Sunday, March 11, 2012

Saturday At Costco

Saturday is not the day to go shopping at Costco if you don't like crowds...unless you can get in and out in a hurry when they first open.  OF(Old Friend of undesirable snackage fame) and I chose poorly.  We braved the Costco crowd to get stuff we could have lived without.  My necessities included dried mangoes, almonds, Asian pears, cat food, cat litter, and bread.  OF's list was half & half, t shirt, skort, beer, cat litter, strawberries, and some kind of healthy looking pre-made salad...she looked for her favorite humus dip but alas...they were out of it...for the second time in a row.   All of these things we could have waited to get and my frustration level wouldn't have reached a near all time high.  Every time I choose poorly like this I swear I'll never do it again...but I do...over and over and over...obviously I'm insane.

I can't get over the fact that so many of the shoppers are completely oblivious to the people around them.  Most of them don't even have the decency to apologize or even look sheepish when their loitering at the snackage stations forces everyone else to wait on them.  Have people always been this rude, obnoxious, and self centered or do I just notice it now because I'm old and impatient?  Am I'm just being self centered?  Being forced to wait for all the snackage seekers blocking the isles to move on to the next free snack is really not going to throw my life into complete chaos...even though at the time it feels like it.  Maybe its expecting too much to feel that people should be considerate of others.

Most of the time I don't sample the snackage items offered not because I don't want to try them, but because I'm afraid I'll get food stuck between my teeth.  Then I'll be walking along, fat, dumb, and happy, smiling at people only to find out when I finally look in a mirror that I've got wads of bread, chips, or whatever the sample  happened to be, packed so full between my front teeth that it looks like I was trying to caulk the spaces along my gum line with snackage bits...it's truly disgusting.  I know other people notice because food stuck between someones teeth is one of the first things I notice about people when they smile.  That and spitlette crusties in the corners of their mouth...I also notice when they accidentally blow spit bubbles and have spit strings between their upper and lower lips.  It makes me want to wipe my mouth continuously.

I watched one woman get trapped in a main isle in front of a snackage sampler who had the audacity to leave her cart halfway in the isle while she stood in line at the snackage station...she was there for a really long time...I think she took more than one sample...isn't there a rule against that?  The flow of traffic kept this poor woman from going around the loitering lady's cart.  I only noticed her because I was trapped behind the same woman's cart. I was immediately impressed with how patient she appeared...and I wondered if she, like me, was inwardly raging and wanting to do serious bodily harm to the woman blocking our path.

One woman even managed to block an isle without a cart...she just stood there talking to another shopper forcing everyone to make detours through other isles.  I actually waited in front of her for nearly a full minute hoping she'd step aside but noooooooo....she never moved her fat ass a single inch.  The guy she was talking to didn't say anything either...he could have pointed out that nobody could get around her.  His lack of action  made him a target of my anger as well...fortunately for them it's been drilled into me since birth that one must always be polite.  Someday I'm hoping I can overcome the dreaded "Good Manner Syndrome" for just one day and see what it feels like to tell people exactly what I'm thinking.  I'm sure I'd end up regretting it when the "Guilt Syndrome" kicked in...then I'd feel like shit for hurting people's feelings...but just once it would be nice to know how it feels to say whatever you think.

On the way out of the store, when we were in line to have the handy receipt checkers look at our carts to make sure we hadn't stolen anything, I accidentally bumped the woman in front of me with my cart.  This bundle of joy was probably in her late twenties, early thirties, about five foot six, wearing a baggy yellow t-shirt hanging down to her knees, and jeans...I'm guessing she weighed in at about 250 lbs.   She was a chunky monkey to be sure.  The baggy yellow t-shirt only enhanced her humongous waist length, and unfortunately, bra-less boobage (that would've done any pasture animal proud by the way) laying atop her protruding girthage.  When she turned to glare at me I couldn't help noticing the sloped forehead and low, heavy brow bone clearly indicative of her Neanderthal lineage.  I couldn't tell if her knuckles would drag the ground since she had her hands on the shopping cart handle...but I bet they did...in fact, I bet they were covered with callouses.  The stink eye she gave me, in spite of my profuse apology, kinda scared me.  Good thing I suffer from "Good Manner Syndrome"...she might have whupped me if I'd said something like "quit holding up the show fatso".

Maybe the "Good Manner Syndrome" that my parents drilled into me isn't such a bad thing after all.  Could be I've survived all these years simply because I've been taught to be polite instead of saying what I think and pissing people off...wouldn't that be the stoopidist thing...

P.S.  OF calls shopping carts "buggies".  I've never heard anyone  call a shopping cart a buggy, have you?  Just another "stoopid thing"...




Tuesday, March 6, 2012

Sleep Deprivation

I don’t sleep as well as I used to when I was younger. I don’t know if it’s just because I’m old or if there’s some other reason. It’s annoying though. Little noises wake me up when they shouldn’t. But not regularly enough that I can say I’m a “light sleeper”. One night I fell asleep on the couch and The Husband came in through the noisy, squeaky back door, wandered around for a while before finally going to bed...and I slept through it all. If he’d been a serial killer, I’d be dead without even having put up a fight. That actually made me feel a little creepy...the fact that someone could be walking around me while I slept and I was completely oblivious to it. I can only pray that he didn’t take photos of me drooling while I slept and is waiting to put them on some kind of Xmas or Birthday card as a “surprise”....please God, say it ain’t so.

Here’s a weird thing that wakes me up. When the electricity goes off in the middle of the night, the sudden silence wakes me up. What’s up with that? How does no noise wake a person up? I can see enormous thunder claps waking a person up, but insta-quiet? Does this happen to everyone or is it just me?

Sleeping with another person adds countless trials and tribulations to getting a good night’s sleep. Snoring interferes with my sleep...not my snoring...The Husband’s...duh...even his breathing can make me lose sleep.

It’s not so bad if I fall asleep first, but if The Husband manages to conk out before me I’m doomed. Unfortunately for me, The Husband can lay his head on a pillow and be out in twenty seconds. I lay there for a while, toss & turn a little, then finally drift off. Not him....he lays down and sleeps like a baby...and it annoys me to no end that he can go to sleep so easily. I know it’s really immature of me to get so irritated by the fact that he falls asleep before me, but when I’m laying there, trying to fall asleep, I just want to reach over and hit him... because even the sound of his breathing annoys me. Have you ever tried to synchronize your breathing with the other person you’re sleeping with? Well, let me tell you, it doesn’t work. You think it’s all going well, you think you have the rhythm of the breaths down and then suddenly they move or shift a little and their whole rhythm changes rendering your feeble attempt at breathing synchronization useless.  I know I’m fighting a losing battle but I still keep trying to make the whole synchronization thing work. (And,yes, I’m aware of the definition of “insanity”.)

Snoring is another obstacle to overcome when you have to sleep with someone. Sometimes The Husband snores like people in cartoons snore. Like Brutus in the old Popeye cartoons... I swear I’d see his lips flapping every time he exhales if I suddenly turned on the lights. I’m ashamed to admit it but when I’m really tired and he wakes me up because his snoring is so loud I elbow him viciously in the ribs. Okay, viciously is probably too strong a word. I don't intentionally break ribs or anything like that..sometimes he does let out a little grunt of pain though. What’s even worse, and I know this is wrong on so many levels, is I get an intense feeling of satisfaction just knowing I’ve cause him some discomfort. The sad part is, it only stops the snoring for a few seconds then we’re right back where we started.

Every time I see one of those commercials on TV advertising a miracle product that cures snoring I beg The Husband to buy it. “I don’t snore that much” he always says, or “I only snore when I’m really tired”. Well I’m really tired too, but I don’t fucking snore...in fact, I can’t even get to sleep because someone else’s snoring is a major contributing factor to my sleep deprivation. Why do people who snore never believe they do?

Gas is another thing that can send me into orbit...figuratively speaking, of course. And we’re talking The Husband’s gas...not mine. If you go to sleep all fat, dumb, and happy, and the stench of another persons flatulence is so putrid that it wakes you out of a sound sleep...your only recourse is to leave the room and go sleep on the couch. I know whereof I speak...Oh, sure, you could try the vicious elbow trick, but when they grunt in pain, they’ll only squeeze out more putrid farts. There’s been more than one occasion when The Husband has gone to bed before me and when I finally decide to go to bed, I open the bedroom door only to become engulfed in a cloud of fart stink so foul I’m sure there’s some kind of dead animal in our room. He thinks this is funny when I tell him about it the next morning...really. I, of course, don’t see the humor in it like he does...but then I’m the one suffering from sleep deprivation...not him.

I have to admit, under normal circumstances I can’t help but laugh when someone farts. Just last week at work, The Princess and I were talking to one of the men we work with, I’ll call him “D”, when all of a sudden he let a little popper slip out. D walked away from us really fast...maybe there were lots more where that one came from, I don’t know, but he definitely am-scrayed into his office pronto. D’s the sort of guy who’s usually really proper and would never dream of farting in front of us deliberately so I’m sure he was mortified. The Princess and I looked at each other and tried not to laugh because we didn’t want to embarrass him, but you know how it is when you try not to laugh and you start making all kinds of weird snorting noises through your nose??? We intentionally turned our backs to each other hoping that would stifle the laughter, but then one of those nose noises would happen and we’d start laughing again.

Things are always funnier when you’re trying not to laugh at them, aren’t’ they? Why is that?

It’s the stoopidist thing...