning being for academic credit as it were.

For a moment it looked like I might be carrying a permanent reminder of my time at Murad UK embedded in the palm of my left hand in the form of a bizarrely accidental splinter from the warehouse door. I didn’t mind terribly and pointed out to Chloe that at least this way she’d have a way of identifying the real me if and when I was replaced with a robot clone, but Rachel displayed a somewhat unnatural delight in digging into my skin and managed to remove most of it. She also braids hair exceedingly well and usually has chocolate with her. I want her to be my nanny.