Nebulous Mooch

When I was young I sometimes pretended to be sick to get out of going to school. Don’t act surprised. We’ve all done it before. You remember waking up one lovely spring morning, rolling out of bed, walking up to your mother, bent over and grimacing, and saying, “Mom, I don’t think I can go to school today. My stomach hurts.” You where sure to make your voice sound weak and pitiful. When you remembered you added a cough. Usually, it wouldn’t work, but it was worth a try.

I ‘m thinking about the old days of faking illness and playing hooky because today I’m sick. Faking sick is a lot better than being sick. Missing school is a lot better than missing work, especially when you don’t get sick pay.

One of my friends told me that when he was in grade school, he won a contest. As one of the contest winners, he would get the chance to stand in a box in which money was being blown all around him for one minute. Any money he could grab during that minute he could keep. He was a faking sick expert as a child. He unknowingly faked sick on the day the money box was in school. The other contest winners got there chances to grab the money, but he missed his. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity. There were no second chances. The box didn’t hang around school for a couple of days. While he was in bed eating chicken noodle soup and watching cartoons, he was missing the chance to grab as many one dollar bills as possible. He was missing the money box!

As I spend the day alternating between sleeping and watching archived episodes of Frontline on the internet, I wonder what I’m missing. The world outside my apartment keeps going, while I slip in and out of sleep. I hope today wasn’t the day. I hope I haven’t missed my only chance to be in the money box.

My husband is nine years older than me. I like to remind him of this as much as possible. Not because the age difference is a big deal to me, but because I like to see him squirm when I use the word older in reference to him. My father is 15 years older than my mother. I think that my grandfather was nearly 25 years older than my grandmother–now that’s a big age difference! I can’t even imagine. So, I’m keeping the family tradition alive.

Though we have an age difference, people usually assume we are the same age. They are shocked when they discover my husband’s age. Upon finding out that my husband was 41, one of my friends sat on our sofa and said, “That’s amazing!” repeatedly. I guess he does look young for his age.

One day an elderly woman started talking to us. She thought we looked like a nice couple. She talked to us for a little bit. As she talked, I was stunned by what she was saying. First she told my husband that he looked too young to be married.

“How could you be married? You’re so young,” she said to my husband. Then she turned to me and said, “Don’t worry. You have such beautiful skin, you’ll never age. White skin ages so fast. One day you’ll meet in the middle.” What’s that suppose to mean?

I must look older than he does. I looked at myself extra hard in the mirror that night after washing my face. I didn’t see many wrinkles–just a few lines under my eyes. Are these few wrinkles enough to make me look older than him? I hope not. I’m not into beauty products, but maybe I should look into buying some anti-aging cream. I could solve the problem by stressing my husband out so much that he gets some gray hair and wrinkles, but I would never do that.

Only two weeks into the hurricane season, and we’ve already had our first named storm in the Gulf. This causes me some distress. The stress comes from uncertainty. If someone could tell me exactly how many storms there would be and where and when they would hit, I would be fine with living in a hurricane zone.

That doesn’t happen. Instead, we receive vague information. I sit glued to the T.V. watching the weather man. I got to know all of their names during last year’s hurricane season. They show a cone that is supposed to show the general path of the storm. Then they show a map with a lot of random lines that mean nothing to the average person. A storm could jog north or south. It could weaken or strengthen. It could flood you out. It could blow your house away. How can I prepare?

I organized hurricane kits for everyone in the family. I packed them with flashlights, batteries, clothes, water, food, and toilet paper (in case we run out of food). I thought we needed true survival food, so I got beef jerky and trail mix. The true survivors always have trail mix.

There are no good closets for me to hide in in our apartment. I’ve tested them out. They’re all too small and too packed with stuff. I’m just going to have to tough it out and act like an adult. While I’m an excellent actress, I don’t excel at adulthood. I’m just going to have to give it a try.

This might be hard for you to believe, but my husband and I weigh the same. Our weight fluctuates a few pounds now and again, but basically it’s the same. He constantly struggles to gain weight. I constantly struggle to loose weight.

We don’t have a scale, so we depend on the large scale at the grocery store entrance to help us keep track of our weight. We celebrate, on the rare occasions that our weight difference is five pounds, him weighing more than me. We are saddened, when I weigh more than him.

When we eat at my parents’ house, we weigh ourselves before and after the meal. I usually gain three pounds after eating a meal, and he gains two. I swear, he eats more than me. His body just seems to use the food more quickly.

I don’t like to obsess about my weight, even though it seems like I do. When I go out to eat, I want to eat something I wouldn’t normally eat at home. I usually order something heavy and bad for me. My husband is health conscious and tries to order the best thing for him on the menu. Usually at restaurants our orders get confused. The person who brings out the food will put the grilled salmon with steamed broccoli and wild rice in front of me, and the hamburger and fries in front of him. Now that I think about it, my hamburger and his grilled salmon, suggest that I’m not really trying to loose weight at all, and he’s not that interested in gaining weight.

Still, we talk about our weight a lot. He occasionally lifts weights to bulk up. He swears that he can see his arms getting bigger after doing seven chin-ups. I really don’t think so. I will continue my apartment running, in an attempt to slim down. Maybe I’ll loose ten pounds. Maybe he’ll gain ten pounds. Maybe, we’ll just stay the same.

I used to think that I hated the beach. For some reason, I thought that the sand was too annoying, because it got into everything. I also thought that the beach wore me out. Even though I grew up at the Jersey shore, I hardly ever went to the beach. You would think that I would have loved the beach as a child. I enjoyed seafood and aquariums. Why wouldn’t I enjoy the beach? I think the complaints about the sand and fatigue weren’t really mine. They were my mother’s reason for hating the beach. She passed these reasons on to me. She will be angry when she reads this, but the truth is sometimes hard.

Last summer, I rediscovered the beach. The water in the Gulf is warm. The waves are gentle. The sand is like fine, white powder. It’s fun to be in the water. I enjoy that much more than just lying on the sand. It’s good to get some sun. It’s good to spend some time with family and friends. I like to pack a picnic lunch, and eat it just before I head home.

I spend much of my time in the water just standing around. I try to float, but floating is hard for me because my butt sinks. I think that standing is safer than swimming because all of the splashing around required to swim might attract sharks. I’m terrified of sharks. Sometimes while standing in the water, I get an intense feeling that a shark is approaching. I have to stand perfectly still until the feeling passes.

I saw a show about sharks on the Discovery Channel. On that show, they said that sometimes when sharks bite, they aren’t trying to eat you, they are just investigating. They don’t have hands, so they use their mouths to handle objects. They are curious creatures who want to check things out and see what’s going on.

In my opinion, sharks should have hands. What kind of oversight was that? Why would God make an animal curious and not give it hands? I don’t have razor sharp teeth sticking out of my palms. If I did, I wouldn’t go around touching everything. If I were going to create a shark, I would give it retractable hands. That way they could retract them when they weren’t using them and they wouldn’t interfere with the sharks streamlined design. Since sharks don’t have hands, I think it would be appropriate for them to keep their mouths to themselves. If they did, I would be able to enjoy the beach much more.

Sharks or no sharks, I’m going to be a regular at the beach this summer. I don’t know what the odds are of getting attacked by a shark. I’ll just do my best not to look like a seal. I hope that I’m not pushing my luck.