Nebulous Mooch

The following event occurred in December of 2010, but I kept forgetting to post it.

On a shopping trip to one of my mother’s favorite stores, The Homing Shopping Network Outlet Store, my sister found these crazy shoes.

They are obviously the results of a love affair between a sandal and a boot. I’m going to refer to them as bandals. I can’t figure out when you might wear a shoe of this nature. It seems to me that if you wore your bandals when it was warm outside your ankles would sweat. On the other hand if you wore your bandals when it was cold your toes would freeze. So I guess bandals are designed with moderate temperatures in mind, but I’m reluctant to expose my toes even in moderate temperatures. Bandals must not be for people who tend to have cold feet.

My sister has a knack for finding the funniest clothes in the store. On this shopping trip she also found a strange cardigan configuration that resembled bat’s wings. It looked something like this.

Okay, maybe my drawing doesn’t quite do it justice. The cardigan looked more like this.

She also took me to the mall at one point to show me a particularly unfortunate outfit a mannequin at Forever 21 was sporting. It looked something this.

Actually, it looked worse than that, but with artistic talents as advanced as mine it’s hard to draw something that looks as terrible as that outfit.

I had to buy a new pair of jeans recently and I found that it is much easier to find clothes to laugh at then it is to find clothes that I would actually wear.

My Grandmother

My Sister

ESPN’s Sports Center was playing in the coin laundry the other day. We’d gone to the bank while the clothes were washing. When we returned Sport’s Center was on and my husband loudly declared, “This is the best laundry ever! The other men in the place agreed.

As we put our clothes in the dryers, my husband kept one eye on the television. I don’t think he heard a single thing I said to him.

I watched one of the men in the laundry try to fold his clothes. His head was turned up to the screen–his eyes fixed. He ended up kind of balling up his clothes into twisted heaps instead of folding them because he couldn’t pay enough attention to what he was doing.

I decided to try to watch some of Sports Center as we waited for the clothes to dry. It was turned up too loud for me to be able to comprehend anything I tried to read in the newspaper. They claim that men don’t talk as much as women–I don’t believe that’s true, my father and my husband both have a tendency to talk and talk–but when it comes to sports men can sure ramble on and on and on. On the show, they’d show a play and then everyone on the show made comments about it. Never mind, that most of them seemed to say pretty much the same thing. They all took their turns to talk and talk and talk. How much can you possible say about a football game? Apparently, one game can be thoroughly discussed for hours on end.

Once the football part of Sports Center was over and they were discussing baseball, the level of excitement waned and the men in the laundry were able to concentrate on folding clothes or talking to their wives.

I don’t understand what’s so great about football. It doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t want to play it or watch others play it. I certainly don’t want to talk about it or watch others talk about it. If you want to spend three hours watching a game and another couple of hours listening to people talk about the game you just watched, that’s your business. Everyone has a vice. Some people smoke. Some drink. Some people watch football. Some people smoke and drink while watching football.

After much consideration, I’ve decided to take my apartment running to the next level–the great outdoors. This of course terrifies me because of the heat (though it is fall, temperatures are still hitting the 90′s in lovely Florida) and the dogs. Dogs chase anything that’s running. A couple of weeks ago, I decided to pull on a sports bra, lace up my running shoes and brave the great outdoors. Don’t worry I also put on a pair of shorts. I’m not interested in streaking.

When I told my husband that I was going to start running in the mornings, he was excited to come along. My husband runs outside on a regular basis already, so I knew running with him might be embarrassing for me.

By nine in the morning the heat is already oppressive. My husband bounds along smiling the whole way, while I feel like I’m going to pass out before we even get to the corner. At about four minutes out,I ‘m already asking how much time we have left. Sweat is stinging my eyes and my lungs are burning. He’s barely breaking a sweat and isn’t out of breath at all.

“Are you alright?” he asks.

“Yeah, ” I manage to say through desperate pants for air. I want to say, “Do I look alright to you?!”

When we get home he goes on and on about how great he feels. I just want to pass out. What makes running outside so much harder than apartment running? Is it the heat? I don’t know but I’ll keep trying. I ran a whole fifteen minutes without stopping on Monday. Today I ran for seventeen minutes. Don’t scoff. It was hard. Maybe I’ll be able to run for twenty minutes nonstop on Friday. Maybe I’ll die from heat stroke. Can you die from that?

In movies about dogs and cats, why are the cats always the bad guys? What’s wrong with cats? I like cats. We always had pet cats when I was growing up. They are independent and mysterious. Some call them aloof, but they just don’t understand cats.

There is a cat that lives outside our apartment. She sleeps under our balcony. Sometimes she sits at our sliding glass door and cries to be let in. She’s a strangly patterned cat. She’s not quite gray and not quite brown. When we go outside, we have to be on the alert because sometimes she tries to slip into the house.

Yesterday she did just that. My husband ran inside to grab sometime he forgot–he’s always forgetting something. When he turned around to leave she had just crept into the front door. My husband said that she was looking all wide-eyed and skiddish. He quickly chased her out.

I like this cat. We’ve talked about adopting her but none of us can really make the commitment. I don’t want to house train her. I don’t want to clean a litter box. I don’t want to pay for vet bills. I think she might already belong to someone anyway. Even though she’s not wearing a collar, she looks so well groomed.

She disappears for a few days at a time and then she comes back. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has more than one home. Cats like that adopt people. She’s probably adopted a few to suit her various needs.

Today our stove blew up. Well to put it in a less dramatic way, one of our burners shorted out. Saying it like that doesn’t do justice to the tremendous bang and large amount of sparks that were produced by this event. I’d turned the stove on and went to set a pan on it. As soon as the pan touched the burner the sparks started flying.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m not a cool and collected person in situations like this. I’m afraid of fire and afraid of getting burned. I didn’t learn how to light a match until I was nineteen. I’m still afraid to light a cigarette lighter. Every time I cook, I’m afraid of starting a fire. I run through what to do if there is a fire over and over again in my mind.

When this happened, I was cool as a cucumber. With sparks flying through the air, I took the pan off the burner. As my husband tried to turn off the stove, I opened the breaker box and turned off the circuit. No problem.

If I’d been alone, I would’ve curled up and a ball and sobbed after that happened. We had company at the time so I went on with the conversation like nothing out of the ordinary had happened. That’s what you do when you’re cool or, at least, pretending to be cool like me.