Tag: Being Cannibalistic

A Trip to the Zoo

A couple of weeks ago, on Tom’s birthday, we thought we’d go to The North Carolina Zoo. We love this zoo. You have to do a lot of walking because the animals have such large areas to live. That’s a good reason to have to walk a lot. While you may not see every animal, there’s always something fun to see, depending on who’s out and about. If I lived in a zoo I would be a very boring exhibit. I would wander out for orange slices and frozen fruit treats and then go back to my far corner. I base this on my behavior in office environments and at parties.

When we woke up that day, it was pouring rain. We took a risk and decided to go anyway because the zoo is an hour and a half away and we hoped maybe the weather would be a little different by the time we got there. Also, we don’t really like other people and thought perhaps there would be less of them there on a rainy day.

It turned out to be a very nice visit. There weren’t many people and the rain was manageable. Here’s what we saw:

I do not believe that the alligators in zoos are the same alligators in the wild. This is all I’ve ever seen an alligator do in real life. I know I’m lucky that I haven’t seen one do anything else outside of a zoo, I do understand that. I think I saw one move a leg once and it was a big event for me.

I’m surprised at how dominant turtle DNA is.

I love silverback gorillas. They are just the best. The thing I particularly love about them is that they love to do this – sit in plain view with their back to everyone. There’s just something about that particular approach to being stared at all day I truly respect.

This sign says “BB&T Chimpanzee Reserve.” We couldn’t help but come up with related slogans – “Just as the majestic and mighty chimpanzee flings it’s poo, we fling the best rates around at you.”

YES. Someday, if I ever get to be the eccentric billionaire that I hope to be, I’m totally getting a dung beetle statue.

Our last stop for the day was the otters. Otters are wonderful. At first, when we walked up, we didn’t see them and figured they were snuggled up napping under some rock or something. But then they saw us and hopped right into the water and started swimming around as if it was their job to entertain us. Oh, it was adorable. And then they started doing it. And then things got kind of awkward. So, we bid the fornicating otters adieu and went on our way.

It was a great day. Then, we got home and I gave Tom a book he already had for his birthday because I’m awesome.

The end.

How to not do a magic trick: a complete guide.

On Saturday, I posted my weekly Super Friends post. You can see it here. In it, I spell out a magic trick that Wonder Woman did on the show. As soon as I saw it, I thought, “there’s no way a kid is going to be able to do this and I also see stitches in their future.” I was really curious about this trick because these are the types of things I latch on to rather than things like making the world a better place.

I figured it would be entertaining enough to try it out myself. And, to truly illustrate what I thought would be a magic disaster, I decided to tape it. Guess what!? It’s completely out of focus. I would make some terrible magic pun like “hocus focus” but I don’t know what to do with it. I made an out-of-focus video and that’s all there is to say. I tested it first, and the test was in-focus. I would have re-filmed it, but, as you’ll see, I set myself up so that I couldn’t re-film it.

I like to think of it as carrying on the crappy production values of the Super Friends. If you can stand to watch an out of focus magic-less trick, here it is:

Surprisingly, the glass didn’t actually break. I wondered if I could even get it to balance empty. So I tried and and it worked:

For three whole seconds. Right after I took the picture, this happened:

You see that, Wonder Woman? How many cuts, scratches, missing eyes and fingers are on your bullet-proof tiara-d head?

Lesson? It is a lot easier to make things work if you’re drawing it than if you’re actually doing it.

If at first you don’t succeed, try it on, try it on again. Unless you’re me.

I hate shopping for clothes. Even more specifically, I hate trying on clothes. I hate every moment of the experience.

First of all, I’ve seen too many “very special episodes” of TV shows about shoplifting to not know that there’s some person sitting at some control booth watching me change. We all know you’re out there, you mouth breathers with your bar-b-cue potato chip fingers, just waiting to catch me shoving tank tops and bras into my purse. When I arrive at the changing room and I do a weird dance in front of the mirror with both my middle fingers in the air – that is directed at you, sir or madam.

I also hate the number cards they pass out when you go and try clothes on. Never are my insecurities over my ability to count so tested as when I have to come up with the correct number of garments I want to wriggle in and out of as quickly as I can in that florescent nightmare of a room. What if I give the wrong number? Will I waste away in prison, cursing myself for my inability to correctly  tally up pants? Will those miscounted pants – the two I never had in the first place, become an enduring mystery, like D.B. Cooper’s money? “Nobody knows where C.E. Williford may have hidden those two pairs of khakis. We may never know,” Dateline will tell it’s viewers. “But I didn’t! I didn’t hide two pairs of khakis, I just count worse than a toddler,” I will yell, but it will fall on deaf ears.

I like to have pictures with my blog posts. This is a drawing of a pair of pants, just in case you’re not sure what I’m talking about.

Last week I had to face the harsh reality that I have grown too fat for all but two pairs of pants – one pair of capris, and one pair of black jeans. I live in the South, which means in the summer it feels like a sadistic grandma is smothering you with a soaking wet hot quilt. If my black jeans had them, they would have rolled their eyes hearing me explain that although it’s 102 degrees outside, I’m sure if I stay in the shade it’ll be fine. But, even I am not that delusional. I only had one pair of useable pants. This was a sad realization, and doubly so because it meant having to buy new pants.

I made my way to the local Super Target, grabbed 3 different pairs of pants of varying sizes (I did count correctly – things were looking up), and headed to the dressing room. Even if there’s a lock on the door, I have a constant fear of being walked-in on, like someone will pick the lock because they’re certain nobody’s in there. This has never actually happened to me, but that doesn’t mean I can’t worry about it; it’s is a free country.

I quickly tried on all three pairs of pants. I bet I looked like a contestant on Double Dare trying to get through the obstacle course in time. One after the other – none of them fit. They were too small. After removing and individually cursing each pair, I gathered my things and left the dressing room. As instructed by the attendant (is that the right word for that job?), I left the unwanted and now cursed pants on a giant pile for someone else to put back (that always bothers me, I feel like I’m shirking my responsibility to put things back where they belong).

This is when a rational person would then get some larger sizes to go back and try on. No. I don’t go back in to dressing rooms after I’ve gone once. I take the information I gathered from the first trip – “those pants were too small for me” – and jump to conclusions – “the next size up is obviously the correct choice.” I went to the pants what were the least tightest and bought the next size up, being so thankful that I’m smart enough to outwit a second trip to try pants on.

The next morning I woke up and grabbed my new pair of pants and I swear I heard my formerly sole pair of pants, a crumpled, broken heap in the corner of the room, crying tears of joy.

The new pants are too big. Did I return them and resign myself to another voyage to the fitting room? I think we all know the answer to that. No, they’re not so big that I can’t wear them. I just need a belt. If the belt were a tied rope, yes, I would look like a hobo. But, I would rather look like an overweight hobo who still somehow manages to have pants that are too big than take my clothes off at a place other than my own home for the second time in a week.

Life is about growing, learning lessons that help you improve yourself. With age comes wisdom and all that jazz. What lesson did I learn from The Ballad of Buying a Second Pair of Pants? Fuck lessons.

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This post was in response to Studio30 Plus‘ writing prompts this week.

read to be read at yeahwrite.me

The Five Phases of a Stomach Flu

Last Monday my mom came down with a nasty GI bug. Then, the next day, Tom  got sick. We’re pretty sure they both got it from my 3 year old niece.

During those few days I was magically unscathed, I took care of them figuring I’d get sick Wednesday or Thursday. I even tweeted about it.

 

But then Wednesday came and went. Then Thursday, and Friday, and Saturday. “Holy fucking shit,” I thought to myself, “maybe I’ll actually be spared.” And that is what the germs were waiting for. They don’t just make you sick, they are sick.

At about 1:30am early Sunday morning, I woke up. I didn’t feel so good. Deep down (in my sick stomach) I knew. But, this was the very beginning, the Phase 1. Phase 1 consists of me steeling myself to not get up and barf because if I don’t, then I’m not sick. This is a sad, proud phase. I think even the germs feel sorry for people during this phase, because they know this is a stupid phase, and they know you know it is, too.

Inevitably, I just felt too bad to not get up and barf, and so I did. And you know what? I felt better. This, I believe, is the germs’ favorite phase. Phase 2: throwing up the one time and then thinking, “that wasn’t so bad, I think I’ll go back to sleep.” Oh, how the germs revel in that last grasp at optimism, that naive hope.

Soon, Phase 3: the aches and fever set in. I couldn’t sleep, but everyone else was asleep, so I couldn’t complain to anyone. That left me with my thoughts. My weird, crazy, stomach-virus-fever-thoughts. The two I remember were:

This would have killed me.

-My feet were cold, but I didn’t want to move to get any socks and also thought I would die if I tried to put socks on. So, instead of getting socks, this played in a loop in my head: Get your feet iced up, grab a stick of Juicy Fruit. Over and over and over.

– “I feel so bad, if someone were to prop me up next to Hitler, I would probably just let them take a picture of us together.”

At 3am, after accepting the fact that I was not getting back to sleep and deciding that my fever thoughts were not the best way to pass the time, I went downstairs to watch TV. I watched two and a half hours of Three’s Company, with violent vomit episodes coming to knock on my door once every thirty minutes. This brought about Phase 4 – “oh my God, there’s nothing left in my stomach, I should not have to barf anymore, isn’t there some kind of form I can fill out and turn in that will stop it?” No, there is not. This is the phase of deciding the bathroom floor is as good as any bed, and deciding that food is for chumps, I’m not bothering with it anymore.

Then, morning came, and I could boss Tom around and tell him to do things for me and I didn’t have to throw up anymore, and a Futurama marathon came on, and Phase 5 arrived: the only time I ever, ever eat Jello. And it was good. I ate my Jello, and besocked my own feet, and felt thankful that the worst was over.

Any good fever-thoughts you’d like to share with me so we can all laugh about them since it’s in the past?

Two Things I’ll Miss, The Thing I’ve Missed

As I’ve mentioned too many times already, we just moved from Atlanta back to North Carolina, where both Tom and I are from.

I was  going through my phone pictures and I found two little examples of things I’ll miss from our time in Georgia.

The first is from the Japanese restaurant near our house. There’s a mural with lots of rabbits and anthropomorphic vegetables. My favorite part of the mural is this:

In all the fun and laughter amongst the rabbits and the vegetables (ok, yes tomatoes are a fruit), one rabbit seems to have gotten a little carried away in her enthusiasm, and this is clearly upsetting to the tomato she’s so happily rough housing. Maybe I like it so much because that’s how I felt in Atlanta – just a little tomato being jostled around by an over-active rabbit. Yeah, I got deep and metaphorical there for a second. Please know that I did not actually like it because that’s how I felt in Atlanta – I like it because a tomato is being man handled by a rabbit, so there’s no need to delve deeper to see why it’s so awesome to me.

The other image on my phone was of a run-down mansion that looks like it was built in the 1980s. We would pass it on our way to the movie theater that plays retro movies, also often from the 1980s. The house is a pastel peach, and I can just imagine all sorts of 80s douche bags dressed Miami Vice-style, having big parties and thinking it would last forever. And it sort of did, because nobody has changed that house since its heyday. This too could be seen as a monument to my time in Atlanta – arriving with the best of intentions and then slowly feeling the need for a change but continuing to stay the same. But, HA, no. We didn’t move to Atlanta intending to stay. Nope, I liked passing by this house because it stuck out like a sore thumb, reminded me of the 80s, and was on the way to watching old movies on the big screen.

Then came the pictures from the short two weeks we’ve been back. This past weekend we went to a small family reunion, held in my father’s small hometown, where my grandmother lived until she died. My grandparents owned a farm. My dad hated helping out on the farm because he was allergic to everything involving farms (which he so lovingly passed on to me). So, when the time came, my dad sold his share of the farm to my uncle, who is more enamored with farm land and farm-related activities.

So, while I love this town, and have many wonderful memories of spending time on the farm, I don’t actually know much about the ins and outs of farming. As a child I did more “look, I’m on a tractor!” novelty tractor rides than finding out exactly what tractors can actually do. I was also more, “hey look, there are peanuts everywhere and I can have some!” than actually understanding how the peanuts got there.

As we made our way to the farm, we ended up behind this thing.  It looked like someone took a bunch of other things and made this one thing. It also looked like perhaps we would find an alien driving it if we looked close enough. I can deduce that the giant old-timey looking wheels are to go down the row of crops, and that the tank on top (you can’t see it from this angle), sprays stuff, but as to what it’s actually called, and what it really does – dunno. But, still, there’s a part of me that sees something like this and it feels right. I may be allergic to farms, but it’s still there in my genes somewhere.

We passed the contraption (after contemplating driving under it just to see if we could fit) and continued on toward our destination. I haven’t been back to this town in years. Living in Georgia meant there wasn’t a lot of time to visit anywhere other than where my mom and sister live. So when we finally hit the street we were looking for, there stood the image that trumps all man-handled tomatoes and coke-filled pastel 80s mansions:

My family’s road. On my family’s farm. A lovely reminder of where my father came from and, by extension, where I came from. And while my dad isn’t here anymore, and my grandma is gone, too, the road bearing their last name is still here, and I can visit it any time I want. And that’s what being back home means to me.

That, and free food from my mom’s house, but mostly that.

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read to be read at yeahwrite.me