I Hate This Part

Every fall our school does this what I did over my summer vacation slide show, and we're all supposed to submit pictures of ourselves committing whatever wacky, school-appropriate hijinks we committed over the summer months.

And I hate it.

It's not that I have any issue with looking at the pictures of my colleagues holding up grandbabies and real big fish, etc.; that's actually kinda fun. It's the having my picture taken - and then put on display - part that bothers me.

You see, I am the least photogenic person on Earth.

I do not believe that I am inherently ugly, per se; it's just that my finer qualities do not translate to photographs well. So, here I am, a not completely unattractive woman with all kinds of pictures of me looking like I have an oddly-discolored face, or one eye that is much larger than the other, or fifteen chins. You get the idea.

Consequently, very few non-required pictures of me get taken.

As I look through our family pictures from our trip to Tokyo (the sort of thing that seems slide show worthy), most of the images are of the scenery or my daughter, who does not carry my non-photogenic baggage.

But I feel that one of the unwritten rules of the welcome back slide show is that we, the staff, must actually appear in the pictures. I can't just send one of Tokyo scenery and not expect to get a certain degree of flak about it.

So I need to find one that I'm in.

In our digital "pile" of pictures, though, most of them that include me are taken from behind - since my husband is snapping away as I walk on to the next sight to be seen. Now, I have enough issues with sending in a picture of my face, how do you suppose I'm going to do sending in a picture of my backside? (Rearview picture self-assessment: butt's too big, but calves are pretty decent. Must throw away those plaid shorts; they're not doing me any favors.)

There is an okay one of me passed out on the bus. We're on our way to the airport, I have a wicked case of food poisoning, and my daughter is sitting beside me making goofy faces.

Is it odd that the picture I find least-revolting is one in which I'm just about to do very unpleasant things to a bathroom at Narita?

The Flu: Day Six

I needed 

to take a nap

before lunch 

because 

I was exhausted 

from 

washing 

my 

hair. 

:-(

Those Beans Don't Scan, Sheila!

I needed to go on a decongestant and low-fat ice cream run during work hours today and, since the nearest place that stocks both these items is CVS, I ended up there. 

Driving time from work to CVS: 2 minutes

Picking out items time: 3 minutes

Standing in line while the one person ahead of me was paying time: 7 minutes!

Listening to cursing under breath from old guy behind me in line time: 4 minutes

Wondering why it took seven minutes long for one person to check out? 

Let me walk you through it.

The lady in front of me was buying six small bags of jelly beans. (Why she didn't just buy one big, inexpensive bag of jelly beans and divvy it up at home, I have no idea. That's her biz.) Anyhow, the cashier couldn't get the scanner to "read" the jelly beans. After fumbling around at it a bit, the cashier got on the PA, "Sheila to the front, please." 

"Thank God. Sheila's on her way. Sheila'll make it all better," I think to myself. (Who else would I be thinking to?)

Sheila, the Honcho on Premises, waddles up to the check out, and the cashier tells her, "I can only get one of them to scan."

What??!!

So, I'm waiting for Honcho Sheila to go crazy on the cashier (whose name I never did catch) and tell her to just push the damn buttons for "times six", since the lady's buying six of the same item.

No dice.

Honcho Sheila makes some attempts at scanning the jelly beans and, when she finds it ain't working, she stomps off. The cashier and customer just stand there, as do I - wondering if there are any other clerks working and if they could pu-leeze open another register so Mr. Swears-Like-A-Sailor and I can get on with our day.

Honcho Sheila comes back with MORE of the un-scannable jelly beans and proceeds to try scanning them. 

"Dammit, Sheila! Those beans don't scan! Go to Plan B! You have keys to the register, don't you?! Use 'em, Sheila! Shit, Girl, that's what they're for!!" I'm screaming in my head, trying to look calm on the outside, as if I'm one of those people who is heavily into yoga or meditation or just really digs hearing "Endless Love" on the piped-in music or something.

Suddenly, Sheila gets one of the bags to scan.

It's an Easter candy miracle!

Two down, four to go, ladies!

We're on our way!

Now, I am getting a wee bit impatient about standing there, swinging my basket of decongestant and low-fat ice cream so it bumps my knees in rhythm to "The Pleasure Principle", which is only barely drowning out the string of cuss words coming from Popeye the Sailor Man behind me, but, I have to admit that I'm also getting a little sucked into the drama of it all. Will Sheila and the cashier lady EVER succeed in scanning six bags of jelly beans? After having invested six minutes into this story, it becomes oddly compelling. 

I was actually a little disappointed when another cashier appeared out of thin air and signaled me over. She rang up my order in about ten seconds. I had the cash in hand. She gave me my change and receipt. No dramatic tension. No story arc. Ho hum.

As I walked through the doors and back out into the world, I glanced over at the first register. Honcho Sheila, the cashier lady, and the customer were all still there, plugging away on the old Scan the Jelly Beans Project. I'll never know how for sure how their story ended, but I hope it ended well. They deserve it after all they've been through.

I committed a moving violation to bring you this picture, 

which isn't even integral to understanding the story 

now that I think of it. 

Obligatory Valentine's Day Post

No, my life is not a romcom. 

It has its moments of rom and its moments of com, but Hugh Grant is nowhere to be found, and I haven't seen Rene Zellweger hangin' out in my kitchen in ages. 

Here's what Valentine's Day looked like at my house, which is not a movie set, this year:

I didn't get my ever-lovin' husband anything. 

We usually just exchange cards, but I failed to even get my act together enough to do THAT this year.

Anyhow, I wake up this morning and have realize that I have succumbed to the cold I've been fighting all week. I'm stuffed up, coughing, blowing the old schnozz, etc. and there's no way I'm going to even get past the plodding around the house in my p.j.'s stage today, so hubby's not gettin' a card.

He takes pity on me and is very understanding, to the point where he volunteers to disappear for several hours of errand-running with our daughter in tow. I get to sit home and watch cable TV alone while he takes care of the grocery shopping AND the child. This is a one sweet deal for me, no?

As they're getting ready to go, he shows me the lists for the grocery store/Target and asks if I'd like to add anything.

Me: Yes, could you pick up a Valentine for me to give to you?

Him: You mean I should pick out something I think you'd think I'd like? 

Me: Pretty much.

A couple hours later he showed up with groceries, a sleeping toddler, and a red envelope with a card for me to fill out. It had a goofy puppy on the front, and my husband was nice enough to act surprised when I gave it to him.

So, while my life wouldn't make for a very good movie, it does have the makings of a pretty great life.

This Smells Like Ass

I was correcting a paper from one of my students when I found this moment of typo:

"I always wear the clothes from Abercrombie, but I hate the smell of their colon."

I'll take her word for it.

Start Seeing Vegetables

I've hit the point of mid-winter ennui, when a snowfall is no longer novel and pretty, and I crave greenery and the scent of living soil. A trip to the conservatory is typically on my agenda this time of year. I walk through the doors and inhale the smell of palm trees and orchids then look around to see my fellow Minnesotans standing with their eyes shut in rapture, soaking in the sort of water-drenched air that makes us grumble in July.

Purty, Ain't It?

I haven't made it down to the conservatory yet this year, but I've found something closer to home to satisfy my need for green: the produce department.

Our grocery store has all the fruits and vegetables arranged in these neat, lovely little displays, complete with dramatic lighting and intermittent mist to keep the lettuce moist and lovely. Since the colors outside lately range from clean snow to dirty, seeing all those bright greens, reds, oranges, and yellows in the produce section lifts my spirits and makes me want to scoop it all up and take it home. And, since it is a store, that's actually an option.

I loaded up my cart this morning with a bunch of fresh fruits and vegetables, feeling quite proud of how well-behaved I was going to be after last week's Cupcakes as Medicine Festival - to alleviate my sore shoulder and depression about being the sort of old, feeble being who is sidelined for several days by a fall down the steps. 

Once home, I started the vegetable drawer ritual that is throwing away all the delicious, nutritious stuff I bought last week that has gone bad from neglect to make room for this week's bounty.  And that's when I had my epiphany. We throw away a crazy amount of fresh fruit and vegetables at our house. It's wasteful. It's a shame. We really ought to do something about that.

So I picked apart the problem and identified two barriers that keep us from eating the good stuff - and propel us to just order a pizza, stop at McD's, et cetera.

First Issue: Convenience. Neither of us is in the mood to clean and chop vegetables when we get home from work - isn't that what they make people do in the army for punishment, after all? It's super fast and convenient to shove a McSomething in your maw, so that's what we do. Too often.

Next Issue: Visual Signals. I realized that if I ever wanted to keep spouse and child from eating something - to hide it from them, as it were - I'd stick it in an opaque plastic bag and put it in the bottom drawer of the fridge, which is exactly what we do with every precious veggie we bring in our house. We hide them from ourselves until they go bad.

I put a good hour into the fridge make-over plan that we hope will alleviate our money-wasting, vegetable-tossing bad habits. One of the crisper drawers is now dedicated to grains - bread, bagels, and such; meanwhile, the other drawer is the dairy dept., filled with butter, cheese, cream cheese, et cetera. The vegetables are all cleaned up and put in clear plastic containers (on sale at Target this week) on the main shelf of the fridge. They are the first thing you see when you open the door. Soon we'll all be grabbing an apple or some carrots as a snack instead of opening the fridge, seeing "nothing", and mowing down a bag of chips. Right?

I'm hoping that we can keep this up and that it will prove to be one of those simple yet glorious things that wind up being life-changing and makes me lose twenty pounds, get a book deal, and eventually end up as a guest on Oprah, where she'll gush over me (and my svelte figure) and buy copies of my tome for the whole audience. And they'll cheer wildly at this. Indeed, they will.

Spinach is Beautiful...

Risky Business

Here it is, ladies. The aisle of I-am-far-enough-into-this-relationship-with-you-that I-have-to-get-you-a-gift-but-have-no-idea-what-to-buy-for-you gifts for men. These specially-packaged goodies range from stress balls with smiley faces to an automatic card shuffler. I don't believe that men really want these things. Honestly, I don't know what men, in general, want for gifts. (Based on some of the gifts I've gotten from men over the years, I'd wager there's bit of a struggle on their part as well.) Shopping for a guy is hard, especially in those early stages of a relationship, when you don't know his shirt size, and a pair of boxer shorts emblazoned with the words "Jingle Balls" feels a bit too intimate. 

My most-hearty laughter is reserved for a product on the top shelf - the personal trimmer. This is a gift that manages to be exceedingly personal - it's right there in the name - and oddly impersonal at the same time. It says, "I don't know what kind of books you read or have any sense of your musical tastes. What I do know about you is that you have a bit too much nose hair, and I'd really like if you did something about it." How's a guy supposed to react to a gift like that? Is he pleased that she wants to take care of him? Frightened that she'll be expecting him to start waxing delicate parts of himself by Valentine's?

I would argue that the whole notion of giving personal care appliances as gifts is flawed. And I just happen to have a story to illustrate my point:

I'm certain that my mother's intention was to give me a Christmas gift that would bring me joy in the upcoming year - something that would improve my life and make me think of her fondly every time I used it. So, when I was about eleven, she wrapped and ribboned a battery-powered Clearasil face-cleaning scrubby brush thing. I still remember seeing the picture of a teen model with flawless skin on the box and having the stomach-turning realization that I'd just unwrapped a gift designed to buff away my zits. 

Of course, the opening of gifts in my family was of the one-at-a-time and admire-what-everyone-got variety, so I got to open this embarrassing appliance with all my relatives looking on. I had kinda been hoping that no one would even notice that I was entering that awkward stage and that my skin had started to break out, but now my mother had pretty much announced it to the entire room. 

Though the tag on the present had my name written on it, the true gift really went to my older brother that year. You see, he found this to be the single-most hilarious thing he'd ever seen in all his fifteen years here on Earth. For several days he tormented me with questions about my "zit brush" and how it was workin' out for me. 

In my mind I picture some hapless tweenager out there today, anticipating an Xbox or a date with Zac Ephron from Santa this year. Poor kid's gonna get the full-on set of Proactiv products from a well-meaning relative. And I feel for that kid. I really do.

So, I guess what I'm saying is, "Step away from the personal care appliances!" If you are truly that flummoxed as to what to give someone this year, I've got two words for you: gift card.

Guilty

I am by no means immune to the lure of the occasional holiday-themed product. 

In the spirit of full-disclosure, I present to you my purchases, semi-artfully arranged on my kitchen table with a cheesy Christmas backdrop ...

Item #1:  Target brand facial tissue in the jolly snowman box

My rationale: 

• It will sit on the counter and, therefore, be seen.

• The graphics have a somewhat slick, retro-charming vibe that I enjoy.

• Hello, it's sniffle season! These bad boys will be used up WAY before "Auld Lang Syne" rears its ugly, incomprehensible head. 

• My daughter said, "Frosty!" when she saw them. (*head tilt* and, "Aww...")

Item #2: super-fancy Dial liquid soap, Winter Pomegranate flavor

Further rationalizing on my part:

• I was looking for an antibacterial with moisturizer, and this stuff fit the bill.

• I've never been completely sure what pomegranate smells like; though, it sounds pleasant enough. I figured this was a way to find out without buying some strange piece of fruit that I probably wouldn't like. (Apparently, a pomegranate smells a LOT like liquid soap. Who knew?!)

• The color of the soap goes with my kitchen's decor, and I can peel off the label if I start to find it obnoxious by Boxing Day.

Item #3: Tangerines

These need no rationalization as they are both tasty and packed with vitamin C. (Note aforementioned "sniffle season".) I merely included them in the picture for aesthetic and comedic balance; the rule of three applies in both milieux, as I'm sure you are aware.