Shoelaces for Josie

This is your first and only and final notice: the entries in this blog may be sparse and scattered over the next few days. Like weeks maybe. Change sucks. Changing banks sucks even more I have discovered.

I was trying to open a new bank account in Washington online today.  It was Bank of America - is Bank of America - I don’t suppose it went out of business in the last five hours. Checking accounts have all these rules that just aren’t necessary.  You can have this type of account if you have this set amount of money. You can open this type of account but the monthly fee will be this amount. However, said monthly fee will be waived if you utilize direct deposit. Seriously - just give me a spot in your stupid national bank and let’s call it good.  My pile of pennies really amounts to nothing next to the vault boxes of gold of all your millionare customers. Seriously.

Anyway, long story short, I may have accidentally set up two accounts. Yeah. Bank of America is going to be really impressed with me. I have a college education and I can’t even manage to open up a bank account online.

Speaking of stupid things, I pulled another real winner out of my butt this afternoon. I was outside of the mail room and the person who runs it needed to ask the girl who had just left a question.  I thought I knew her so I ran down the hall yelling, “Sarah - hey SARAH!” Everybody is looking at me weird but she just kept walking and then my brain kicked in.

Yeah, her name was Courtney.

Keep it real, folks, and keep living the dream. 

In the words of Stewie, “Oh, I feel so deliciously white trash!”

Yesterday, I had my first experience at a demo derby. The Demo Derby really. Oh the memories at the BVR - and the documentation in pictures. I’ve been to the races before which is decidedly of the same nature but the demo derby is in a class all its own. I hauled my cousin along with me because partaking in white trash activities is only made less so if you have a partner in crime. So we show up and I’m wandering around, looking for a place to take pictures from (for the paper) and I get permission to take pictures from the flagman’s stand.

Wow.

Talk about the view.  And the dirt.  But the view trumped dirt totally and completely.

We were right over the top of it. It was loud, it was dirty, it was freakin’ awesome - it was bumper cars for adults! I would totally do a demo derby if I had a piece of crap car that I could bolt and chain together and paint really non-coordinated colors with homage paid to sponsors. Or your uncle - who happens to also be your boyfriend. Standing over a bunch of overgrown kids taking out their macho-ism in an attempt to demolish their friends’ cars - you just get it. You get why people go to these types of things, laugh for the sheer joy of watching something crazy and stupid and give a thunderous round of applause every time somebody delivers a big hit.

And it was made even better because I got in for free.  And I got my cousin in for free. Amazingly enough, all you really have to do is walk around with a camera and act like you’re supposed to be there. It works every time. It does help if the camera is a professional one. Tiny point and shoot digitals don’t command the respect a 300mm zoom lens does. 

I’ve tried to describe it but I can’t say it any better than Stewie did. When you lack the words to describe your life, turn to Family Guy. It’s really all there is. 

There are times when I am inappropriately loud, spouting inappropiate verbage and peforming inappropriate actions. By inappropriate, I mostly mean unacceptable in society (i.e. - you do something and the old lady walking her Pomeranians gives you “that” look. You know the one I mean).

Yesterday, I was walking around town with my cousin and we were talking, being our usual random selves and saying and doing whatever happened to pop into our ADD-charged minds. For whatever reason, I was reliving the glory days of baseball and telling stories. I was in the middle of my story about a guy who had gotten walked and the pitcher was making him pay at first by trying to pick him off.

I like to really get into my stories when I tell them. If the person spoke with a British accent, I give them a British accent in my story.  Sometimes if I’m creative, they get one anyway regardless of whether they actually have one in real life.  If the person was stumbling drunk, I re-enact the stumbling.  And - if they are yelling, I am usually yelling in my retelling.

With that said - I was telling her that the guy at first wasn’t diving back to the base and almost got picked off and that the entire dugout was yelling, “GET DIRTY, SCHMITTY!  GET DIRTY!!”

At the exact moment that I’m at this point of the story - screaming “get dirty” at the top of my lungs - a car drives by with it’s windows down. I wanted to run after it and put the phrase “get dirty” in context of my story. That lasted for about two seconds.  Then really all I wanted was to have seen the expressions on their faces. I probably could have sold them on Ebay and made millions.

Hello Sir Friday. So good to see you! I’ve officially done the following today:

- Slept until 8:30, got up and ate an apple, and then went back to bed.

- Cleaned the bathroom. 

- Worked for about an hour (also referred to as sitting).

- Went to Nick’s to check up on him and spent a good 7+ innings of Cubbie baseball there.

- Even though I was there for the majority of the game, I missed Ramirez’s homerun. 

- Stopped by the bank and asked dumb questions about closing my account.

- Fell asleep on the couch.

- Listened to Right Said Fred’s I’m Too Sexy.

- Went to a softball game at (la) Fonda to shoot photos of my non-favorite team.

- Hit up the local county fair to support a band that is friends of friends of friends and drank beer. 

Now don’t you wish you had my life? Yeah buddy.

You know, I like lunch buffets just as much as the next person. Who can’t be happy with all the food you could possibly want for $5.99?  Or $6.99.  Or $10.99.  Whatever. The point is you get an unlimited amount of food for limited dollars. Voila!

I haven’t been to a lunch buffet in a really long time but the effects of them are pretty universal. You eat too much, your stomach is mad at you and all you want to do is pass out on the couch. I think parts of life are like that. The Life Buffet: segmented in to the Love Buffet, the Pain Buffet, the Family Buffet, the Work Buffet, the Friend Buffet, the Happiness Buffet, the Sadness Buffet, the All-Other-Emotions Buffet….

More often than not, we load up and we take on too much, we think we can handle it only to find out afterwards that it was too much. How do we know?  In a world full of people pushing you to do more, to do better, to love more, to make friends, to be happy, the line separating enough and too much is blurred beyond recognition. So how do we know when we’ve had enough love, enough pain, enough work? 

It’s just like at the lunch buffet. You have to take a step back, take a deep breath and think about what’s really in your best interests. That sounds self-serving but believe me, if you don’t take care of yourself then you won’t have the ability to take care of anyone else. So think about what you need and then take that from the Life Buffet. Take it and try your best to not fall over the blurred “too much” line.  Inevitably you will. Everyone does, some people frequently. And when you do, that’s when you turn to the Family and Friend Buffet to pull you back across so you can pass out on the couch to recoup.

And you thought this was going to be about food, didn’t you? 

I’ve had to adhere to a variety of dress codes in my limited working career. When I was growing up, scuzz clothes were your best bet since cow crap really doesn’t do anything other than smell bad and stain. When I worked at a nursing home, I wore scrubs. I imagine I looked like a walking blue garbage bag but the comfort equated any lacking of fashion. Besides, they were old people. The fashion in their day was puffed sleeves and floor length skirts. Blue garbage bags are pretty hip to them.

In my current full-time job, the rules are lax. I probably shouldn’t wear jeans and t-shirts and sweatpants to work but I do and no one says anything. So I continue to do it. Wah-lah comfort. My part-time job I could wear whatever I want. Some days I decide to look casually gorgeous. Some days I look like I just came from the gym. Some days I look like I’m going to work the corner as soon as I get off work. (Just kidding on that last one. I would never recommend dressing like a hooker if you plan on attending high school baseball games.)

Really, my point is that the TV show Scrubs has some amazing one-liners and this one is so apt and so befitting of me and my personality.

“People are just bastard-coated bastards with bastard filling.”

Amazing. Pure amazing genius. Because it’s true while still being funny and can be used in so many situations when other appropriate words fail to come to mind.

I was just thinking about my past travels when I thought of this story. I can’t remember which city I was in - I’m thinking Rome perhaps…

We were rushing along underground on the metro, jam-packed, dirty traveler pressed up against fellow dirty traveler, everybody swaying and gripping handles on the rather rickety contraption. I was tired, staring unseeingly at the side of the car, when I felt an ever-so-gentle tug at the zipper on my coat pocket. It didn’t register at first until I felt it again.

Sudden memories of stern warnings about pick-pockets crashed my brain. I was hanging onto an overhead grip. I was in the process of swinging my arm down over peoples’ heads to stand with my arms crossed when I clocked this older dude standing next to me in the head. I accidentally knocked his glasses off and I was in the middle of apologizing when I realized he was the bastard who had been trying to pick my pocket. I just glared at him the rest of the trip and lost all guilt for my fist accidentally connecting with his eye.

That sounds like Rome, doesn’t it? Ah, the memories. 

You know, I was a good radio dj. I loved music, I had a good radio voice, I connected with the audience. I was good - too bad someone had to ruin it for me but that’s life really, you know? But my point is that I was good.

The reason I bring this is up is because I was listening to the radio as I freeze my buns off in the weight room and the dj just made me cringe, quite literally. I can’t even describe the horrors of his dj-ing but suffice it to say he sucked. I could get back into dj-ing maybe. Maybe someday. And very quite possibly not.

That’s really all I’ve got other than there is a football recruit being shown the weight room. Like I said, high school kids don’t look like they’re in high school anymore. Must be the ‘roids. 

There have been moments in my life where I simply stop what I’m doing and wonder if I have a brain, wonder if I was running along one evening and it fell out on the sidewalk, wonder if it temporarily went to sleep, wonder when it’s going to decide to kick in and work again. Friday night was one of those moments.

I was booked for a trip to OC (Orange City…sadly not Orange County) to shoot a baseball game. OC is not close to the Pond which is sad and I knew the baseball game was going to be a dismal one in which the Pond’s illustrious squad was going to take a beating. Even more sad. So I decided to take the afternoon off work and do a little shopping in Sioux City for a thing called business casual clothes (apparently my sweatpants and t-shirts are no longer going to be allowed as acceptable workplace clothing).  Sioux City is relatively close to OC - just a hoop-n-holler around the corner - so like 30-45 minutes away.

I find OC no problem. Finding the baseball field proved to be a different matter. I’m driving around, looking for 8th Street. I find 6th. I’m gripping the wheel hoping and praying that the next street is going to be 7th. Yeah, no. It’s 5th Street meaning I must have driven right through 8th and didn’t even notice. Idiot.

So instead of turning around, I just jot over a block and head back, thinking that the street is going to be parallel and I’ll run back into 8th street. Yeah, no. It curves, it has dead-ends, it sucks as a street basically. Eventually I find myself back on 8th Street but so far down that I’m not even close to the original road I was on. Which way to go - left or right?  I can’t see a baseball field from the stop sign, there’s construction everywhere and some dude in a maroon car is starting to get less than happy behind me. So I go left. And I was wrong. I think my new rule of thumb is if you don’t know where you’re going, always turn right.

I’m driving along when I realize I’m running out of town. There’s countryside. And no baseball field. Crap. A yellow school bus flashes by me. Well, not flash really. Schoolbuses generally aren’t known for their speedy wheels but I whip the ole Buick in a U-turn and tail the yellow beast and find my way to the field that way. I won’t go into detail about my struggles in finding the driveway or the parking lot but suffice it to say that my brain took a major vacation at a rather inopportune time. I’m still not sure if it’s checked back in yet. 

Do you remember the game Oregon Trail?  It was the game when I was growing up.  I remember fighting over the classroom computer in elementary school to get in a few rounds of the game. Crossing the western United States, your sister dying from cholera, your brother not making it because of a broken arm and your uncle keeling over from a snakebite. I feel like I’m on the Oregon Trail right now.

I’m moving in two weeks. I haven’t prepped at all for it really. I don’t really like preparations - they’re too structured and pretty much doomed to failure anyway in my opinion.  So I’m just going with it, but I do need to go through my stuff and get rid of the extra baggage. I feel like I’m trudging along on the Oregon Trail, my oxen are getting worn out and I have to lighten the load by throwing some of my belongings overboard.

Maybe you think I’m just talking about material stuff. And I am. But I’m also talking about tossing all that emotional crap, the painful memories of these past years. If I’m going to take the time to clean out the closet then I’m going to do it right and do it thoroughly. Everything that’s tying me down just got its number called for the end of the line.