Halloween, Where are You?

I don't especially appreciate being made a fool by anyone or anything, especially a calendar and its annual tricks it plays on me. I try to outsmart time by preping myself well in advance for changes of years, ages and holidays.

This year, in the spirit of unintentional self-sabotage, I went into overdrive and began missing timely landmarks altogether. By the time my 23rd birthday came, I had been telling people and myself I was 23 for so long to get used to the idea, I thought I had turned 24. I'm still trying to get over that one. I'm 23, I'm 23, I'm 24. Oops.

Since my character requires me to continually make the same mistakes over, I have been telling myself it is Christmas season for so long to be sure I not miss it when it actually comes, I keep forgetting to acknowledge Halloween at all. (Put the light sabers on clearance already!)


But since my dad's character requires him to solve all my (and the world's) problems before I even tell him about them*, he sent me this photo from his phone of his and my mom's afternoon walk today (bless them):

If my mom's purple shirt, black sleeves, and orange cardi don't put me in the spirit of All Hallow's Eve**, then nothing will. But don't worry Dad, it does. Happy Halloween.

... it's 2010, it's 2010, it's 2010.

*See also complexes for which I will find myself single at 40.

**Thanks for teaching me about this, Hocus Pocus

Hold the Phone

Wednesday just got a little better.  

Found out that it is (was...) this girl's birthday today (yesterday):

Happy Birthday Rachel Cook! (Am I too late?)

1.May we never meet in person (...again.... because I think that happened once) lest you find out how boring I actually am. 

2.May you teach me some day how to glow like that in all of my pictures.

3.May people who read this think we have a creepy online relationship.

4.May your fears about number three be eased because I'll just tell my mom it's not true

5.Most importantly, may this year be as glowy and poised as the last seem to have been!

Thanks for reading, Rachel, and happy birthday!

I like Your 'Socks'

I'm sort of having a love affair with each day of the week for totally different reasons, and no, I don't think they know about each other. But more on that later.

Wednesdays particularly weaken my knees because instead of going for a run on my lunch break, I go to the oasis of groceries: Smith's Marketplace. I love it here at this time of day because there are two groups of shoppers and two groups only: those who are on their lunch break, and those who are on their life-at-the-retirement-home break. Or as I like to call them: cadavers on Rascals.

The dynamic causes a ferocious climate around the store due to agendas. Group A would like to get out as soon as possible to move on with life, and group B (for obvious reasons) would not. And can not.

I'm indifferent because my main objective at Smith's is just to eat as many grapes as I can before they are weighed and paid for at the counter. But I feel as though I will be forced to choose sooner or later, and I'm afraid I'll have to turn my back on my fellow lunch-breakers. Because the last thing a lunch-breaker said to me was, "excuse me" so she could better be heard when barking, "hurry up, Buddy!" to Cute Corpse counting his dollar bills at check-out; and the last thing one of the cadavers said to me was, "I like your socks!" And I love it when old people refer to things like tights as things like socks. It's just endearing.

Sorry lunch-breakers. I respect you for your efficiency, but I'll probably be hanging in the incontinence section deliberating patterned tights and the ethics of eating candy out of the bulk bins for the next hour.




**Illustration/photograph by an ex-lover of mine. You don't mind, do you sweetheart?

Dear John(ny)

I was four years old when my parents told me they were expecting their next and last baby. I remember being so repulsed by the whole idea that I swore off completely all the making out I had been doing with my three-year-old neighbor, Michael. Lest I find myself wrapped up in the same kind of "trouble."*

It wasn't a good start for Johnny. Before he was even born he had already robbed me of both my befitting role as youngest, and my pre-mature sex life. Thus the resentment roller coaster was born. On October 12, 1990 (1991?).

Resentment waned and morphed into amusement when he picked up the endearing habit of putting socks into his pants as a tail and growling at strangers in the grocery store. In third grade I wrote a poem about it and entered it into the young author's competition. When I lost, it was time for my muse to become the object of my resentment again. (Had I kept my rightful role of youngest, we'd know that blaming others for my personal rejection is just an unavoidable character flaw obtained from my birth order.)

Resentment probably flared back up again at 15 when he started dating a girl named Maggie born on June 16 (hey that's me!), but then burned back off again when he managed to be the only teenager in this decade to get arressted for stealing music by taking a CD from Best Buy in the greatest age of online music piracy. Since, my winning approval has been sealed by similarly cute little stunts I just can't help but h-e-a-r-t.

It's been a significant stretch since I've last resented the little compact disc, birth order bandit, and perhaps I'm adult enough to say Johnny, two thumbs up.  Welcome to adulthood.  If you weren't already there.  Again, I'm not sure.

*I think finding out you're pregnant at four and 40 are probably equally as horrifying... And insulting to nature.

Let's Stay Together

I find it appropriate that my love for my new Costco membership also comes in bulk and can't be found at Wal-mart.  

They even use my preferred type of photograph: B&W, heavily pixilated.  You know me so well...

This is the beginning of something that matters.