Bitches Brew

At work there are four young women who sit together at breaks, poring over celeb magazines and commenting on the stars' sordid lives.

One of the girls, who is physically quite beautiful, has the bitchiest expression I have seen since high school. I mean, the evil nemesis of my senior year, Jaime Lambert, could only occasionally muster such disdain, and she was really working at it.

I walk into the break room with my usual smile and this woman, technically my co-worker because we are locked in the same building together each day, looks me up and down with this haughty expression of total disapproval that must have been honed in junior high and high school cliques. It is a perfect sneer. The Mean Girls in "Mean Girls" could only hope to look so snooty.

I really felt like giving her a slap. I haven't seen anyone who so obviously deserves it in forever. Of course I can't - I work for the kind of corporation that is so huge it has whole processes and departments just to deal with inter-employee disputes.

So I have to do something short of physical violence, it appears. Since I have to deal with this treatment at least three times a day, I have tried different strategies.

I kept smiling. But that somehow felt like I wasn't doing enough.

I tried glaring back at her. I practiced my Hard Girl glare. That actually worked a little. Now she doesn't stare anymore or leaves when she sees me coming. But it didn't feel good to me.

But now, since I am a kind and enlightened spiritual master-in-training I have decided that my job is this: do nothing. Or keep doing what I was doing before she entered the picture. In the grand scheme of things, what is this poor pathetic little sneerer to me? Except blog fodder, LOL.