Sadly, I sometimes find that being friendly and nice isn’t always wise. I say this because I often suddenly find myself in the midst of someone’s insane elevator sales pitch. People either want to sell me Jesus or Amway. In either case I must have a lost and desperate look in my eye. One time I was waiting in the bathroom line at Chevy’s. Some homely talkative girl struck up a conversation about what I like to do for fun and I think at that point I might have known better. She asked me if I liked to play volleyball. Well, surely. Oh…great! Her church was having a barbeque and she’d love if I came with her and played volleyball and then we could talk some about the Lord. No thanky. I think she tried to give me her number. I have a near constant stream of gypsies trying to read my fortune. The Jehovah’s, however, might finally have gotten the picture after my brother answered the door topless and scratched the hair on his chest.
This morning I was walking Nacho in the park and came across this gal with her annoyingly yappy dog. I’ve seen her before. She doesn’t want to violate the “dogs must be on leashes” law so she lets her dog run around hooked up to his leash, only the clip part bashes into people’s legs and today the stupid leash rolled over Nacho’s poo. After some B.S. dog-related chit-chat, she paused and then burst out with, “hey, I have a business opportunity.” This is never a good way to begin a sentence. It reeks of desperation. She then went on to explain that she works with this company that is “similar to Amazon” and allows you to buy things you buy anyway (“like toilet paper”) at wholesale and then you get a check. Wait, wait. That is too good to be true. Anyhow, she then told me it was called Amway and that she was having a product party Monday if I wanted to come over.
This disturbed me. I thought we were having a nice time. She reminds me of someone I would have been friends with when I was a sweet lil kid. And she tried to RECRUIT me. I felt so used.
Halloween has sadly come and gone. I hate that about holidays. There is so much build up and then they happen and then it’s over. And you have to wait through the drought of spring and summer for the good ones to come up again. Labor Day? Bah. I had a bigger night than I had expected. This is always a good thing. The next day, not so much, but you sure do enjoy it when it’s happening. I was a very unsuccessful cupcake. The only recognizable thing was a big sparkly cherry I pinned to my wig. It was sort of embarrassing but way less so than wearing some lame “Sexy Fill-in-the-Blank” costume. At the first party I attended all the girls were sexy. Sexy gangster, sexy Red Riding Hood, sexy Greek goddess, sexy Egyptian, sexy border patrol agent. The border patrol agent was actually with me, so she might not count. And all the guys had weapons: guns, swords, toilet plungers. I was an unsexy and pacifistic cupcake.
My boyfriend’s friend played beer pong at some bar and was trying to talk to some group of girls when he found that he was puking in his Optimus Prime mask. The mask had a little breathing hole and some puke started oozing out. I think I might have run away.
My friend Esteban went to a pumpkin carving costume party and someone there had a complete psychotic episode while scooping the slimy guts out of a pumpkin. I’m really only guessing it was that that set him off. I hate those guts myself and I almost want to pitch a serious fit when I have to deal with that muck. They had to call an ambulance and hide the carving knives and Esteban had to have a very serious conversation with an EMT while dressed as some freaky weirdo with a skull strapped to his head and blood seeping out of his eyes.
I was listening to Fresh Air the other day and good old Terry was interviewing a woman who worked at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Her job as the emergency room doctor was to determine whether patients were at risk to themselves or others. She wrote about how sometimes the smells she encountered were awful. She had taught herself to self-hypnotize and would convince herself “the smell of urine is not offensive to me.” She did say, however, that it’s really the smell of fungus that is the worst. For some reason the hypnosis didn’t work on the fungus. Ahhh, the fungus among us.
