Velcrometer
Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks
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M. Giant's Velcrometer Throwing stuff at the internet to see what sticks |
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Thursday, December 31, 2009 Movies 4Q09 Part 1 Not a bad showing for this quarter, especially the week I saw three movies in three days. Which were, in order: Paranormal Activity This was the jumping-off point for an entry back when I saw it, so I don't know that I have a whole lot to add. I just know that if anyone ever makes a horror movie where every character heeds all the warnings, signs, and portents that fill the first and second act, the ending is going to be a giant letdown. Zombieland I can't resist a good zombie movie. But then I can't resist a bad one, either. So I can never tell which is which. I loved Bill Murray's cameo, although you'd have to think that any guy smart enough to survive the zombie apocalypse would know better than to walk into a room of armed non-zombies while looking like a zombie -- twice. Where the Wild Things Are Everyone pretty much loved this movie, although I only liked it a lot. I found myself a lot of the time thinking, Say something! Although it's hard to say how much of that was because I was constantly distracted by trying to identify the voices of some of the actors playing the monsters. An again, that was all in one week. Think it's a coincidence that this was also the week that M. Edium was out of town on a road trip with my parents that week? Speaking of road trips, come back in a few days for the last batch, and my ranking of everything I saw this year. Unless of course you have a life. posted by M. Giant 7:10 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Monday, December 28, 2009 Snow Days Last week we were warned that the snowstorm that was coming over Christmas would be like nothing we'd seen since October of 1991. I have vivid memories of Halloween 1991. I waited downtown for the bus, watching a few grown-up trick-or-treaters running across Hennepin Avenue as it was getting covered by a blizzard. The next morning, Trash and I were picked up by a snowplow so she could make it in to the hospital where she worked then. But at least then we lived in an apartment and didn't have a sidewalk and a driveway to be responsible for. I'm not sure where I left you on the status of my snowblower as of the end of last winter. I think my last entry was how happy I was at having duct-taped it back together, and how well it was working. Shortly after that, the duct tape succumbed to the snow, and then the engine wore out. Fortunately that was at the end of the snowy season. This past summer, when demand was low, I brought the snowblower in to see if it was worth fixing. It wasn't. I bought a new one. Well, a new-used one. Brought it home, stored it in Chao's garage during M. Edium's birthday party (and for a couple of months after that), then asked him to drop it by around the time of the first real snow a couple of weeks ago. Fired it up. My initial experience with it was frustrating. I realized too late that this model doesn't appear to have a mechanism for directing where the snow actually goes. The chute pretty much swivels freely, meaning that the force of the snow causes it to always be pointed straight ahead. Which is fine if you're always pushing the snowblower in the direction where you want the snow to go, but sometimes one wishes to turn. And even that wouldn't be so inconvenient if there were a way to disengage the throwing mechanism without turning off the engine, but I wasn't able to figure that out either. So I decided to just make the best of it, muddle through while I was out there, and see if I could figure it out later. On the Internet. Inside, where it was warm. But then, when I was almost done, the engine quit. And I realized something. Before going to the gas station to fill a two-gallon container with unleaded, I had made sure to find and set out the two little bottles f two-cycle engine oil I'd bought with the snowblower. These two bottles represented the exact amount you need to mix with two gallons of gasoline. These two bottles were, as of this moment, still sitting where I'd left them, their caps on tight. You know what happens when you forget to mix oil in the gasoline? Your snowblower breaks. I know this, because I had done it before. With my very first snowblower, many years ago. In other words, I have no excuse. That was the last time my snowblower ran, a couple of weeks ago. This past week, we got five inches of light, fluffy snow. Then we got four inches of slush that was as heavy and sticky as wet clay. Then we got seven inches of freezing rain. Then we got nine more inches of snow, a foot of sleet, and about a yard and a half of what I guess they call "wintry mix." The only consolation is that I'm not sure my little snowblower would have been able to handle all that even if it had been in working order. The way I see it, I have three options. One is to get my snowblower fixed. The second is to buy myself a fourth snowblower. The third is to not leave the house for anything until April. So far the vote is tied. Trash is leaning towards number one. I prefer number two. And the ice caked on our driveway, forcing us to helplessly spin our wheels for a while every time we want to leave, is clearly in favor of number three. To be honest, it makes a strong case. posted by M. Giant 9:24 AM 1 comments 1 Comments:The best option is to move to the Pacific Northwest where we get enough snow for the kids to build about two snowmen per year and the few people who own snowblowers are so excited to finally get a chance to use it that they happily clear their own driveway and all the neighbors too.
By Tuesday, December 22, 2009 Showtime M. Edium's Montessori school has several special events scheduled throughout the year. Some of them are special and exciting, and some of them are trials of endurance. Last week was the "Holiday Program," which was both. The thing about putting on a show with three-, four-, and five-year-olds is that you can't make it too awfully elaborate. I mean, you can feel free to go ahead and imagine a group performance from Glee with a lot more headroom for the performers, but it's just not going to happen. Although this is M. Edium's second holiday season at his school, it was only his first Holiday Program. Last year we had planned to go, but he just wasn't up to it and decided to bail. Normally we can make him do our bidding with dire threats like, "Eat one more bite of your dinner or we're staying home," but last year when we tried that he was just like, "All-righty." Normally he'll give in just on principle. The other night, however, we realized that a year ago, he made the right call. The Holiday Program begins with all the parents perching on the little wooden toddler chairs in the main room. Then the kids are all paraded in wearing Santa hats and lined up on the oval marked on the floor. Then they sing. M. Edium sings a lot at home. He sings songs we know, and a lot of songs we don't know. We assumed they were songs he learned at school. We assumed they were all of the songs he learned at school. We assumed incorrectly. I found myself wishing for a copy of the set list just so I could have some idea of how many pages of it were left. About fifteen or twenty songs in, Trash whispered to me, "How many songs are they going to sing?" "All of them, I think," I whispered back. It probably would have been a lot worse if the turnout had been less dismal. Maybe a third of the kids and parents showed up, to the disappointment of M. Edium's teacher, who started the show by asking us parents to sing along to the ones we knew. Even if I’d gotten a set list, there would be simply no room to reproduce it here. Suffice to say that the festivities began with a medley of patriotic numbers (M. Edium's teacher is always careful to include plenty of those, either due to or in spite of being Sri Lankan), then some nursery songs like "Baby Beluga" and some songs about farming. Then came the Christmas songs. I assumed that the carefully named "Holiday Program" meant that there were going to be songs about other holidays than Christmas, but it turns out it only meant that there were lots of songs not about Christmas. At least at the beginning. Throughout the performance, a little boy in the center of the line consistently danced a soft-shoe. I didn't know there were three-year-olds who could move like that. The teachers let him go, because you can't lecture a three-year-old about how he's creating a focus problem. Near the end, the teachers passed out little jingle bells for the kids to shake while they sang, but in practice most of them spent a lot of time figuring out how they worked instead of shaking them or singing. But they got a few numbers to let the novelty wear off before the big showcase piece, which was them shaking them along to a recording of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra's epic version of "Carol of the Bells," which I like to call "Angry Christmas." Some of the kids seemed particularly into the “angry” part. Since we were several hours in by this point, I wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. Near the end, they busted out the choreography, which consisted of clasping their hands behind their backs, breaking formation, and sort of shuffling around while singing "Frosty the Snowman." I didn't know there were moves to "Frosty the Snowman," but now I do. Basically you clasp your hands behind our back and shuffle around. As the show wore on, M. Edium was a trouper, especially for him. Even though he's simply bailed on or outright ruined any number of similar productions, he lasted through the whole thing, aside from plaintively and repeatedly telling Trash he was thirsty, and licking his lips in a way designed to be seen from the back row. He also told her to stop laughing, several times, to no avail. But he made it, and I think it was only in part because we had made his ability to open an early Christmas present the next morning contingent on his behavior. So after about an hour of singing, it was time for snacks and punch and going home. I'm glad we went. But I'm even more glad we didn't go last year. posted by M. Giant 9:26 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
Un-lurking to say I once ejected myself from my son's holiday presentation because I was laughing too hard. Worth every second. Now he's an adult who doesn't put on shows for his parents. They grow up so fast.
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That song totally IS Angry Christmas! Sadly, our six year old loves it and requests that we turn the volume up if we're ever unfortunate enough to come upon it while in the car.
By Sunday, December 20, 2009 Passing By Years ago one weekend morning, my friend Bitter was bicycling to work. This was when she was working at a downtown pub and living in a downtown-adjacent apartment, so riding her bike was customary. Plus downtown is dead on Saturday mornings, so there's really no traffic anyway. Except on this morning, when she was waiting at a traffic light and there was a white minivan with tinted windows pulled up next to her. The passenger-side window rolled down, and from inside she heard a creepy voice calling out, "Hey, pretty lady!" If she'd had time to think about it, she probably wouldn't have looked over. She didn't know anybody who drove a white van, and even if she did, who would be creepy enough to do that? It was me, of course. I'd borrowed my dad's van to help my other friend Lawre move that same morning, and we had just finished up. Passing Bitter on the street a few minutes later was just an unexpected coincidence, but it was one I couldn't pass up. In fact, I was so pleased with myself I completely forgot to offer to throw her bike in the back of the van and drive her the rest of the way to school. Ever since then, I've never passed up a chance to do the same thing, whether she's come over for a walk with Trash, or whether it's just Trash, or whether it's someone I don't even know. Kidding on that last one. But more recently, when I caught up to them on the way to a neighborhood restaurant, Trash saw me coming and shook her head warningly at me. I guess it was because they had M Edium with them and they didn't want me modeling inappropriate behavior or something. Like that's ever stopped me before. But I behaved. This time, I pulled up next to them, rolled down my window, and called out in a creepy voice, "Hey, little boy!" He didn't mind at all, but Trash and Bitter both seemed to have some objections that I really didn't understand. I think they're just uptight. posted by M. Giant 5:33 PM 0 comments 0 Comments:Thursday, December 17, 2009 Brick by Brick I have mixed emotions about M. Edium's current fascination with Legos™ and Star Wars, and particularly about his obsession with where they intersect, in Star Wars Lego sets. I mean, have you seen these? These are not his father's Lego sets, and I speak from firsthand experience. When I was his age, Legos were a bin of square and/or rectangular blocks that came in four colors, and if you wanted to build something out of them, it better be something square. Even though they interlocked, they really only stacked in the same orientation. The only difference between Legos and old-style wooden blocks is that sometimes you could pick up the former and turn it upside-down without falling apart. And if you really wanted to get exotic, you could use doors and windows in a Lego house. Dynamic! A bit later, Legos evolved into the "space" sets, which consisted mainly of the addition of wings, cockpit canopies, and more jet engines. This made it possible to build fighter ships, although they were still a pretty blocky. But if you wanted to build something that actually looked like something out of Star Wars, you were on your own. So that – and, more significantly, puberty --pretty much ended my involvement with Legos for a couple of decades. Come to find out that in 1999, the Star Wars line of Lego sets had their debut. Just a coincidence that The Phantom Menace came out that same year, right? Anyway, I didn't know any of this was going on until M. Edium started getting Lego catalogs in the mail, again with convenient timing -- just as he started getting into Star Wars.. It's like they know. Back in August, M. Edium came home from his first road trip with his grandparents as the proud owner of a Darth Vader's TIE fighter Lego set. Once he'd scammed them into buying it for him, he had a little trouble figuring out how he was gong to bring it home to us, since we'd given him strict instructions not to be scamming gifts out of his grandparents. At first he told them, "Don't tell my mom. It'll just confuse her." But then he came up with the story that he had received it as a reward for being extra-good, which worked great for the two or three days we believed it and by the time we learned the truth we were too impressed with his scamming skills to be mad. And actually, it came in handy for our own purposes. A day or two after he got back, the three of us were going on a camping trip to Wisconsin, and we weren't about to bring it along. Still, knowing it was waiting for him at home, and that the amount of time he had to wait before assembling it when we got back was directly proportional to his behavior, helped us keep him in line. Of course, I didn't let on that I was probably looking forward to building it as much as he was. They teach you some parenting skills in high school, but sometimes the most important one you learn there is how to hide what a dork you really are. We had a lot of fun putting it together after we got back, and it actually stayed together for a few weeks. But that was just the beginning. posted by M. Giant 6:49 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:My four year old is all about Star Wars, the Legos, and the Star Wars lego sets. Lately, he's been disassembling the Star Wars kits and building scenes from Indiana Jones with them instead. It's better than running with scissors, I figure.
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It wouldn't be so bad if they weren't ridiculously expensive.
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We just got that exact set for our nephew (5 years old) for Christmas. Most crucial: no Jar Jar or Anikin involved.
By Tuesday, December 15, 2009 Our Twentieth First Christmas Trash and I aren't exactly the most astute trend-watchers, but one trend we have been aware of is the rise and fall in popularity of "Our First Christmas" tree ornaments. You know, the ones that say "Our First Christmas" on them along with the year. And the reason we know this is because every year, we go out and buy ourselves one. They've been easier to find some years than others. One year we couldn't get one at all, and had to have "Our First Christmas" painted on a glass ball. Other years, it's impossible to find one with the year on it. So I drew it on, in ballpoint pen, and it's mostly stayed on. Since 1992, in fact. Some years, other people in the family get them for us, from Trash's mom to M. Edium's birth-grandfather. But the worst years are the ones where only nice, tasteful ones are available, because we prefer to collect the tackiest Our First Christmas ornaments possible. So this year, we left nothing to chance. In honor of our twentieth first Christmas, Trash got online and ordered a personalized Our First Christmas ornament, the kind where you fill in the fields and they print or paint it on the item before shipping it out to you. This is the first one we've gotten with our names on it. Intentionally misspelled, naturally. We'll always treasure that one especially. Of course we don't want to leave M. Edium out of this, so he's gotten a "Baby's First Christmas" ornament every year since he was M. Tiny. Now he's got six of them. And his latest one is personalized just like ours, from the same online retailer. Not that it went entirely smoothly. One evening last week, I got a phone call. From that online retailer. She wanted to confirm some of the information Trash had filled in. The name was correct, of course, but another bit of data had somehow gotten flagged. Specifically his weight. "Baby's not really 42 pounds, is he!?" the woman asked me with concern. Well, Baby is now. An Baby could probably tell her the entire plot of The Empire Strikes Back if she has time. I explained that this was an old family joke, and that he's been getting a Baby's First Christmas ornament every year. I didn't take up her time explaining about the ornaments Trash and I get, or our plan to keep getting them for M. Edium until he's old enough to get the joke (which is where he pretty much is now), continuing through the stage where he's embarrassed by it (the later he hits that phase, the happier he'll be) and on through the period where it's just one more stupid thing his parents do (like make sarcastic comments at the TV screen and kiss each other), until finally we're long gone and he's buying his own at age 83 and having them personalized with the name "M. Oldy." Still, the lady on the phone was deeply relived. "We were all thinking, 'that poor woman!'" she said. But sure enough, both of our ornaments arrived a few days later, and were given pride of place on the tree. God bless us, every one. posted by M. Giant 7:17 PM 6 comments 6 Comments:
That is the coolest tradition ever!
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Aw! That's adorable and awesome!
By Ha, "M.Oldy." I just laughed out loud.
By You guys are the coolest, and the dorkiest. Merry Christmas, M. family (it feels like Trash should have an M. name, too)
By Aww, I love a dorky tradition/ inside joke. And "M. Oldy" is genius! Many more Merry First Christmases to you all!
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I agree with Life in Pennies, I would love to see pictures.
By Saturday, December 12, 2009 Twelve Hour Photo Our local drugstore isn't really our local drugstore any more, and I'm not just saying it because it's part of a national chain. It's because we don't get our drugs there any more. A few years ago we got tired of 45-minute waits and screwed-up billing on our prescriptions, so we gave up on the pharmacy seven blocks from our house and started driving to another one with the same name over the door that's two and a half miles away. Unlike the one by our house, it's open 24 hours, has a drive-thru, and isn't staffed by morons. So our local drugstore is more like a convenience store. And, until last weekend, a photo place. Early Saturday morning, Trash got online and uploaded a couple of photos of M. Edium -- one by my parents and one by the photography professor who lives next door -- into some Christmas card templates and ordered eighty of them, to be picked up in an hour. Simple enough. An hour later, a guy from the store called and said it would be longer than an hour. He was really sorry, and promised to call us as soon as our pictures were ready. I was actually impressed by his candor, his proactiveness, and the way he made it so I didn't have to put on a coat yet. But then as the morning, and then the afternoon wore on -- a morning and an afternoon Trash had been planning to use to sign, address, and lick said Christmas cards -- Trash started to get impatient. She called the store. Now, here's where it gets confusing. At different points during this one call, there were several different situations going on, all of them mutually exclusive. They were, depending on who we were talking to and at what point at the call she was at: a) Currently being printed, because the machine was working again. b) Next in line to be printed as soon as the machine was working again. c) Not even on the list of projects to be printed, whether the machine was running or not. Really, the only good news is that this was the photo department fucking this up rather than the pharmacy, because I'd rather have this situation with pictures than with medication. Twelve hours after the initial order, we got a call with the good news that the machine had worked for a while, although it had since broken again, and that our picture order had been moved to the front of the line from where it had previously been at the front of the line yet not actually in queue. I headed up to pick up the order, expecting a discount. Instead, they told me that a bunch of extra copies had been printed, and they weren't charging us for the extra envelopes they were giving us to go with them. 200 of them, they claimed. Then we got home and there were 100 envelopes, 35 of which were already glued shut. At this point, the only good thing I can say about this photo department is that it is, as previously mentioned, only seven blocks away. I drove back over and asked for some more envelopes. Oddly, they gave me a box of envelopes that had our name written in marker on the printed label, as well as en entire timeline of the order that had clearly been added to at different stages throughout the day. I considered trying to interpret it, but I'm no archaeologist. And all through these interactions, the store manager seemed annoyed, which I understand, but acted like it was my fault, which I don't. So that's how our local convenience store/photo developer/ex-pharmacy became our local convenience store/ex-photo developer/ex-pharmacy. I hope I don't one day have to post about a three-day shaving cream run or something, because I don't want to have to start driving two miles for everything else we posted by M. Giant 9:23 PM 2 comments 2 Comments:
I feel your pain, having had extremely similar experiences myself, though not with a pharmacy's photo dept, but rather a very large discount retailer's photo dept, right down to the "well the machine made extra copies of your order and you can have them for FREE!" though in our case, this turned out to be about 8 times the number of our original photos. I had already ordered duplicates of some of the shots for grandparents, birthfamily, etc, so to have eight times the order was a huge waste of trees and ink. I mean, my kid is cute and all, but that was way too many pictures. I spent a week and I don't even remember how much money on postage to send off copies of said pictures to every single person to whom we're related, as well as folks to whom we're not. At the end of it all, I still had a sizable stack of copies of the pictures left. Grrrr.
By Takes slightly longer than a day, but I highly recommend Vistaprint whom we discovered this year. (That link has a "friend" promotion but you can go directly too). At least you don't have to drive anywhere and they have good results...
By Tuesday, December 08, 2009 Gerd Heavens I didn't have an Internet pseudonym for Chao's girlfriend Karin when they first moved up here. It was damned inconvenient, because we were hanging out with them a lot and you just can't force an Internet pseudonym. Try it and you end up with what I called Chao's former girlfriend, "Disqueen." Chao would probably deny it, but I suspect that was a major factor in the end of the relationship. Fortunately, like so many seemingly intractable problems, this one solved itself. One time Karin was hanging out with Trash in our basement. She asked Trash to recommend a good OB in town, since they were living up here now, and Trash was happy to refer Karin to her own. Karin's only question was, "Will she take care of my gerd?" Trash was not aware of the term "gerd," but given that they were talking about OB/GYNs, she made the natural assumption. I mean, given how disrespectful some common names for lady bits can be, it's surprising more women don't make up their own. Which is what Trash thought Karin had done. And for what it's worth, I think Trash kept an admirably straight face about it. She simply said that yes, Karin's gerd would be in good hands. "Even though she's an OB she'll still deal with the gerd?" Karin pressed. Trash assured her that she would. "Because some OBs don't deal with the gerd." Finally Trash asked, "Okay, what do you mean by your 'gerd?'" Karin meant "gastro-esophagal reflux disorder." GERD for short. There was much hilarity over the misunderstanding. I think Trash wanted to co-opt the word "gerd" for her own purposes, but I co-opted them for mine instead. Anyway, today would have been Gerd's 29th birthday. Yes, she was born the day John Lennon died. We miss her more than we miss John Lennon. 
posted by M. Giant
1:23 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Just wanted to send good wishes your way as you honor and remember your friend.
By Thanks for making me cry - both in laughter from remembering that story (and the night we took that photo you posted) and because I still miss her terribly. Damn you and your way with words...
By Thursday, December 03, 2009 Story Time A couple of weeks ago, Trash went out of town for the weekend, leaving M. Edium and me doing the bachelor thing again.  This time we decided to make a little road trip. My mom had read that they have a T. Rex skeleton at a museum in St. Cloud, a little over an hour northwest of here. So we made a day of it. I packed us a lunch and everything. Of course, on the way up there I saw a restaurant in Albertville called Space Aliens Grill and Bar, so obviously packing a lunch had been a waste of time. After the museum, where the sight of a complete, full-sized skeleton triggered nightmare flashbacks for me (you can't fault the model for accuracy, at least) and a visit to the playroom resulted in M. Edium bonding with Krazy-Glue speed to a 7-foot stuffed caterpillar (Melissa & Doug, no longer available, and believe me I looked), we started the trek back home, as excited about lunch as anything else we had planned for the day. I was expecting the place to be a chaotic zoo like the Pizza Planet restaurant from Toy Story, but it's actually more upscale than that. The birthday parties were tucked back into a side room and the game room is way in the back, so it's possible to actually walk across the place without getting kindergartners in your sneaker treads. The food is standard Applebee's, but with sci-fi names for stuff and French fries that come in an antigravity cone (which is actually held upright with a wire rack). Speaking of the game room, M. Edium kind of cleaned up back there. It's the kind where all the games feed out tickets depending on how well you do, thus serving the vital function of being Junior's introduction to legalized gambling. Then you can exchange the tickets for stuff in the glass case by the front door. I hadn't given M. Edium that many coins for the games, so the number of tickets he had fell far short of what would have been required for, say, an original 1977 metal Star Wars lunch box with thermos. What he could afford was a cheap little spiral notebook with an alien's head printed on the cover. Three of them, in fact. He wanted to use them to write stories. And later, after we'd done everything we planned to do that day and more, we were on our way to the grocery store for one last errand. He busily sat in the back the whole way, composing his tale word by word under the dome light. When we got there, he asked me to wait a minute. The story was not finished yet (which meant some of the ten or so miniature pages hadn't quite been filled), but that didn't take much longer. Then, at bedtime, the story he'd written was among the ones I read him to help him get to sleep. Now, I'm not going to post the story here, because I don't have permission, but here's a short excerpt: Mom mom dad mom cats dad He's got two blank notebooks left, but doesn't seem in much of a hurry to follow up with a sophomore effort. Which is understandable. One needs to give the creative batteries time to replenish. I'm so proud that he wanted to take a crack at what he sees his dad doing all the time, and coming up with a first draft that was better than most of mine to boot. Trash was proud, too, and sorry she missed it (although she read the story to him at bedtime the next night when she got home). She didn't even feel bad that M. Edium had emulated my career before taking a shot at hers. I kind of wish he would soon, though. A lot of our paperbacks could use a little sorting and cataloguing. posted by M. Giant 3:29 PM 3 comments 3 Comments:Make sure you hold onto his earliest efforts. My parents kept EVERYTHING, beginning with a story about bunnies, which I wrote (and illustrated!) in kindergarten. It's made lovely blackmail material, since they drag it out whenever possible. I plan to do the same thing to my kids.
By I am jealous. I always wanted a relationship with my dad like you have with M. Edium. I hope it lasts when he becomes a teen.
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this caterpillar?
By Tuesday, December 01, 2009 Doorbusted, Part II: The Doorbustening I mentioned before that pretty much the only thing that went right in my midnight Black Friday trip to Toys R Us was scooting across the middle of the store to nab the first item on my list. Because from there, my goal was to head to the back right corner of the store to grab something else. Which proved pretty much impossible, because see previous entry about the aisles being backed up like a centenarian's GI tract. The main aisle I was in only went one way tonight. Maneuvering a cart upstream was like trying to drive a semi the wrong way up a gridlocked freeway. However many people they were keeping waiting outside, it wasn't enough. So I ducked back into one of the side aisles that fed off the main one, which wasn't much better. For one thing, the traffic there was almost as bad. For another, it didn't go back as far as I needed to, so I had to fight the main aisle traffic anyway, but at least this time I had the added impetus of an impatient woman behind me, wanting to go the same direction and giving me occasional pushes in the ass with her cart. Finally I got my hands on the second item. The deal was to get those two, and then call home, where Trash was serving as mission control, with the sales brochure as her flight manual. I told her I had accomplished our two primary goals. "Oh, good," she said. "Why don't you go back over to the Star Wars section and look for the lightsabers that are on sale. And then there's an MP3 player you might want to check out. Oh, and wander by the art supplies if you get a chance." She. Did. Not. Get. It. Still, I gamely followed her instructions, and called her a half hour later. "I got the lightsaber," I panted, about twenty feet from where we had last rung off. I didn't tell her what I'd had to do to get it, because I'd been forced to abandon my cart some distance behind me and had to get back to it before it was emptied for me. The small side aisle I was in, you see, had been backfilled by people waiting to check out. Now I was understanding what those arrows of blue masking tape on the floor were all about. Trash suggested I just sort of browse around. I could have explained to her that this was not an environment where anybody was going to be able to move anywhere without firm, definite purpose, and possibly also mace. I could have told her how much I was, at that moment, wishing the lightsaber in my hand was real. Instead I just told her, "Right now I'm just worried about getting out alive." But on my way to where I thought another checkout over line might start, back on the other side of the store, I was lucky enough to get a chance to fight my way past the art supplies (I was fighting my way through there anyway), where I saw that everything on sale had already been snapped up. So I drifted toward the front of the store, where there was a deceptively clear area opened up before the checkout lanes. "Are you ready to check out?" a store employee asked me. I was, in more than one sense of the phrase. He said, "The line starts over there." I looked in the direction he was pointing. Through a wavering haze created by the vast distances, I could see another employee holding a sign that says, "LINE STARTS HERE." He was holding it high above his head, which was the only reason I could see it over the horizon. So I schlepped my cart all the way to the back corner of the store -- it was all over in this area but some mopping up and body disposal -- where that employee added me to the end of the line. A line that wound through the baby baths, all the way to the back corner, through baby clothes, and then back and forth in a zigzag pattern that led through seven or eight side aisles. It was at this point I texted Trash, "NEVER AGAIN." She asked if I wanted to just skip it. I said there was no way I was going to abandon this ordeal, having already gotten as much as ten percent through it. And I didn't begrudge Trash getting to stay home. It's not even like she had a choice; M. Edium was asleep in his bed, and someone had to stay with him. But I did find myself wishing that there was someone she could call at this late hour, just to sit downstairs and read a book in case he woke up. That way, she would be free to get in the car, drive down to the store, find me, and kill me. I think I actually left my body for a while there, as I did the slowest browse in history through board games, books, and drinks. But even then, I didn't go far, because even if I couldn't stay in my corporeal form, I wasn't about to leave my cart. At one point, I seemed to sense myself coasting swiftly downhill toward a bright light in the shape of an unprotected car door panel. I was brought back to myself by the observation that the last aisle the line went through was the snack aisle, and I was both astounded by the nefarious cleverness of this and curious as to how many empty boxes and wrappers would be rung up that evening before everyone got out of there. Finally, I reached a register, checked out more quickly than I ever have before at that store. When I got outside with my merchandise, there were still people waiting to get in. "Abandon all hope!" I wanted to call out to them. But any interest or concern I might have felt for any of my fellow humans had vanished upon witnessing an argument between a woman who wanted to move her cart and another woman who wanted it to stay right the fuck where it was. So how long did my twenty-minute shopping run last? Well, let's put it this way: I wrote and posted this as soon as I got home. posted by M. Giant 10:20 PM 1 comments 1 Comments:Waaiiiiitt a minute .... you got to the sale before midnight, and the post was dated after ten p.m. You were there for ten hours? Surely I've done the math wrong ....... I waited in line for two hours once, and was ready to stab someone by the end.
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