Guest blogger!

We have a guest blogger this week! It's all very exciting! And she comes all the way from Cleveland! She shares with us a traumatic tale...



Danielle recently invited me to share a poor decision that I've made. One coping mechanism that I have developed over the years in order to allow myself to go on living in spite of all the poor/embarrassing/mortifying decisions that I've made is to simply block certain things out. I've gotten quite efficient at blocking out bad memories. It was really hard to come up with something to write about because I've forgotten events prior to last Saturday. In fact I've become so efficient at shutting my brain off that I'm afraid the more vital brain functions are getting affected. Here is an example:

I am very strict about preventing shower curtain mildew. I try to enforce a stringent policy of always leaving the shower curtain closed and nice and spread out and airy so that it cannot collect mildew. Enter the main obstacle to my attainment of Shower Curtain Utopia: the Fiance, a creature whose main goal in the morning is to get to work on time which apparently prevents him from closing the shower curtain properly. On one particular weekend morning, (we are residing in Pittsburgh during this time), I slither into our bathroom like the sleepy slug that I am, ready to embark upon my morning routine. There I go, brushing my teeth, putting my toothbrush away neatly, my eyes are almost fully open at this time, here I am making sure I have a towel ready for after my shower, off I go to turn the shower on, I turn toward the bathtub---WHAT? the SHOWER CURTAIN IS OPEN? I am angry. I check the curtain for signs of mildew. Nothing there yet, I am momentarily placated. My shower ensues, it is relaxing. Lather, rinse, repeat. I am looking forward to the day ahead. I turn the water off. But...something is amiss. I thought I turned the water off, but then why do I hear water running?

My eyes quickly dart toward the sink, which is steadily overflowing. The faucet merrily runs like a babbling brook, onto the bathroom floor and into the carpeted hallway outside the bathroom. I step out of the bathtub onto the little red bath rug, even though it is completely underwater and it makes no difference whether had I stepped onto a bath rug or into a swimming pool.

Fiance and I spent the good part of the morning cleaning up. We exhausted all the absorbent materials in our home (1/2 roll of paper towels, a mop head) and set up a fan to dry the wet hallway (it took 4 days to dry). Even though I've lost my credibility as the guru of bathroom cleanliness, I still compulsively pull the shower curtain close whenever I get the chance.

---Q

Cooking

My little sister just got her permit three days ago. This has made all of us nervous, particularly me and my father because it is our cars she is practicing on since my mother's is currently more or less in a coma. My father is even more nervous than I am because, well, he was the one who took my sister for her very first driving lesson. Yesterday afternoon I told my sister I would take her driving, so we went to inform my father we were going out. He immediately jumped up from his chair and said, "Oh no, no no no. I will go. Not you. No. Highly dangerous. You are not equipped. Your sister will kill both of you and your mother will kill me. Unacceptable." So I said, "Okay then. I guess you two will go and I can stay here and make myself food."
My father immediately sat down again and squinted at me accusingly. "Explain 'make yourself food."
"I was thinking I would cook some eggs."
"Oh no. No, no, no, no. You'll burn the house down. Kill yourself. No more house. Your mother will kill me. Now I can't leave you alone..."

My father now faced a terrible choice. Which was more potentially fatal? His teenage daughter's second attempt at driving, or his 24 year old daughter's attempt at cooking?

In the end the problem was solved when he forced me into the backseat of my own car while he taught my sister how to drive, effectively preventing me from touching a stove AND monitoring my sister's every move.

A good solution, clearly. But what stands out to me here is the fact that my father believed me making myself eggs was equally as or MORE dangerous than my sister's first attempts at driving. It's a problem that has plagued me all my life, that I have inherited from my mother. Between the two of us, we've set at least 7 fires in various places--stove, oven, toaster, microwave. On one notable occasion, I set a salami sandwich on fire.
Another time while making cupcakes I mixed up sugar with salt. That is a lot of salt.
Knowing my weakness, one time while baking a cake I tried laying out all the ingredients before even beginning, checking them off a list, making sure I had the correct amounts of the correct things all in a line on the counter. When I took my cake out of the oven awhile later, I discovered that it was completely flat. Completely. I was very puzzled, until I turned around and found that all of the flour was still sitting nicely on the counter, waiting to be added.
Pasta. Oh, pasta. I can't tell you how much pasta and how many pots have been burned and destroyed in this household, between my mother and myself. We have an attention problem. Set the temperature on high so the water boils faster, forget we are making pasta two minutes later, occasionally go so far as to leave the house, return and discover blackened bits and one livid father/husband threatening to beat our heads in with his beloved and dead cook ware.
I have lost so much blood over cutting carrots and tomatoes and chicken and yes, even opening a tin of biscuit dough. You know those easy open Pillsbury tubes? Not so easy open to everyone.

These days, I get much of my food by wandering downstairs whenever I am hungry and announcing loudly what I am going to cook for myself. Wherever my father is in the house, he will come running, shouting, "I'll do it! I'll do it for you! Get back into bed! Watch TV! Go to the mall! Come back and it shall be all done!"

As far as I'm concerned, this is a perfect system, because I hate cooking as much as it hates me.

This evening I was thinking about making something from a recipe I found that sounded good, but I realized what a TERRIBLE DECISION that would be, and figured it was much safer to write about cooking than actually attempt it.

I think I'll wave the recipe around my father and declare loudly how I am about to start trying it out.

Camp

I have had a lot of jobs over the last ten years, with quite a bit of variation. Assistant Gymnastics Instructor. Sales clerk. Babysitter. Software Tester. English Language Assistant. Coldstone...person. French teacher. Volunteer Coordinator. Caller at a calling center. English Language Assistant and Volunteer Coordinator top the list as my two favorite positions (with the lowest salaries), babysitter and and software tester are down at the bottom at least favorite (with the two highest salaries). The job at the calling center is the only one I have ever quit, after lasting only three days. I would have quit after the first fifteen minutes, but my supervisor was so damn attractive I tried to stick it out. I don't regret having any of these jobs. I can look back on each one and point to ways in which they helped me further my career, develop my interests, or at least help financially.
Except for one.
One job I look back on and think, Why, why, WHY did I ever do that to myself? It made me cry nearly ever day. It paid next to nothing during the time in my life I least needed money. It made me physically sick. I didn't like the people I worked for and few of the people I worked with.
Summer camp counselor.
Every day for eight weeks during the summer after my freshman year of college I got on a school bus at 7:45 in the morning and went on an hour long journey, gathering children who routinely vomited each and every morning before arriving at our destination. I have a phobia of
vomit. Even just knowing someone in the same building as I am is throwing up is enough to make me sick enough to do it myself. Obviously I did not fare well on these bus rides.
And this was before camp even BEGAN.
Once camp began I often had MORE children vomit throughout the day. Sometimes in the pool. I do not know WHAT parents were feeding their children during the summer of 2004.
It was either burning hot or raining. I had kids running off into the forest. I had girls shrieking over centipedes. I had boys sticking their butts on one another. I had food fights and naked children running about trying to pee on things and at least one girl per day who cried unintelligibly over something incomprehensible and three hypochondriacs and a lot of snot and blood and tears and parental notes and YOU try getting sunscreen on hyperactive 6 year olds with ADHD and a bizarre obsession with running around NAKED.
AND I had to get in the pool.
In a bathing suit.
It was the most horrific of all nightmares.
In the middle of it all, I had to sing this song repeatedly:

Beaver one beaver all let's all do the beaver call
Beaver two beaver three let's all climb the beaver tree
Beaver four beaver five let's all do the beaver jive
Beaver six beaver seven let's all go to beaver heaven
Beaver eight beaver nine CLAP CLAP it's BEAVER TIME!


But you know what the worst part is? The most ridiculous, awful,
insane part of the whole thing?
I went back the next summer.

Retail. Oh GOD, Retail.

Yet again, I begin an entry in this here blog with an apology. I am very aware that this entry is a couple of weeks late, but I am also aware that it is far more prompt than the last entry was. I take this as a positive sign. A few more months of haphazard shit, and we will have turned me into a regular blogging dynamo.

Apologies aside, this week's entry is about the magical world of retail.

Let me make something clear here. I don't have any particular problem with shopping. I approve of shopping, in a general sense, even if I myself am not as an avid a shopper as many of my friends. Working retail is another story altogether.

I work in a local independent lingerie store, neither Victoria's Secret, nor Fredrick's of Hollywood. It's a cute little place with an excellent selection of bras, panties, and cute little things, and in many ways it's not a bad job. I'm selling things I like in a store I approve of, for a boss I generally think is pretty awesome.

That said, retail is like high school. No matter how good your particular high school is, it is still high school, and therefore it is terrible. No matter how good your retail job is, it is still retail, and therefore it is terrible. It is also, for the most part, unavoidable. Yes, you could go into the service industry, or become a nanny, or just go straight for the gold and become a hooker, but for the most part, retail is simply what you do when you aren't qualified to do anything, and when you're poor. I am both of those things, so retail it is.

Retail is a poor decision for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, retail is a poor decision because it forces you to interact with other people. Now you may be thinking, “I don't get it, Rachael, I like people!” You are wrong. You may think you like people, but that is because you don't work retail. If you worked retail, you would realize that people are terrible. They are smelly, inconsiderate bastards who talk on the phone while you ring them up, thrusting their credit card in your face, and babbling away at whatever halfwit was stupid enough to have answered the phone when these inbred underwear buying hippos called.

People are also gross. Incredibly gross. A truly surprising amount of the time, they're not actually looking for underwear. They have wandered in off the street, taking a break from their evidently constant masturbation, hoping to find sex toys to shove in their every orifice to distract themselves from the emptiness of their broken, greasy lives. For the record, all of these disgusting, mutated examples of pseudo-humanity are male. They are also apparently incapable of distinguishing between Adult Mart and a high end, reputable, classy lingerie store. The presence of women not bearing the telltale signs of herpes should really be a dead giveaway.

People are also cheap. Really cheap. Women come into the store with bras that are literally falling apart on them. They complain about spending forty dollars on something that will actually separate their nipples from their belly buttons. They hang around for two hours, showing me far more of their pustule-encrusted wrinkled rolls of fat than I would EVER under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES like to see, and then only buy ONE FUCKING BRA. If I were on commission, I swear to you, you would have seen me on the news by now, wielding a bloody knife and growling.

IN SUMMATION: I didn't hate people until I started working to retail. I walked in there my first day, bright eyed and bushy tailed, innocent and sweet, and retail has killed all that love. Beaten it out of me. What a shitty decision. Ugh.

Strike

I'm on strike. Again. For reals this time.

Glasses

I started wearing glasses at nine years old. They were turquoise and large and I looked very silly. But at nine years old, I felt pretty super cool wearing them because as far as I was concerned, they were a mark of smartness. The mark of someone smart enough to come up with a better word than smartness. Cleverness? Intellectualism? Whatever. Point was, I was less concerned with looking attractive and more concerned with my teachers liking me and writing nice notes on my tests.
Obviously as I grew older my priorities began to change and suddenly adding glasses to the mix of giant fluffy hair, legs of disproportionate size to my body, and practically translucent skin was terribly unappealing. So I stopped wearing them.
But...could you SEE? you might ask. The answer is no, no I could not see. From age 12 to age 16 I wandered around in a cloudy haze, not even completely sure of what my friends looked like, which occasionally caused minor problems when I arrived late to the cafeteria.
At 16, I changed my life by getting myself contacts.
I hate wearing glasses. I hate the way they look, I hate the way they feel, I hate the way I have to take them off and on when I eat or read so I don't get a headache. Also I hate the way they look. But for eight years now it's all been okay, because I wear my contacts most of the time.
And then June happened. June did a large number of unhealthy things to me, including giving me the Eye Infection That Would Not Die. The doctor tells me it is minor, and it certainly feels minor, but it means: No Contacts. For an Indeterminate Amount of Time. Thus far an Indeterminate Amount of Time has been very nearly two months and is beginning to look more like an Interminable Amount of Time.
Here we come to the Poor Decision Making. While I was a teenager, wandering around totally blind was acceptable because I was a teenager, and teenagers are stupid. Now, however, I am 24 years old, and for a month now, I have done a lot of stupid things without wearing my glasses. Going on walks, to dinner, to bars, to clubs, on dates...
It is one thing to go out with your close friends and say, "Just make sure you don't leave without me" and another to be on a first date standing painfully close not because it is a key part of your seduction technique but because you are afraid if he moves much farther away you won't be able to pick him out of the crowd.
This, clearly, cannot be allowed to go on. And yet my vanity is so monstrous that I cannot overcome it with common sense. So I'm trying uncommon sense. I went out and spent money I don't have on an expensive pair of chic red designer glasses in the hope that my love of wearing things that are red and expensive will trump my hatred of looking at myself in glasses.
The most smartest solution possible. Clearly. We'll see how well it works after I finally pick them up this week.

Bathing Suit!

What with the insanity that has recently become my life, I did not find a topic for today's post. Rachael and I have been spending a large amount of time with each other and, more recently, with her new foreign exchange student. Actually, there is a poor decision for you. I demanded his hand in marriage this weekend, which is probably something I should not have done, the fact that he is only 19 not withstanding. And I do mean demanded rather than asked. Though he believed I was joking. So I'm just going to have to try again this weekend.
But news! Between picking up strangers in bars (okay, maybe another poor decision?), having trouble parking (I PARKED RACHAEL'S CAR), getting lost (Rachael stopped paying attention to the streets and started paying attention to Ke$ha on the radio), freaking out the exchange student with the size of our cheeseburgers, and other shenanigans, WE BOUGHT A BATHING SUIT. Rachael made me drive out to the far reaches of the far reaches of the edges of the city and I found the absolute only one piece bathing suit in a size below a 6 and I promptly BOUGHT IT.
No swimming today though. Trip to FunFest! Where fun will be had by everyone but me. I will be busy running around shouting "KEEP YOUR HANDS TO YOURSELF!" "STOP HITTING YOUR BROTHER!" "STOP TELLING YOUR SISTER YOU ARE GOING TO KILL HER!" "STOP TELLING YOUR SISTER YOU ARE GOING TO KILL HER BUT IN SPANISH. I UNDERSTAND SPANISH."