I was at Target digging through the clearance bathing suits since they were all like $5 and there were 1000 of them, and if there’s anything I need it’s more mismatched bikini parts that don’t fit properly. So I was there for a while. While I was standing there, a woman and her husband and an older lady that I later understood to be her mother were shopping in the women’s underwear section. The woman was on one of those scooters with a giant basket in the front. She was trying to steer it around a really tight corner and it stopped. She said “Well, it died on me!” She slapped her thighs in exasperation and looked around with her big moony eyes, searching for sympathy from me and the two preteen girls who were combing through the bikini top spaghetti. Her husband and mother were like “What, really? OH NO! It died?! Whaaat?!” She started heaving back and forth in the seat like she was going to push-start the damn thing, like rock it back to life or something, while her mother and husband mashed the buttons and turned the key every which way. The mother dropped a bunch of very large women’s briefs into the front basket, threw her hands in the air, and said “Well, I’ll go get us another one.”There was a good two more minutes of rocking and button-smashing, peppered with the lady saying “Well it up and died! It just died! I can’t believe this! It just up and died! Didn’t do nothin to it!” Finally, the thing revved to life and shot forward, knocking her backwards in the seat a little bit. “Whoaaa!” she yelped, before driving onward, leaving her husband in the dust. “It’s workin now!” she called over her shoulder. He picked up the several shapewear undergarments that had been hanging from the edge of the basket and were knocked loose by her sudden lurch through the sock aisle and ran after her.
Several minutes after that (I’m telling you, there were a LOT of bathing suits to look at), the mother comes whurring around the corner in a new scooter. She said, to nobody in particular, “I’m lookin for the girl whose scooter died.” Right when she said that, she lost her ability to make the replacement scooter work. Maybe those things have some kind of sensor for when something is too close, so that nobody runs over a small child in Target? Anyway, it was stuck in the EXACT same place. Unbelievable. “Well now THIS ONE’s dead!” she huffed to, I guess, me? To Jesus? I don’t know. I was minding my own bidness (and watching from between a bunch of extra small string bikini bottoms on the other side of the rack). So SHE started rocking back and forth like she was trying to get an old Honda up a snowy hill, and it wasn’t working. “This is RIDICULOUS. Just AWFUL!” she kept saying, and “Oh I just can’t believe this! RIDICULOUS!” Banging on buttons, turning key off and on, shaking the steering handles back and forth the whole time. I guess she rocked it far enough around the tight corner for the sensor or magic or whatever makes those things stop short of killing people wore off, and off SHE shot off into the socks section, and hollered “OH it’s workin, okay!”
I tell you I was crying tears of joy by the time they were all gone, had to wipe my face on some off-brand Spanx.
She’s Not There
A couple of weeks ago, I was walking Dog down the street when I saw a former coworker, current neighbor, walking down the other side. I realized who she was right when we glanced at each other’s faces, I knew she saw me and that I knew her. So I said hello, said her name, said it louder, said hello again, but when all she did was flip her hair and ignore me, I eventually said “Uhh, okay.”
She’s a weirdo. I mean, a certified weirdo. I’m pretty sure if you went to her house, there would be a certificate for Weirdoism on her wall, in a nice frame. I couldn’t even bother with being annoyed or hurt about her openly ignoring me when I thought about other things I know about her. Then I realized that it’s possible that I’m not always the weird one in the situation, sometimes other people are weirder! So here’s some stuff about this creep:
- She’s kind of a suicide pig, in the way that she seems almost excited when something awful or tragic happens. Case in point: when I worked with her in retail, I overheard her yelling at another employee, telling him to do something. He protested, I think he was saying it wasn’t his job or whatever, so to get him to do it, she said “LOOK! MY GRANDPA IS IN THE HOSPITAL! WOULD YOU PLEASE JUST FUCKING DO THIS?” Anyone else would have been dumbfounded, or would have gone “ohmygod I’m sorryyyy YES of course I will do this unrealistic and unfair thing you are asking of me because it would make me a dick if I didn’t!” But this fucking guy, this superstar, he said something I will never forget: “I don’t care about your grandpa! I’m not doing this. Bye.” AMAZING. She stomped away and hid out for the rest of the night. Nobody really minded because it wasn’t any kind of new thing for her to be crying in a corner somewhere at work.
- I can remember two separate times when she claimed that her drink was tampered with at a bar. Two. Separate. Times. Either this girl has a hard time keeping track of her drinks, or she can’t hold her liquor, or both. I don’t know. I just remember getting really tired of hearing how the ambulance had to come because she felt dizzy. At this very moment, she’s vaguebooking about “an assault” that she apparently suffered, rallying the troops to rack up enough Facebook likes to convince herself to live or something. God damn. I mean, I guess it’s possible for a single person to be a constant victim of attempted sexual and physical assaults, but I find it really hard to believe, especially when that person is a whore for drama. My grandpa is in the hospital!!!
- I had this Tori Amos record, it was a bunch of club remixes of “In the Springtime of His Voodoo.” It was probably the dumbest piece of Tori Amos merchandise I ever purchased, but I bought it when I was like fourteen and on vacation to Lake of the Ozarks with my parents and it had a sticker on it that said “RARE” and I wanted it SO THERE. Anyway, when we worked together, she was a club dj. I mentioned the unts-unts nature of the record to her and she said she would looooove to borrow it and could she? Of course. So I bring it to her and a couple of months pass. I ask her about it and she’s all, “Oh, I’ll get it to you. Oh sure, I’ll look for it. Let me see if I can find it tonight. Yeah, I just forgot, I’ll get it to you.” So I wait and wait, and eventually I get the feeling that she’s doing the thing people do when they want to keep that book you loaned them, and fuck that shit, so I asked her again, “Can you find my record please?” Then she came out with it: this long, detailed, over-involved story about how she was walking down the street? In the rain? And guess what! I fell down! My record bag opened and ALL of my records fell out into a puddle! Your record got ruined! I’m SO SO SORRY. I will buy you another one!” Something about that story smelled stank to me, and I think at that point I already had this girl’s number. So I kept asking her where she would buy me one, did she check online at this place, at that place? Did she look at this record store? They might have it! Well, eventually, I annoyed the shit out of her. She came in one day and, without saying a word, threw a record at me. I remember it landed in my lap and flipped a pen out of my hand. She turned and walked away before I could say anything. Guess what? It was the original one, the one she supposedly ruined. Being lied to as an adult, by another adult, over something like this, is one of the most awkward things that can happen to you.
There’s all kinds of other little things, the kind of stuff that attention whores do. Just tons of that kind of shit. One day I will sit down and make a list of it, but that day is not today. And I think the record incident is pretty indicative of Underlying Weirdness. So that’s probably all you need to know.
Anyway. Now she’s living half a block away from me. She won’t speak to me in public. Which is super weird, because the other day she was standing in front of my house talking on the phone, and I was about to step out my front door, so I was just like…do I say hello again? Do I bother? Will she speak to me this time? What’s the point if she doesn’t want me to talk to her? Bitch, get away from my house! A few days after that, I was waiting to cross a street and suddenly felt really creeped out for some reason. I expected to turn around and see a 4-foot tall Mexican dude in a tank top sitting behind me on a tiny bike, rolling back and forth, licking his lips and making kissy sounds, since that is what usually happens in my neighborhood, but no. It was her! Standing there staring at me! Not speaking! LIKE A TOTAL FUCKING CREEP.
Parts of this situation are kind of intricate, I guess. Up until his death from cancer last year, one of our mutual friends was her roommate. The day he died, all I could think about was her. Like what if she genuinely needed something? Was she okay? But she’s so repellent and odd, I didn’t know how to reach out, even though she was less than a block away. Eventually, with all the Facebook advertising she did after his death, tagging him in all of her posts, making sure Internet people knew she’d lost something, all the memorializing and eulogizing and self-masturbatory public mourning shit, I got annoyed and kind of shut off. Suicide piggery just bums me out. I’m starting to realize that some people literally don’t have any other mechanism for dealing with death, that they need to share it with everyone in order to get past it, but I still can’t feel comfortable with it. Anyway, I kind of forgot about her. Until his memorial service, which she did not attend, but texted several attendees to say that she was in the hospital and didn’t knowww what was wrooong and neither do the doctooors! Apparently, not much was wrong, since she’s alive and well and skulking around my neighborhood probably this very minute, looking for someone to train her stinkeye on. But anyway. She wasn’t there.
Anyway, blah, this sounds more like shit talking than blogging, but who the hell else would I tell about this? Also, the two have always been the same for me.
Tastes like vintage.
I just want to direct your attention to this for a moment:
ARE YOU FOR SERIOUS. Can it someday be my job to drive around the state in a vintage camper and sell cupcakes? Because I would not mind that. I might also set up a little bookmobile type of thing, but that depends on how large of a trailer I could get. Also how many puppies I would be sharing it with. You know.
Cupcake Heartbreak 