Month: December 2016

I Broke Him…

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I had to console a teen grocery clerk over my divorce. Sorta. Lemme ‘splain:

So I was checking out and the kid was way excited about everything.

The woman in front of me with the cart full of groceries and kids had amassed 160 grocery points and smugly looked at me and said “I guess I’ll be back to get free stuff!” He said “Yeah! Winning!”

Next he picked up my jug of iced tea and sang the “unsweetened iced tea” song. Then he made it dance on the counter and asked if I’d be drinking it with sugar cookies. I laughed and said no, it would have to find the tools to survive solo. He rang up my total and said “You’ve got…. Oh. 15 points.” He made a sad face.

I said “Yeah, I don’t shop that much.” He said “Oh – no shame, no shame.” I was still looking at the receipt and without thinking said “well, when you don’t have a family…”

Silence. I look up and the kid has TEARS in his eyes. On his face. “I’M SO SORRY,” he says.

“No. It’s okay. I’m divorced.”

“Oh. That’s TERRIBLE!”

“What? No – it’s fine. I promise. I just meant that it’s not like I lost my family. We never had kids.”

“No kids?! But it’s Christmas… ”

At this point I feel Iike I broke him.

“Yeah… I have a super cute dog though. I swear. Massive ears. It’s okay. Really. Uhm… Have a great night.” I ran.

I posted this story on Facebook, and some of my friends – well, their responses were fantastic.

You should have just kept going and destroyed him…..SWEEP THE LEG!!!

We do not train to be merciful here – mercy is for the weak!

FINISH HIM!!!!!!!

I love my terrible, awesome, idiot friends.

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That’s Not Right…

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So I made a discovery about myself.  All because of a movie.  Well, technically several
movies – but it all started with one.

A friend at work has been giving me movies to watch.  Most recently he gave me a “mix DVD” of like six – including Bad Moms, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, The Nice Guys, and Rock the Kasbah – which were all really entertaining. But not the subject of this post.

When I finished with those last week, I decided I wanted to keep watching movies, and I stumbled across Mr. Right, with Anna Kendrick and Sam Rockwell and Tim Roth.

That movie….THAT MOVIE!

The first part of that film is eerily similar to my life. To me.  In fact, Anna Kendrick is sort of a weird spiritual doppelganger of me throughout.

  • She has a moment where she drunkenly screams “I’m wearing my favorite socks!” followed by “ONE OF YOU HUSSIES IS GETTING FISTED!”20161204_205503
  • She asks her friend Sophie “Why does this keep happening to me? Do I just suck? Am I just suckball McGee over here?” And Sophie replies (like my friend Karen or Lynn or Erin) “No, you’re not Suckball McGee. You’re just a work in progress, babe.”
  • She confesses to having a fantasy to be the crazy old woman in the neighborhood who drives around and “dead-eyes teenagers.” I have OFTEN said I want to be the crazy old lady with a big fuck-off hat shouting at teenagers to get off my lawn.
  • I don’t want to spoil a kind of special moment for you, because you NEED to see it – everyone does.  But the picture I’ve included here will make sense when you do. That’s me -in the picture, by the way, age five – as a T-Rex. Mom and dad made that costume for me.

In the movie, the love of Martha’s life turns out to be a government assassin.  This is important.  It’s important because, well, I realize that I liked this movie slightly better than my NEXT favorite romantic comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

I was talking with a friend about that, and he asked me to rank them – my favorite rom-coms.  So I did. Here’s my list:

  1. Deadpool
  2. Mr. Right
  3. Mr. and Mrs. Smith
  4. RED
  5. Grosse Point Blank
  6. Sweet Home Alabama

Do you see it? Do you see the pattern?  I’m pretty sure SHA is the exception that proves the rule – the rule that I am MESSED UP.

Some women get accused of having these crazy, unrealistic standards as set by the likes of Mr. Darcy or Captain America or even Doctor Who (David Tennant, naturally).  But me? I apparently also have equally unrealistic standards – but I toss in near-psychotic trained killerhood. Because THAT’S normal.

Marth’s friend Sophie nails it when she says “At some point you’re going to have to start noticing these red flags…”

Yeah. Okay. I do… Red flag seen.  But I don’t want to DO anything about it. Except to find that crazy bastard.

Making it MINE

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So it’s been well over a year now since I’ve been alone here in this house.  Well, alone except for the dog. For a while it was me the dog and the cat – but Beki saw fit to shuffle off her mortal coil in February, so it’s been a bit with just the two of us. The neighbors haven’t said anything at all about Sam’s departure, but then what do you say?

“Oh hey – so…..your husband took off.  That’s….a thing…”

No.

So I’ve slowly been establishing myself as the sole resident of the house, both inside and out.

I kept the lawn guys, because there are wasps outside and I really REALLY do not cotton to those.  Plus, yard work?  That smacks of effort.  They’re not THAT expensive and I like coming home and going “Oh hey! The lawn is mowed! Awesome!” Plus they do gutters and leaves and whatnot.  It’s a good deal.

But it’s weird sort of being “me” instead of “us” in the local environs. Plus, if we’re all being brutally honest, I am a crazy person now – at least some of the time.

I mean, my Josh Groban porch-sobbing episodes HAD to have occasioned at least some gossip as I tried to tearfully explain to the dog, me in headphones, why the adorable little gnome just KNEW how to punch you in the feels with his angelic warbling.

And exiting the front door, face-first into spiderwebs streteched between my two giant yew bushes, and then dancing around yelling “FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK YOU MOTHERFUCKING SPIDER FUCK GAH FUCK ADAUGHTER OF UNGOLIANT BITCH FUCK” was probably not the best thing I could have done for my reputation in my quiet, conservative burg.

You have to understand that if you translated “We have lots of money and we love our lawns” into Latin and slapped it on a flag, that’s my city’s motto. Only they’d argue for days – weeks – about the color of the flag, not because anyone gave a shit about the color, but because they worried about what message the color might send and whether or not it clashed with the awareness ribbons.  Awareness of what?  NO ONE WOULD KNOW.

So I am trying to be a good citizen, but occasionally I fail.  Thus it was yesterday when I let SB out back. I just needed him to do his thing and come back inside. Only he caught sight of something and decided it was a terrorist cell in the next door neighbor’s yard. In fact, it was a white squirrel.  Like all white.  Like, admittedly, frighteningly white. He DID NOT LIKE ALBINO SQUIRREL.

So he went apeshit. Like you do.

I tried my normal CTFO tactics, but he was not having any of it. The barking. And the jumping. And the snarling.

I finally ran out of patience and, forgetting myself just a tish, screamed “I KNOW IT’S AN ABOMINATION IN THE EYES OF THE GODS, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF CHEESE AND WAFFLES LEAVE IT!” Which, strangely enough, worked. As if my acknowledgement of its eldritch strangeness was all he was really looking for to begin with.

Also though, my neighbors looked out their back door.

So I went inside and cranked up Josh Groban. For internal consistency reasons.