You can read it.
So, I’m going through the McDonald’s drive-thru, and I order my wife a Coke-Float. Pretty simple, really.
The first thing they ask me is, “What do you want in that?”
Err… “Coke.”
They rang it up as a “Rootbeer-Float with Coke”.
Next time through, I made sure to specify hamburgers w/beef and ice w/water too. Guess I’ve been pretty lucky winging it all these years.
Cold hearted orb that rules the night,
Removes the colours from our sight.
Red is grey and yellow white,
But we decide which is right.
And which is an illusion?
-Moody Blues song lyrics
Sounds an awful lot like freelancing web design to me. Up every night until the wee hours tweaking text, code, images… until you can’t tell which way is up anymore. Oh yeah, and eating pop-tarts. They forgot that part, but hey, I’m betting the record company made ‘em take it out.
I’m walking out of the grocery after a quick surgical strike trip for some odds and ends needed for dinner. Erin and little Maddie were waiting in the car. I’ve grabbed the necessities and a few other things on the way up to the check-out lanes.
The necessities are all in the back of the store, so 90% of the run is a corporate-planned walk-through of impulse buy items, like half-price 30% more-for-free celebrity-endorsed low-cal not-enough-room-on-the-box for a product-name snacks, Platinum-Chef cooking utensils, kid’s toys, and hygiene products - and that’s just the first aisle. Three more aisles of breakfast cereals, including the latest Happy Happy Corn Pops with free life-sized statues of Broadway Stars in specially marked boxes. Then the gauntlet of bulk-food barrels where the siren song of endless pantry staples has been known to suck in happless shoppers never to be seen again.
Relatively unscathed, I survey the bowling alley length of check-out aisles for my quickest escape route. Of the three open lanes, two are lined up back to the clearance meat freezer (conveniently located next to the Pepto Bismol and Immodium AD - go figure) and the last requires you to have the Big-Brother Grocery Key-Chain card.
I opt for the increasingly more popular self-check-out lanes. Anyone who can fly a high performance fighter jet and knit a sweater at the same time will have no problem with these babies. Just follow the instructions completely and you won’t set off the shoplifter alarms and have to talk your way out of the full-cavity body search from the overweight Charles Bronson rent-a-cop.
But, as I was saying, Erin and little Maddie were waiting in the car. I’m walking up to the car and my wife looks out the window and says to me, “Those are the biggest buns I’ve ever seen!”
As a dozen other parking lot patrons within hearing distance blatantly gawk at my posterior region, I realize she’s talking about the fact I was going to purchase one bag of hamburger buns, and I’m walking toward the car, with an additional load of pickles, mystery-snacks, two varieties of soda (pop, cola, whatever!), and of course, Happy Happy Corn Pops.
I opened the trunk and, without bending over to offer a better view to the still staring parking lot cart-retrieval-technician managed to put everything inside, slide sideways into the driver’s seat and drive away.
My wife told me I shouldn’t be so self-concious, but I still had to put my lifesize Phantom of The Opera statue in the basement. It just brought back too many bad memories…
Whistling - Part II
I’m working away on the computer, whistling and really into what I’m doing. In the zone…
My wife walks in singing some really old poppy, hurry-up-and-turn-the-radio-station-to-something-else tune. She says, “Now you’ve got me singing it.”
I gave her my patented, “What are you talking about?” look. Actually, I may have just said, “What are you talking about?” which sort of defeats the need for a patented look. But hey, I was working, I was in the zone. The zone can be forgiven.
She followed up with, “That’s the tune you were whistling.”
“Woman!” I exclaimed - once again, in the zone, so it’s forgiven - “that’s Metallica I’m whistling! That’s not some old poppy hurry-up-and-turn-the-radio-station-to-something-else tune!” Spoken, of course, with complete hyphenation.
“Funny,” she says, “it sounded just like an old poppy hurry-up-and-turn-the-radio-station-to-something-else tune.” Mimicking my complete hyphenation, I might add. The nerve. “Oh well, I’ll bet in your head you were really cool.”
Grrr. So much for being in the zone.
Okay, I love the heat. I cut my hair short enough to see my scalp peaking through around all the edges. I switched back to anti-perspirant, even though there are enough extra chemicals in it to shield the space shuttle on re-entry.
* DISCLAIMER - GRAPHIC IMAGERY AHEAD *
I even compute in my underwear in my old not-too-well air-conditioned two-story house. You get used to the “shrrrik!” sound as your flesh rips up off the faux-leather Sam’s Club chair.
I’ve got a huge glass of water sitting by and I’m even eating my pop-tarts untoasted. Hell, I’ll take all this over snow any day. You know what I can’t stand?
“It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity.”
Ahhh! If I have to hear one more sweaty-browed, pit-stained person say this to me like it’s some sort of heat-miser epiphany, I’m going to freaking kill somebody!
And I’ll get off on the charges too, man… Because it’s the heat, you know…
It makes you crazy.
When you get a new haircut and everybody comes up to you and says, “Hey, your new hair cut looks really good!”, you start to wonder what you looked like before…
Did you ever think about pulling a hang-nail? What if it were like pulling a loose thread on a sweater? I mean, suddenly everything starts to unravel until you’ve got nothing but an ex-sweater.
What if you pulled a hangnail and you were wearing a sweater at the same time?
What does it all really mean? Probably that I should have paid more attention to the expiration on that jar of pickles in the fridge a few minutes ago…
I came to the conclusion while driving that my daughter is going to love roller coasters.
If I had any passengers I think they’d agree.
When you’re driving in the car flipping through radio stations, make sure you pay attention to if your wife starts singing along with a song before you change to the next channel.
I’ve never seen that in the rules to a relationship, but someone might want to think about adding it.