This weekend, I’ve been suffering from a rampant bout of stupidity.
Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I’m too dumb to figure it out.
I think I go through these phases’ it’s all a way of evening things out. I can be really freaking brilliant for moments but then must suffer from intense retardation at other times, otherwise I believe a vacuum will be created and I will be sucked out of existence as we know it.
Ouch. That just made my head hurt.
Anyway, Esteban and I were going to go over to Markus’ house to give him Christmas presents. But I wanted to play my little winter addiction, a little 3 meg game called SnowCraft. So I told him to go over without me and I would follow in about an hour. Now why I did that, I’m not certain. When my mouse hand finally started to hurt from slamming little kids wearing green parkas with slush balls, I thought, ‘Ok, let’s go.’ But then I realized that there no longer was an ‘us’ because I had sent Esteban away over an hour ago. So now I had to go and drive over in a cold car myself.
I packed up the gifts that Esteban hadn’t taken and went to close the front door. Hmmm’ didn’t want to close. I reopened it and slammed it hard again. Still didn’t close. Something appeared to be blocking it somehow. So I tried slamming it extremely hard. Still wouldn’t close, but this time I heard the glass breaking. I looked down. My sunglasses had somehow fallen out of my jacket pocket and were preventing the closing of the door. My favorite pair of Rayban aviators that make me look oh-so-cute… the ones that allow me to pretend that I’m the girl in the “Boys of Summer” song by Don Henley… albeit without the “brown skin shining in the sun”. My $70 pair of sunglass now lay shattered in the doorway.
Esteban later asked me why I had demanded that we both separately go to Markus’ house, I could only answer ‘Because I’m a girl and we’re dumb sometimes.’ And sadly, that was the best answer I could come up with.
Stupidity, I’m telling you.
Saturday night, after Esteban left me alone for hours on end, I chatted with Levontaun about firearms and how niply cold it is here, then went to Barnes & Noble for some late night shopping. I’ve long loved the fact that Barnes & Noble has some outrageous (for a bookstore) hours, but I’ve never been able to take advantage of it, being that my only access to them was in far away lands, far away from our sleepy little burg. Thus, I was cold and in need of some hot tea and DVDs, so I traversed town in a cold Monte in search of some. Wearing my cute, kicky DKNY glasses so that I looked like a literary quirky girl and not a loser who has nothing better to do than go to the bookstore on a Saturday night, I entered B&N and immediately felt my Estrogen Radar turn on. Men were scoping me out! Men! In Barnes & Noble. Apparently, the bookstore is some kind of Smart Person Meat Market. A guy made small talk with me while I waited in line at the caf’. Another guy (and he was yum! He looked like the teacher who falls for Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed‘ uh,’ not that I’ve actually seen that movie or anything’ nope, not me’ just, you know’ the commercial) smiled at me while I stirred the sweetener into my tea. I’m telling you, if I weren’t married, I’d so be hanging out at the bookstore more often.
Hmmm’.. Maybe I might hang out there more anyway. I do so love Godiva chocolates and tea.
Later, however, I was carrying around a copy of The Vagina Monologues and I think it scared them all away. Maybe they thought I was a militant possessor of a vagina. Perhaps if I had been walking around with ‘Ways to improve your life with Kegel Exercises’, I would have been beating them off with sticks. Or maybe if I had started tonguing my Blackberry & Sage tea or perhaps doing a pole dance by the 50% off calendar display, someone would have asked me for my phone number or started to quote Sartre.
I think that’s what smart guys do when they’re trying to sound smart. Quote Sartre. Possibly Sartre is kind of a code word for ‘I’m smart’ are you smart?’ A way of recognizing smart people, since we don’t have our own club houses with ‘No Dummies Allowed’ printed in messy handwriting, or possibly written on calligraphy upon fine linen paper. The same way dumb people recognize their own by the displaying of large number 3’s in the rearview windows of their monster trucks.
I later left Barnes & Noble with a DVD, a calendar, a box of very cute holiday cards, the afore-mentioned Vagina book, and an impulse purchase of Creed’s latest CD. Then I drove around the city, looking at the pretty lights, occasionally head banging to the tunes.
I can already tell that this is going to be one of those CDs that I listen to and listen to for weeks on end, a sort of musical one night stand, then burn out on because they are not able to go the long haul, then eventually replace with one of my old favorites, a Violent Femmes CD or Sting, to cleanse the palette. And then will never pick up the CD again. Then eventually, sometime in the future, I will hear ‘My Sacrifice’ on the radio and it will instantly transport me back to those weeks in my life and I will become enormously nostalgic.
This has happened before. The Pulp Fiction soundtrack brings me back to when Esteban and I moved into our second apartment, all sunny and bright. The Goo Goo Dolls CD with ‘Iris’ on it reminds me of the month I purchased the Monte, the wonderful feeling of being in love with my car, of driving faster, of feeling it purr, feeling the leather seats envelope me. My Shawn Mullins CD reminds me of driving to Milwaukee for my grad fiction class, where no one talked to me and immediately discounted me as a dumb Cheesehead and then totally changed and sucked up when they read one of my stories, found out that I was related by marriage to Joy Harjo, which almost makes me a literati by default in those circles. The Counting Crows ‘August And Everything After’ reminds me of my undergraduate short fiction class. It makes me wonder what will stick out about these weeks, what I will be nostalgic for in the future’ what will be missing that I will long for.
Ouch. I just made my head hurt again.
Speaking of things I do so very love, I got one of the best things ever in the mail the other day from one of my very favorite people, Chauffi. A package containing four Dr. Pepper Lip Smackers. How damn cool is that? My lips will be Dr. Pepper scented for years to come. And things like that make me just giddy.
