So this morning.
I read Mechaieh’s Friday entry and one of her answers to the Friday Five questions was that she collects cancelled stamps.
I don’t collect anything. Well, that’s not really true. I don’t officially collect anything. I have a number of black Hard Rock Cafe hats with white writing on them, but they certainly aren’t displayed or anything. One’s in my trunk. One is on our hat rack. I don’t know where some of them are. It’s just that I buy them when I have the opportunity.
Likewise, I have spent a rather disturbing amount of money upon scrapbooking supplies. Oh, under a thousand dollars, certainly, but easily more than $500 in the last three years. I’m ashamed to admit that. But that includes a $120 suitcase thingy to hold it all, as well as several very nice leather bound scrapbooks, so there is that. I don’t know if you could call that a collection. I think most people would just call that sad.
I also have many china dolls, mostly from my childhood, although I did purchase a one-of-a-kind sculpted one when I went to England. They’re all in a Xerox box stuffed into Computer Room #1, next to another box filled with non-matching English china tea cups, another half-hearted collection. The tea cups used to reside in the china cabinet in our dining room but they were dethroned by century-old Austrian cut crystal, passed down in Esteban’s family and given to us as a wedding present, along with our hokey engraved wedding champagne glasses and Ward and June’s even hokier engraved wedding champagne glasses. I also have 8 retro lunchboxes, stuffed into Computer Room #2 and I’m constantly on the lookout for more.
But I suppose that I don’t really consider any of these things really collections. More simply, just a reiteration of a singular theme. No. The only thing that I really truly collect would be Kool-Aid stamps.
You know, those little squares on the backs of Kool-Aid packs stating that they are worth so many points? Yeah. Those.
I tear those little stamps off soggy packets of Kool-Aid like they were redeemable for gold bars or something. It started about eight years ago, back when we were very poor and Esteban was working a full-time job and a part-time job and I was carrying 18 credits a semester and also working 30 hours a week. We were poor. We were very poor. We had two car payments, rent, and we could only afford soda if it was on sale for less than $1.50 a 12-pack. Very sad. We lived on rice-a-roni and chicken breasts, which could be purchased for $2 a pound, or ground turkey. I made my own pasta (which, in retrospect, was really really tasty and I should probably make some again). I hauled all of our laundry to the Laundromat because it was cheaper than using the coin-ops in our apartment building. All of our furniture was stuff that Ward and June had given us (which, actually, is mostly still the case). And we drank a lot of sugar free Kool-Aid because it was cheaper than soda.
This frugality spawned a compulsion to tear off the little red-stained squares and store them. I was envisioning all sorts of free Kool-Aid stuff. Maybe I’d get a nice glass Kool-Aid pitcher out of it? Maybe I could save enough to get a new tent for camping? Maybe they’d have a Raspberry red convertible that ran on Sharkleberry Finn Kool-Aid? The possibilities were endless. When we purchased our house, June threw away scores upon scores of loose ones she found in various kitchen cupboards. I still fixate upon those lost points sometimes at night when sleep is a hard-fought battle between embittered souls on a desolate landscape of our lives.
Ooops, got a little James Joyce there. Sorry. I forget sometimes that it’s not forging our destinies upon Fate’s bitter anvil…. it’s just Kool-Aid points. Anyway…
I doubt that there is a time when there is not a half-soggy Points square drying on our countertop, leaving little red smudgy marks everywhere. When I removed all the stuff from the cabinets before they were painted, I gathered up all of my torn Points and put them in a Zip-Loc baggy. God, there must have been at least 500 points there. Probably more. You get about 20 points per box of Kool-Aid and we go through a box a week during the summer, easily. Sometimes two or three.
So when I read Mechaieh’s entry, I thought to myself “Hmmm…. I wonder what kind of stuff I can get.” So I mosied over to the Kool-Aid website and clicked on their free stuff.
insert pained look of 8 wasted years with red-stained Lady Mac Beth fingers here
There were no tents. No glass Kool-Aid pitchers. No beach towels. No red Lamborghini.
A yo-yo. Two plush toys. A sport bottle. A super ball. Some cheap-ass ice cube tray. And a piece of foam you use in a swimming pool.
Oh my god. I think the last remaining bit of my childhood na’vet’ has been completely dashed. All of those packets. All of those carefully torn little squares. All of those dreams of decking my house in lovely Mission-Style furniture with the Kool-Aid insignia. All dashed. All gone. A mickey fickey sports bottle, which costs $1.50 in shipping and handling above and beyond the 50 Points. A damn sports bottle I wouldn’t pay 50 cents for!
And the worst thing is this: I’m torn about what to do. I don’t want anything they’re offering on that page, but at the same time, I feel as though I can’t throw those Points squares away. There’s too much invested, too much history. But if I keep them, they’ll mock me, every time I open the drawer to take out some aluminum foil.
The worst part is I feel like I’m being screwed over by a big red smiling pitcher, who’s smacking my ass and saying “Who’s your daddy?”
On a similar vein:
I was chatting with Poor Yorick yesterday and he told me “So I’m sitting in my Pastor’s office and he says ‘Who’s this Weetabix?” And I was all perplexed, so I asked “How does your pastor know about ME?” So PY replies “He must have followed a link from my diary. Anyway, he says, exact words, ‘Some of the entries I could do without, but for the most part, I was rolling on the floor laughing.'”
Which was totally supposed to be a compliment, but all I could think of was all my entries about sex. And the tuvalee one. And the one where I went to a gay bar and watched gay men strip. Or how much I use the word “fuck”. And the uterus… oh dear Lord, the uterus. And the boobs… there’s a powerful lot of boob talk. And suddenly, Chubby Tink started looking all salacious and wanton, flirting and exposing her cute dimply thighs to the world.
So I tried to get more information from him. “Was this Pastor Justin, the young hip Youth Ministries guy?” And PY replies, “No, this was Pastor Ed.”
Oh my god. The full-blown regular pastor. And then I gulped because I used the term “full-blown”.
So now Pastor Ed is out there, I’ve got to clean up my shit… I mean, er, act.
I’m so going to hell. Like I wasn’t having enough trouble trying to get into heaven, here’s a man of God reading this doodie. And I’m swearing like a mofo.
Can I say the word “mofo”? If it’s an abbreviation, is that as bad as swearing? And when I say that I’m a “curvy round sex goddess”, that’s just hip talk for “curvy round praying Child of God”, Pastor Ed. Seriously. Did I mention that I went to a parochial grade school? And you should hear me sing “Amazing Grace”.
Gah. I’m going to spend eternity in purgatory, trying to teach Milli Vanilli how to sing or something. Or wiping the butts of the entire cast of The Golden Girls with the really thin horrible kind of toilet paper, the kind that your finger rips right through. I can already hear Rue McClanahan saying “Can’t you use Charmin?!” and Estelle Getty asking me to rub her old lady feet.
(shudder)
Crap. I mean… doodie.
