Uh oh. I officially like Glee.
AMANDA, ONE OF YOUR NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS WAS TO BREAK UP WITH MORE TV, NOT ADD NEW SHOWS.
Bad Amanda.
I was worried this might happen
This is why you should have to pass a test
Being in this state where Edgar and I are actively trying to get pregnant, I've become very aware of the parenting styles that I see around me. In grocery stores, in movie theaters, in restaurants....basically everywhere. And I've come to the conclusion that I really don't like what I see.
I know, because I have such a right to tell people how to raise their children when I don't have one of my own. Yet.
Except here's the thing.
Edgar and I walked over to Burger King today for lunch. Because Burger King is so great? No, because we were hungry and wanted something inexpensive and 2 Whoppers for $3 is a pretty sweet deal. Anyways, we're at Burger King and this woman comes in and gets in line behind us with two kids. One was a baby in an infant carrier and the other was probably about a year old. So maybe this spreads a little light on the responsibility level of this woman. As in, she's totally not responsible. Anyways, the woman plops the carrier down on the filthy floor and the older (I use that word liberally) boy runs off immediately, tearing towards the counter and subsequently bumping into the people that were standing there in his haste to get to where the toy display was.
The kid is a year old. I don't expect him to have manners. He's one. And that's okay.
But what I do expect is for the kid's mother to have manners. What does she do? Lazily roll her eyes towards the kid, give a half hearted "Come here," and then go back to staring off vaguely into space.
I know little kids. I know how little kids can be. I fully expect my own children to be absolute hellions because my parents always say that you get back three times what you gave your parents and HOLY GOD WHAT HAPPENED TO MY HOUSE? BECAUSE HELL JUST ROSE UP AND SWALLOWED IT WHOLE! I know this. It's coming. I've accepted it.
HOWEVER.
That will be my own burden to deal with. And not push on other people. Other people like a nice lady who might be standing at the counter giving her order and then innocently step back AND ALMOST CRUSH ANOTHER PERSON'S CHILD BECAUSE IT'S MOTHER WASN'T WATCHING IT.
The lady had no control. She just let her little one year old run off on his cute little stubby toddler legs at full speed around the restaurant, not even bothering to see where he went. Um, lady? This is Long Beach, be lucky that you didn't turn around and find your one year old freshly inducted to a gang with a tattoo emblazoned on his little round belly saying "Rollin' with my homies" with a little pistol shoved down the back of his diaper.
Have some responsibility, lady.
Hold your kid's hand. Pick him up. Do something. Don't let him run around a restaurant being a little innocent adorable menace just because you can't shake off the apathy and be an involved parent.
Seeing things like that scare me. Because there are tons of parents like that. People that don't care. People that just ignore their children with a half hearted "Hmmm, don't run out in the middle of traffic" attitude while they turn to face the TV. And I know that I never want to be that parent. It scares me too much.
I want to be a good mom.
Maybe tonight
On a "Why does this happen this way to me?" note: every single one of my lottery numbers has been pulled on separate lotto drawings over the past two weeks. Gross income: TWO DOLLARS. Come on universe, let's get it together now.
Walk this way
Having won a $25 gift card for PF Chang's at work (because I'm just that awesome), Edgar and I decided to have ourselves a little date night. Because date night for middle middle class citizens like us entails having dinner at a restaurant in the vein of PF Changs, Olive Garden, Chili's, Outback Steakhouse, etc. You know, those havens of good worker-bees. We're good little faux-yuppies pumping cash flow into the economy.
The PF Chang's at Shoreline Village is about a three-quarter mile jaunt down the street from our apartment. There's a part of the sidewalk that goes down a hill at a fairly steep grade. So la la la, there we go, walking down the street, going about our business in totally sensible shoes, and then all of a sudden BAM my left foot slips out from under me and I fall with my right knee behind me and my left leg sprawled in front of me. And besides keeping a hold to my hand, Edgar just starts laughing and I had to be all "Need I remind you about that time earlier this week when you almost died because you choked on your Diet Coke in the middle of a Jack 'n the Box? A JACK 'N THE BOX? REMEMBER THAT?" So after limping the rest of the way to the restaurant I discovered that I had torn a hole in the knee of my jeans and scraped my knee to shit.
So, you know. Awesome.
Forget the food. Get this. On the way back, walking home, all full of Dan Dan Noodle-y goodness, we passed on the street....
...you'll never guess.....
.....THE MOTHER OF MICHAEL PHELPS. That's right, the lady that pushed out of her vagina the Dumbo-eared boy (I'm thinking they used forceps) that would one day become an Olympic, no, scratch that, an AMERICAN hero that won eight gold medals in the land of China. THAT'S RIGHT, TAKE THAT COMMUNISTS. And his sister was there too. And the reason I recognized them was not because I'm a Michael Phelps stalker but because when the Summer Olympics were on in 2008 Edgar and I were glued to the events for a lack of other things to do and how many freakin' times did they show little pre-recorded segments of interviews with his mama and then show him giving his sister the flowers after he got yet another gold medal draped around his neck.
And no, just because I live in Southern California, I don't see celebrities on a daily basis. Or, in this case, people with shared glory that bask in the glow of said celebrities. So it's kind of still a big deal to me in that "girl from the Mid-West that dreamed of being a star as a child" kind of way. I think that the only celebrities I've seen since living in California were Magnum PI and Carrie Ann Inaba at the Revlon 5k in 2008.
Oh, Pine Avenue, I never know what you're going to throw at me.
What an eventful evening.
Is it a coincidence I Lysoled the crap out of my desk last week?
It's official. I'm getting sick. NO FAIR.
The weird thing is that I've got the exact same cough that Edgar had last week and yet bronchitis isn't contagious so HOW AM I SICK? I think the universe owes me a big cupcake. Or a box of donuts. Or a quart of Thrifty Chocolate Malted Krunch. Or a pregnancy test because, damn, that was a whole lot of junk food.
So now I have this ridiculous cough that keeps kicking in whenever I speak, and since I spend a lot of time on the phone during the day at work that's not really convenient for me. So a whole lot of people are getting a lot of nasty lung hacking right in their ears.
But my favorite part, my absolute favorite part, is the part where I'll cough so hard that it will sound like my lungs and stomach are about to be ejected through my mouth. That part is awesome. Nearly as awesome as Edgar going "Tsk, tsk, you should really go to the doctor on your day off on Friday" in that know-it-all voice, AS IF I WASN'T SAYING THE EXACT SAME THING TO HIM ALL OF LAST WEEK WHILE HE IGNORED ME.
Sick doesn't really go well with my personality, either.
Where the sidewalk ends
Today, I saw a punk-ass kid's life pass before his eyes. Apparently it wasn't that impressive.
Shall we start at the beginning?
My husband is sick. He's had this hacking cough since New Year's Eve. No other symptons, just the bad cough. The kind of cough where you're listening to it and going "Seriously, how are you not throwing up right now?" Until two nights ago where it really did make him throw up. LOVELY, I KNOW. We had been asleep for about a half hour and he started coughing, then he sat up and started hacking, and then there was a point where I swear puke came up and he choked it back down. And I was all GO TO THE BATHROOM AND PUKE. DO IT NOW. NOW. GO. STOP FIGHTING IT. GO. Mainly because I knew it would eventually happen and I would prefer not to see it. Puke makes me puke. It's bad. And if he kept fighting it, it was still going to happen, and it would happen all of a sudden, and he would have to make it around the bed first to get over to the bathroom door and that could be problematic in the dark and the next thing you know I'd be washing the sheets and steam-cleaning the carpet in the middle of the night because SOMEONE DIDN'T LISTEN TO HIS WIFE.
Then the same thing happened again last night, and I was like That's it, you're going to the doctor tomorrow morning. We were going to go to IHOP because it's ALL YOU CAN EAT PANCAKES TIME, Y'ALL, but sometimes, as an adult, you have to make sacrifices. This is one of those times.
We found an urgent care clinic close to home to take him to today. It's lovely to mix with Long Beach's finest, you know. And by finest I mean ghettoest.
Side note: there was a 10 year old girl in the waiting room reading one of the Twilight books. Aren't those a little age-inappropriate? I mean, come on, Bella's all like "Edward! Do me! Do me! Do me! Do me! If you don't do me I'm gonna jump off a cliff!" Or something like that.
Okay, so the official diagnosis is that Edgar has bronchitis. So the doc wrote him a prescription for a Z-Pack (also known as a gift from Jesus) and an extra-strength cough syrup. After running a bunch of errands after the doctor's office (since that's exactly what a sick person should be doing), we drove to the CVS near our apartment. We were stopped at a red light on a one way street, crossing a major, busy, two way street that also has a Blue Line track running down it.
Just as the stop light changed to green, out of the corner of my eye I saw this kid in a bright blue shirt darting across the sidewalk into the intersection on his skateboard, in an obviously misguided attempted to make it across the street before any of the cars started moving. The person in the right line and Edgar, driving in the second lane, saw him coming, and didn't even take his foot off the brake. But in the next lane over, there hadn't been anybody stopped at the light. There was a van that was still approaching the intersection, and since the light changed to green before he got there, he hadn't stopped and was already accelerating again. And there goes the kid. Right in front of the van. The kid managed to jump off his skateboard out from in front of the van. He might have even pushed off of the van, I don't really know.
The skateboard ended up under the front wheel on the passenger side of the van.
My heart nearly came up out of my mouth. We just sat there stunned, realizing that we had almost seen a child get killed in front of us. Because if that child hadn't jumped out of the way at the last second, he would have been dead.
And it would have been his own fault. The van had no way of seeing him, and the kid should not have been crossing the street. The street was five lanes wide at that point. The light was green. The van wasn't at the intersection when the light turned green. The van was in the center lane. He had no reason to think that there would be anyone in the intersection.
The kid DIDN'T EVEN CARE. He just came trotting back to get his skateboard, in front of all of those cars that were stopped at the green light going WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED, I'M SO DUMBFOUNDED I CAN'T EVEN MOVE FORWARD. He was more concerned about his skateboard than the fact that his brains were about two inches away from being splattered all over Long Beach Boulevard.
STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID STUPID.
My caps lock button may break by the time this post is over.
His behavior was absolutely unacceptable. The stupid little shit thought that he was invincible. He knew, HE KNEW (looks like it still works), that the light had changed before he came off the sidewalk. And yet he did it anyways.
What is wrong with this kid? What is wrong with all of the kids like him?
Things like that make me scared of what it will be like when I'm a parent. Will I be able to get through to my children about how precious life is? About how playing in traffic is definitely frowned upon? That VANS GOING AT FULL SPEED THROUGH AN INTERSECTION CAN KILL YOU SO KEEP YOUR ASS ON THE SIDEWALK?
I hope so.
Lost: The update
Edgar and I have now completed three seasons in our "Let's try to figure out what's going on on Lost" project. My eyes hurt a little bit.
So here's my thing:
Um, Charlie. Hobbit-man. You are dumb. And you totally didn't have to die. When running for the door in the underwater hatch, you could have just run two more steps to be on the other side of it and then closed it from the outside. It had the big dial-y thing to seal it on the other side.
You brought this upon yourself. Or the writers of the show were stupid and brought it upon you, whichever.
Either way, YOU DIDN'T HAVE TO DIE. Was anyone else as annoyed by this as I was? And yes, I know, IT'S A TV SHOW. I just can't help but become indignant about stuff like that though. I get too emotionally involved. It's the same way with every show for me. I get mad if a character I like gets killed off. I have an "I hate you, I love you" relationship every time the two characters that are meant to be together have some made-for-TV obstacle arise between them. Ooooh, will they make it? Will they not? Who cares, it's a TV show, right? I CARE, THAT'S WHO. Escapism at its finest.
I'm the same way with books. I just finished reading Jane Eyre and I absolutely hated it, because I found Jane Eyre herself to be a whiny, indecisive, arrogant, and entitled bitch. You're supposed to be some great figure in literature? Whatever, you wouldn't have had half the problems you did if you weren't so whiny, indecisive, arrogant, and entitled. And then that boring book could have been much shorter than 500 pages. And I KNOW, she's a figment of Charlotte Bronte's imagination. It's just the principal of it!
That wasn't what I was going for
I love that I wrote a post a few days ago about attending a Catholic church service and now all my Google Ads are like "Catholic Singles" and "Everyday Catholics" and "Evil Abortion No-No."
Be kind, and leave
Ok, so I believe that any person that's ever worked anywhere is going to agree with me on this. When there is an unspoken rule of parking space assignment, WHY DO YOU PARK IN MY SPACE?
I park in the same spot every day. All of my co-workers do the same. No one told us we had to park in those spaces. But we do. Doesn't everyone in the world do that? It's always been that way. Even when I was sixteen and worked at a restaurant, the employees all parked in the same spots every day, assuming some dumbass customer didn't take our spots.
It's like the unwritten rule of employee parking lot etiquette. It throws off your whole day if you don't get your spot. And it's not like I always park in some cushy spot right next to the doors. It's off to the side, no tree coverage so there's no leaf or bird poop coverage, but still requires a bit of a walk to get to either entrance to the building.
It's my spot.
SO GET THE HELL OUT OF IT.
