9 posts tagged “life is funny”
A few of you may have already heard this story, but I thought of it again this morning and feel it is a story worth sharing again and again. The kind of story that gets passed from generation to generation, gathered round the hearth on a wintry evening. Heartwarming and such. Listen carefully.
I used to work at a local music store and warehouse. The store was open until midnight, and I happened to be working the late shift one night on the eve of a Snoop Doggy Dogg show in town. Now picture this: I am at the counter with my co-workers Mandy & Ian, just chatting and hanging out, as it is about 10pm and no one is in the store. A large black van pulls up and about 7 guys climb out and amble into the store. Two of them come up to the counter, a couple of them start walking around the store, 2 are standing outside the door, and one stands outside the van, which is pretty much parked on the sidewalk. (Looking back, I'm pretty sure everyone but the 2 at the counter were bodyguards or something similar. Anyway.)
The 2 men that came up to the counter introduce themselves and say that they are in town with Snoop Dogg for the show. They ask us for help in selecting some jams that the ladies will like in case Snoop or anyone else wants to get busy while he was in town (their words, not mine). Why they did not bring their own music to get busy to, I do not know. Maybe they were just trying to support local business. Nice of them. Anyway. Mandy and I walk them around the store, selecting ridiculous CDs, for instance, Barry White and Johnny Mathis. The men are clearly amused by us and end up buying about 50 CDs.
Co-worker Ian has to excuse himself to go around the corner and drop onto the floor in a fit of laughter at us, having been stiffling the giggles the whole time. Mandy & I start a membership at the music store for the men under first name: Big, last name: Daddy, so they can receive a few of the CDs free (not that they needed it).
And now, for the grand finale: while we are ringing up their purchases--which is taking a while, considering--one of the men starts talking me up. Let me describe him for you: tall, skinny as a rail, and the spitting image of Snoop Dogg were Snoop Dogg aged by about 40 years. Dressed all pimped out--baggy clothes, big chains, the whole deal. He previously introduced himself as Snoop's uncle. Anyway. Starts talking about this and that, the show, travelling. And then he leans in. Invites me back to the hotel. And in the best pick up line ever, tells me, a curvy size 16 at the time, "Baby, you know that thickness is my weakness."
I politely decline the invite. Mandy's face is red. Ian is off in the distance howling with laughter. The men leave the store. Mandy and I promptly fall into a heap of hysterics on the floor.
The end.
I hate the telephone. I don't own a cell phone, and given my druthers, I would not own a land line either. But because this is the 21st century, society deems that we must have one in order to communicate with the outside world. I fight back with my caller i.d. and never really calling anyone unless it is a true necessity. (It is not anything personal, mind you; I love talking face to face, email, and writing paper letters. I don't hate people, I just hate the telephone.)
But anyhow. Lately we've been getting these calls: caller i.d. says, "Private Name, Private Number." I don't answer them. I figure, if you don't want to tell me who you are, I don't want to talk to you. And whoever it is never leaves a message on our machine. But poor Kelly. Poor sweet, talk-a-holic, phone-loving Kelly. She will answer every single call and talk to everyone. And one day a few weeks ago, she answered Mr. Private Name, Private Number's call. And do you know what he said to her?
"What are you wearing?"
(Um, yes, seriously. I thought that only happened in old movies.)
And so she said nothing, and hung up, and we laughed at the creepy ridiculousness of it for a good week or so.
But here is the creepier part. Private Name, Private Number has been calling quite a bit lately. Usually 2-3 times a day, sometimes at midnight or 2 a.m. Not okay. If we pick it up, we usually get silence, or a click. If we don't pick it up, he (I assume) listens to our voices on the answering machine message, then hangs up. Ick.
So I've been making sure our doors are locked lately, and drawing our curtains, and we are going to change our answering machine message to the generic man's voice that comes on the machine. But this fear feels silly. Maybe I should just start answering Mr. Private Name, Private Number's calls with, "Does your mother know that you do this?" The poor dude probably just needs someone to snap him out of his creepy compulsion.
We woke up this morning to about 3 inches of snow on everything. And what's more, Portland decided that it was going to have sub-zero wind chill temperatures and a frozen layer of rain on the sidewalks beneath the snow.
I AM NOT AMUSED.
And I'd just like to clarify that when I said a few posts ago that I was ready for winter, what I meant was, um, I am not ready for winter. I think I was thinking of like, 35 degree weather and a charming dusting of snow. But then again, as I said before, this is Maine. I guess I should expect this by now. Ugh. The countdown to spring begins.
In cute and slightly hilarious news, I came home to find a little package in my mailbox from Ms. Diaz's old employer. I thought, Oh, That Anna, She Probably Swiped Some Letterhead Before She Left The Job, and I laughed and proceeded to open it, thinking it was from her. But alas, it appears that once again, my "winning things through radio contests" mojo has come through for me:
Like the proper senior citizens that we are, Kelly & I often listen to the local oldies radio station. A few months ago, I entered our anniversary into the "Anniversary Couple of the Week" contest, and then promptly forgot about it. (So you know what's coming, right?) And the package was not, indeed, from Ms. Diaz, but was instead from the radio station, notifying us that we had won the contest for the week! Oh my God, I'm like 85, getting so excited about this. So they announced our names on the radio (which we missed) and sent us a crapload of gift certificates for local businesses. And we were rather amused by the certificate that they sent declaring us as winners, listing us as "Mr. and Mrs. Banbury." We can't decide who is who. Hee.
I love straight people. I really do. Some of them are down with the gay and just "get it." A lot more of them don't. Some of them try so, so hard to be okay and/or inclusive concerning gay folks. (I've especially seen an increase in this in the last couple years, which is amazing and beautiful.) But when it comes down to the end of the day, it's still pretty hard to be queer in a straight world. Sometimes, just when I think things are going swell, I'm reminded that there's still a lot of progress to be made in the world.
Take this week, for instance. A benefits person at my work asked me to correct a form concerning Kelly by filling out the "dependent child" section of the form. I managed to restrain myself from replying smarmily and managed to reply calmly, "Kelly is not my dependent child, she is my domestic partner, as it is clearly marked on the form. That is why I did not fill out the dependent child section of the form." [I am already taxed several thousand a year on the benefits I receive for her marked as "taxable income" on my paycheck because we can't be legally married. Don't humiliate me further my making me mark her on a form as my "dependent child," you idiot.]
I called my sister on Sunday to wish her a happy birthday. We spoke about many things, one of which was her possibly having children with her new husband. (Oh my God, don't even get me started on that one.) During the conversation, she mentioned something about my mom saying that she was hesitant to move out of the state where they live now because she knew that luck would have it that one of my two straight, legally married siblings that live in said state would start having children as soon as she moved, and then she'd never have grandchildren in her daily life. Um, HELLO, what about the fact that if they move, they will most likely be moving closer to K & I, and we've stated multiple times that we're planning on having children and we're excited for them to have grandparents close by. It's like my parents (and K's, too) just don't understand that we're going to have children, and when we do, they're going to be the cutest f-ing kids ever. Seriously.
So anyway, these were only a couple of the incidents that occurred this week that caused me to question the progress of the queer rights movement in the world. *Le Sigh*. They say it takes 7 generations from the start of a civil rights movement for a population to see full equality. I guess by the time our great, great grandkids are born, they may have a fair shot in the world, barring any circus freak physical features or any other Bushes residing in the White House.
I thought for sure that I was headed for the looney bin during the last couple of weeks. Things were going along really nicely for the last several months, then all of a sudden it was like BAM, and life really knocked me flat on my tuchus. I was lagging in school, crying all the time, calling out of work, and fighting with K constantly over nothing (I think we actually had a fight last week about whether or not K should be allowed to leave glasses of soda out on the counter. It's a long story, but regardless, it was a ridiculous thing to have a fight over.).
So I'm trying to make amends. I firmly believe that there are just times when the universe blasts your expectations to bits and the best thing to do is just do what you can to pick up the pieces that are salvageable and move on. So that's what I'm working on now.
1. I dropped my statistics class. I just wasn't getting it, and I had a teacher that was so new that she had no concept of pace or workload. She would seriously assign 20 hours of homework every week, and it was sucking up all the study time I had for other classes. I feel good about this, even though my mother continues to try shame me into thinking that I will never graduate from college.
2. I started reading a book for nursing students about surviving nursing school. It has study tips and advice from other nursing students and I'm trying to let it coerce me into having a positive outlook and getting pepped up. This kind of seems silly, but it's helping me a lot. Because I was so ready to just quit school in general and become a baby-makin' housewife for the rest of my life. Not. Kidding.
3. K and I took some time (actually, she forced me into it, but it worked out for the best) to clean up the house, get rid of some stuff, and put things in generally better order than they were. It definetly feels better to have a clean house than a clutter-filled one (although it still needs a lot of work).
4. We are going shopping for new clothes, shoes, etc. this weekend. Besides the actual act of retail therapy, it also always makes me feel better to have shiny new clothes to wear.
5. We are going on a date this weekend to drive/bike around and see the fall leaves. This makes me happy. And it makes me happy to be spending quality time with K instead of just spending the few precious hours we per week that we have together vegging on the couch and staring at the tv.
So that is what is happening in my life since things fell apart. I am trying to take things one day at a time and enjoy the little positive things that make my heart happy. When I clear out the junk and really take a look at life, I realize that there is a lot to be thankful for.
Sometimes to get through my endless Anatomy & Physiology homework, I pretend to be a member of the Grey's Anatomy cast in my head. (Now, if only I were as cute as Izzie or Cristina or Meredith. Hmm.)
Seriously, people, it's sad, but it gets me through my 20 hours of memorization each week on blood pH and cell organelles. And the new season starts on Thursday, so that might just get me through the semester. Whee!
I've been swinging back and forth wildly lately between the mindsets of "life is fabulous" / "life stinks." So most of the time I'm neutral about life, and I just kind of do my thing and take it day by day. But also I have these days where I'm either manic about everything and I'm just bouncing off the walls with happiness and waxing poetic about how wonderful life is. And in turn, I have the days like yesterday (night), where everything that could possibly go wrong does, and I am miserable and cranky and left standing in the proverbial rainstorm with no umbrella.
Ugh. The meat of last night's misery was the statistics class I am taking. The teacher is about 12 and just spews through pages and pages of pertinent info in mere minutes, then lets her inexperience get the best of her and lets the class boss her around. I ordered my textbook online 3 weeks ago and it hasn't arrived yet. Several people who have been asses to me at my job are in the class (and I'm required to do group work with them). Also, the only student who has ever made me cry at my job is in the class, and while I am no longer intimidated by her (it was when I first started this job), she is just nasty, bitter, and mean to everyone in the class and constantly loudly interrupts other students and the teacher. (I am, however, able to take her less seriously, now that I've seen her sad attempts at being cute by posting pictures of herself in an outdoor shower and in a bikini on myspace. Ha.)
Anyway, I would just drop the class, but I've decided to stick it out. After all, I've paid for the class and the book (even if it hasn't arrived yet), and I have just as much of a right to get the damn class over with as any of those schmucks.
But still, your suggestions on humor to deal with the situation, if you'd like to share them, would be much obliged...
What time period would you have lived in, if you could have lived at any time?
How weird; I was just going to write about this the other day.
I am obsessed with the 1930's, 40's, and 50's. I pester my grandma with questions about what it was like when she was growing up, I have boxes full of reproduction and real vintage fabric from that era, and I drool over dresses and clothing from that time period. Sometimes I fantasize about being a 1950's housewife and wearing aprons and fixing fabulous suppers and having a bunch of little kids running around in the cul-de-sac wearing cowboy hats and riding stick horses. And it makes me happy. I think that it is perhaps the simple, worry-free, Norman Rockwell type image that I have in my head of it all that makes me want to revisit the time period. In reality, I know that it was pretty much like life as it is now, except with more social stigma and less civil rights and cuter clothing standards.
There is this guy at my office who seriously seems like he stepped straight out of the 1950s. He wears a suit and a porkpie hat to work every day (everyone else wears jeans or business casual), had a flat top hair cut up until a couple months ago, keeps his office sparkling clean & neat, and always talks and greets people so cordially, like everything's just swell. He is a pretty cool dude. I guess I could just take a lesson from him and live in the now, but keep the good things from that time.
