Day 322
I just realized that I copped out on from not only yesterdays details but also from the day before yesterdays details. So here we go on a little catching up adventure through time:
Two Days Ago:
This day was my best friend's boyfriends Half Birthday but we forgot all about that. Turns out though, he had a pretty awesome Half Birthday. It all started out with my best friend making breakfast burritos but not just any breakfast burritos, they were breakfast burritos whose meat was diced up breaded pork. By noon we were at the Lincoln Park Zoo. Turns out that crocodiles everywhere look fake and women who smoke and walk around wearing furry bedroom slippers DO belong in the zoo.
Later the Half Birthday boy and I ended up at a café. I went in to use the sink in the bathroom and noted that the toilet had brown streaks of shit on it. Not only was there a person who knocked on the door and was waiting to use the bathroom and rushed inside after I had left, after I went back to the table the Half B-day boy also declared that he was going to use the washroom (Canadian for bathroom). Surely both the bathroom user after me and my friend had thought that I had unloaded a slippery one in there. Why does this always happen? Why do innocent people get blamed for shit crimes they did not commit? Damnit, am I going to have to start cleaning other people’s messes so I don’t get blamed? Or am I going to have to start shitting in public because if I am going to get blamed anyway I may as well be the culprit.
At night we went to see a series of plays that were written based on the work of 4th graders. One of the best parts was when there was a poem about something with a tale and another character was introduced and the actor said, “And I am (some wacky kid name) and I am (whatever the fuck the tailed-character’s name was) sister. That means that we have the same mom and dad.” Another play had a nerdy character going on his first date but saying he had a girlfriend. The waiter at the restaurant said, “You have a girlfriend?! But you are 32!” Apparently, at 32 there is no excuse for someone to only be boyfriend/girlfriend. The “girlfriend” took one look at gassy nerd and said, “I dump you.” One of the final plays was a letter to Obama in it the kids demanded that everyone except terrorists should be allowed to immigrate to the U.S. Their only real claim as to why immigration should be allowed freely was that “…less Mexicans would be arrested.” They signed the note Mrs. So and So’s 4th grade class. But before that send off they had written, “And if you do not meet our demands we WILL have you kicked out of office.”
All in all my friend couldn’t have asked for a better forgotten Half Birthday.
Yesterday:
On my last morning my friends and I went to a neighborhood coffee shop to get a coffee to go on the way to the airport. I waited outside the coffee shop with my cartoonishly large luggage. Also outside the café was a couple and their two dogs. The dogs barked at me and then calmed down. Another person approached and the dogs barked again and pulled at their chains. The dog owner then said disinterestedly, “Don’t take it personally.” Many more people and dogs walked by and got barked at before my friends re-emerged with coffees and they got barked at as well. But, the dog owners stopped saying, “Don’t take it personally.”
When I arrived at O’Hare I was greeted by a McDonald’s employee who handed me a glorious Egg McMuffin. I found a seat and merrily wrote postcards through several announcements regarding delays to the flight. What I loved the most though was watching the woman across from me and her 20 year old daughter. The mother was the type that would huff and puff at every plane delay and go up to make complaints. I had thought, ‘Who the hell lives their life like that? Geez, she’s a sad person who is ridiculous.’
The plane finally did take off and was a very turbulent ride. I watched the woman across the aisle from me white-knuckle it with a nervously bouncing knee. She held a Kindle in her other hand pretending only to herself that she was reading calmly Steinbeck and not at all worried that the wing was going to fly off. I sat there and listened to my I-pod and imagined the wing flying off. Anyway, when we landed I whipped out my cellphone, called my sibling who was picking me up and immediately started bitching about how awful it was that the flight took forever and I couldn’t get off the plane. It wasn’t until today that I realized I was like the mother in the airport except I wasn’t a middle-aged divorcee, yet.
I spent the rest of my day with my sibling eating burritos and drinking beers. In fact, when our parents finally found us they snuck up behind us at the bar. For a former alcoholic and a woman who doesn’t drink too much (but probably used to) seeing your offspring having what is obviously not their first beers of the day much be a little rattling. But they got over it quick when we joined them at a table with a view of Wipeout on a large screen. A woman got smacked in the face and my dad squealed and laughed while our table neighbors looked like we’d just kicked a baby. I was home.
Today:
Wow, so I finally get to write about today and now I can’t really remember what happened. Let’s see…
My dad is maybe being pursued by an angry man due to a failed E-bay transaction.
I took a shower and saw a black bug which I killed with shower cleaner. After I picked up my clothes I saw two more of them scamper away before I could cleanse-kill them. I pulled on my clothes and went running down the hall screaming to my father that he had cockroaches. He told me to open the cupboard door and I did to find an article from the local paper about Earwigs and their local invasion. Then he made fun of me for screaming down the hallway and for killing bugs with cleaner.
Yesterday I had found a gift card for Wal-mart in my brother’s old room, turns out it had 10 bucks on it. So today I went to Wal-mart and found a couple postcards, some nail polish, face cleanser, a soda and a 15 cent notebook and I still have $1.45 left. And then I remembered how much I love shopping in the U.S. In Canada the same stuff would’ve cost me $20.
This evening my parents and I went out to eat at a local small town restaurant. The same restaurant my brother had called me from a few weeks ago telling me how hilarious the salad bar was. Tonight I experienced the full ridiculousness of it. I went up to the salad bar and it was just soggy Iceberg lettuce and processed cheese and things that were supposed to be bacon bits but didn’t taste like bacon and several kinds of creamy dressing. The thing he left out though was the containers of unidentifiable salads. There were about six containers and each one contained a different item like coleslaw or vanilla pudding but the thing was, was that you couldn’t tell at all which was which they all looked like vaguely white globby things.
When we got home my mother and I went to the basement area. Before I had left for Canada I had boxed my belongings and stored them on two metal shelves down in their basement. I started going through the boxes and finding stuff to get rid of, my goal being to get rid of half of my belongings. Despite the broken water glass I had to clean up and the fact that a box packed full of VHS tapes came crashing onto my toes I got rid of tons of things. I just hope that I don’t forget there is broken glass in the garbage when I take it out and I also hope that I don’t need an x-ray and a cast on my foot. Oh well, if I get all cut up from the glass and need a foot cast I can at least get both things in the same trip to the doctor and save on gas money.
Well, I am exhausted and will add to this account tomorrow if I can think of anything else that happened.
Tip of the Day: Try to love your parents and if you can't, take a break.
-Canadian Castaway
No comments:
Post a Comment