Lunch Hour

The mall near where I work can be summed up as the answer to this question: “Where can I go when I need an outfit, I have $12, and I don’t even want to spend all of that”. Naturally I hate it, and yet when given a slow day at the office I find myself darkening its doors. Today was one such day. And it continued to deliver on being legitimately the weirdest.

As I pulled into the parking lot I found it harder than usual to find a spot. This isn’t so much due to the fact that it’s Christmas time, but more so due to the fact that school busses were taking up the spots.

 I’m sorry, is there a field trip to the mall happening today? Is that real life? Did some kid have to go home and get his mom to sign a permission slip and give him $5 for his sack lunch so he could go on a field trip to JC Penny? What school is this? The only justification I could see behind this is taking all the slackers on a trip and ghost-of-Christmas-futuring them about where they are headed career-wise if they don’t shape up.

As I’m walking through the mall I walk PAST a disgracefully embarrassing shoe store called Cathy Jean. What’s your target demographic when you’re naming a store after someone’s aunt? Aunts. That’s who. 

To be clear, I’m not in this store, and yet a lady FLAGS me down and asks me to help her pick a shoe out. Her exact words were “Can you help me? I’m trying to go for an Eva Longoria look and don’t know what shoe to pick”. The only answer I could muster is “I don’t personally know Ms. Longoria but I’d venture to guess that the 70% off blow out sale at Cathy Jean isn’t a target rich environment for her shoe collection. But that beige kitten heel will do.” How is that a real thing that happened.

I then make my way to Sephora because I’m “technically” out of foundation but it’s also “technically” my birthday month and I want my free birthday gift. The line is equivalent to being at the airport the day before Thanksgiving and not having sky priority or TSA pre check like some unknown hobo. 

When I finally get to the front the cashier is like “Is this all you’re buying?!?!” as if to say that I’m crazy for standing in such a line for this small purchase. Excuse me to the moon and back that the Lord and I share a birthday month. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t ask for any of it. And quite frankly I enjoy exercising quite possibly the only self-control I possess and not buying all the do-dads that your store places like bait in the line to distract me. You know where I’m about to not exercise said self-control? Great Wraps in the food court when they ask me if I want to add curly fries.

The food court is the loneliest place on earth. Literally everyone is sitting at a table by themselves eating Chinese food or a great wrap that she said no cheese on and she’s obviously going to the gym later and not eating dinner tonight so it’s no big deal if she gets fries. You know who very much does not belong in the food court, 9 days before Christmas, barreling though like she’s been set on fire? A blind lady. And yet there she is. Walking at such an uncomfortable pace that I start to question if maybe she’s actually a speed walker and she just likes pushing a walking stick in front of her. I am so insanely uncomfortable with what she’s doing and also with how much of a Nostradamus I am because lo and behold she jackknifes an empty chair. 

Of course you did. I only wish you t-boned the sample lady so I could watch all the samples cartoonishly fly into the air. And that’s my cue to head back to work.

School is the Weirdest

Given my recent foray/cannonball into this whole “kids exist and not just at the grocery store with their tiny shopping carts” thing I’m doing these days, it’s gotten me reminiscing about my days in elementary school.

(What in the actual world has this poor woman gotten herself into. Literally stop)

And, since I’m technically a grown up, I’ve started to realize that the “normal” things from 3^rd grade were in no way normal.

Art Class

Every child had the luxury of expanding their artistic minds for 45 minutes a week in art class. This expansion almost always involved a repurposed baby food jar with “paste” in it. What in the actual world was paste? What’s happening there? Is this driven by budget cuts? We have to take a post-apocalyptic approach to art supplies? Homemade glue was keeping this school afloat? We all had it too. It could not have tasted weirder and before you judge me for tasting it – everybody tasted it. It came in a food jar. It was arguably edible.

The most astonishing and intriguing part of art class was the kiln. Don’t you DARE touch the kiln. Don’t touch it, don’t go near it, don’t even look at it. You know what? Don’t even say kiln. Because a bunch of 53 pound 7 year olds have the ability to destroy a ceramic oven that is so heavy it had to be brought into the school with a crane. All I remember about it was that it was massive and it took eleven full days to bake my “Chinese pot” that I made for my mom, during which time the entire classroom was blazing hot at all times.

The Cafeteria

               Why do we look back on our times in the cafeteria with such fondness? I remember LOVING getting a school lunch. Cardboard flavored milk, a rectangle of pizza that is so undercooked the dough is still raw, those weird Lorna Doone cookies with the holes in them that you put on your finger like it’s a ring and eat. The cup of ice cream with the wooden “spoon” that was just a splinter factory for your tongue but you didn’t care because, ice cream. I flipping loved all of it.

I also really loved when the cafeteria would get too loud. We would all see it coming. The teachers would start by standing at the front of their class’s table and making threats they couldn’t legally keep. Then the scariest teacher would stand on the stage and scream that “the 4^th grade class down the hall is taking a test and they can hear us! This is not how young ladies and gentlemen behave”. As if an 8 year old’s compassion for other children taking standardized testing was going to be what stopped the ruckus. Then the best part. For WHATEVER reason, like Alzheimer’s patients, teachers forgot what happened last time, and decide that the only possible way to quiet the crowd is by SHUTTING OFF ALL THE LIGHTS.

Which was a jackpot. Every single child knew what that meant. It meant you could scream at the top of your lungs and not get caught. And there was always that one girl who legitimately cried about it. I just remember being like “You have got to get it together, you’re never going to make it in the real world, Tiffany”.

Presidential Fitness Test

I hated this. Mainly because I was above average in just about every way you could measure a 7 year old, except I had the flexibility of an 86 year old woman who just had her hip replaced and my arms were just for show – no actual strength associated with those noodles. So the V-Sit crushed me. 

To the point where I would be willing to snap my hamstring in order to reach whatever threshold I had to reach to achieve greatness and would still miss it to the extent that my mom had to sign a permission slip to allow me to be so inflexible. Also, pull ups. Come. On. They’d be like “Ok Ainsley, you have to do 3 pull ups”.  No, by all means. Let’s attempt that. I couldn’t even effectively hang from the pull up bar for 10 seconds. Much less pull my actual self up and over it 3 times. This was just a slap in the face that no matter what, I was physically inferior and this fact is confirmed by the President of the United States of America.

Why I'm Indoorsy

Every year I get an itch to pretend to be outdoorsy. And by outdoorsy I mean not just drink on patios outside, but take it a step further. This usually translates into some version of me and a body of water. This year, it was white water rafting.

If you want to go do it for yourself, here’s how this is going to shake out for you. You are going to show up at the place with your groupon, pay the additional “river fee” (that can’t be a real thing) and be pointed into the direction of the “safety barn”. There you will put on a life vest that someone just peeled off of their body and hung there 2 minutes prior. This personal flotation device has only ever been damp since the day it was manufactured. It has never ever once dried out. 

You will then put on a helmet that, again, someone just took off their head from returning from an earlier trip. To the point where sometimes they just hand it right to you and mock the faux “these have been sprayed clean” façade that the company is trying to put forth.

It’s then time to load up onto a school bus that is exclusively sized for elementary schoolers and ride to the drop off point. Your bus driver is a critical component of this trip. First of all, don’t think about how someone becomes a river rafting bus driver. Don’t think about life’s twists and turns that lands someone there. What you need to confirm before getting on is “does this guy have suspenders on?” Because if you ever, EVER, get on a bus and the bus driver doesn’t have those on, then they’re not a real bus driver. They’re an impostor bus driver and you are going to crash and die. 

The alternative is a large african american lady who is kind of mean but its for your own protection. She is the only suitable replacement to the guy with suspenders. This goes for all buses by the way, not just river buses. This is my bus-advice.

Once you’re at the drop off point you break into raft groups and get assigned your guide. Your guide will either have a legendary beard, a smattering of hippy tattoos, nipple rings, dread locks, all of the above, or you get the guy who has been doing this for 40 years and he goes by the name Reverend Dean because he “baptizes” you in the river – AKA everyone always falls out on his raft. Super.

If I had to assign a theme to white water rafting it’s “You’re going to die”. I don’t know what kind of Einstein’s these river guides are used to working with, but they spend 30 minutes giving you advice on how to do things that I’ve managed to master since I was born. At one point the guide told us that if you are bobbing up and down in the water, breathe on the up-bobs. I suggested that maybe we just let our instincts kick in, he told me that would not be sufficient.

After all this life-changing survival advice, you are left with about a minute to coordinate the rowing. There will be someone in your group who has never done this nor has he even spent one second of his life thinking about how rowing works. He will sit behind you. He will, in essence, play sword fight with you the entire time, hitting your paddle with his on every stroke, rendering both of you useless. Your raft will paddle in circles.

The circle paddling is not ideal, since every single rock in the water has a nickname like “face crusher” and “grumpy” and “widowmaker”. Who gets to name these rocks? Clearly not the nail polish naming people, that’s for sure. And as you careen around a liquid version of the doldrums you are warned things like “if you fall out here swim left or you will get sucked into a vortex and die and I can’t save you”. You have to try and hear that message between the continuous **whack** sounds of the guy behind you still hitting your paddle every effing time.

This rock was just called "murder"

Somehow you manage to make it down to the end without you and everyone you know dying. At this point you kind of wish Jeff had fallen out and not swam left, but he’s still behind you, super proud he made it too. Good job Jeff. Then you pile back onto Mrs. Frizzle’s drizzle bus and drip your way back to the safety barn to hand your gear over to the next victim. You’ve been pretty jacked about the fact that somewhere along the way your picture was taken!

Don’t be jacked about this. 1. You look huge in every picture. 2. You have 12 double chins 3. You are terrified. There is photographic evidence of Jeff hitting you in the face with his paddle but at least he’s got a HUGE grin on his face. Glad you had a blast, Jeff, I really am. They will allow you to buy the pictures but they won’t allow you to pay them to insure that they never see the light of day again, which I find rude and quite frankly a business opportunity missed.

At least you did it. You made it. You’re super well rounded and have checked “do something outdoors this summer” off your list. See you next year Reverend. You and your nipple rings made my day.

People - Volume 3

I have written several posts about people whose existence is beyond my comprehension, but quite frankly I haven't scratched the surface. So here's another stab at identifying these people, in an attempt to make sure that I am not alone in finding these people to be full blown pests.

The Speed Limit Sheriff

These people consider the speed limit THE LIMIT. As in NOT-TO-EXCEED. As in, there is zero reason why you should be expected to go that fast. And by "that fast" I mean 35 miles per hour. Not only are these people just not in a hurry to be anywhere, ever, but their stance on acceleration/deceleration is "If you can feel it, you're doing it too fast". I was behind one of these human-nightmares today on my way to work, and all I wanted to do was walk up to their car (since they were going slowly enough for me to catch up to them on foot) and ask them "Do you have cupcakes?". Because not spilling a dozen cupcakes is the only reason I can think of to drive like this.

The Normal Clothes Gym-goer

I could legitimately write an entire blog about the types of people at the gym. Talk about people watching. Especially at the YMCA where I go because I like a bargain on my gym membership and I like getting the village people song stuck in my head 3-5 days a week. Inevitably, at any gym, there is someone in there who looks like the fact that they are even there snuck up on them. Full pair of jeans, polo shirt, tennis shoes purchased at Costco for $19. Just pumpin' away at the leg press - 7.5 pounds.

Did you know you were going to be coming here? Do you personally like sweating in jeans? These people are also the ones you will find on the stationary bike being almost completely stationary themselves. To the point where they can hold and read a hardback book without it moving. Way to leave it all out on the field you guys.

The People Who Turn Everything into a Guilt Trip

I personally am obsessed with the fact that people do this. But the obsession I'm talking about is more similar to the fascination we all had when we saw the show "Hoarders" for the first time. Just constant - How did you get there?! I'm talking about when an internet sensation like a momma cat snuggling her baby cat or a blue and black dress that is clearly blue and black and not gold and white sweeps the nation, someone will inevitably make a social media post that shames everyone for talking about such a trivial topic when "people are getting beheaded by ISIS" or "Ebola killed a dog". How. How did you take it there?! This is the 2nd iteration of "Eat your peas, there are kids starving in Africa". Is me eating the peas making the starving people feel better? Or should I be sending the peas over? I simply love the logic here and I LOVE how many people are like "OH AGREED!!" when someone does it.

 I am not ashamed that I definitely looked at that blue and black dress. The only thing to be ashamed about is if you thought it was white and gold.

The People Who Use Ringtones as Chinese Water Torture

This. Is pure murder. There is a certain someone that I work with who is SUPER pumped about his/her ring tone. They have had the same one for 4 years. They see no need to have it set to anything but ear-bleedingly loud. It's really kitchy. It goes off dozens of times a day. It is maddening.

When I emailed said person asking them to consider, I don't know, vibrate when at the office, the list of reasons I got as to why that's absurd was incredible:
1. I'm really important and need to be reached at all times
2. It needs to be loud in case I'm in a loud environment and I otherwise couldn't hear it - the decibel level of a jumbo jet engine should suffice
3. This is how my family reaches me, what if they have an emergency and can't get in touch with me because I didn't hear my phone.
4. Why do you want my child to be dead in a ditch and can't call me to say goodbye?!?

The best way to combat this person? Download their ringtone. Set it for your text messages, emails, calendar notifications... everything. Set it to loud. Stand as closely to them as possible at all times. They will in no way notice what you're doing but operating at this level of passive aggressive is purely entertaining.