So the weekend.
Pretty tame. I worked late on Friday, then went home with the intent of watching my NetFlix stuff and doing laundry. What really happened: I worked on a project for about three hours, surfed, played entirely too much Spider Solitaire (which is the ONLY thing I like about Windows NT, by the way), and then tried to get Ricky current so he didn’t delete all of my “stories”. Friends was very funny. I’m happy to see that not only is Monica recovering from that Scary Skinny look, she’s not screeching nearly as much. And how cute is Paul Rudd? Seriously? How cute? I want to pinch his cheeks until he calls me Crazy Cheek Pinching Girl and starts avoiding me at parties.
On Saturday, I woke up early and checked my email, then did the shower thing, got dressed, blahety blah blah blah. I then bustled into the bedroom where Esteban was still passed out and grabbed the two boxes of clothes I culled from the closet. Sadly, it is just a small representation of the clothing I should remove. I only use the top two drawers of my six-drawer dresser because the other four are filled with clothing I no longer wear (although, to be honest, one drawer contains my Too Small jeans that I’ve been determined to wear again). Esteban announced, from bed, that he would either finish the lawn or do the dishes… whichever I preferred. I submitted to my need to have a clean house and picked dishes. Screw the neighbors. Screw the lawn. Snow’s coming in a week.
Then I went outside. It WAS snowing. I chortled, yes I chortled, about making the correct choice, and shouted over my shoulder that I’d be returning in an hour. Now, actually, I knew that I would be gone at least two hours, but Esteban has a problem getting started when he is alone. The man cannot begin to do anything he does not like. It’s a sickness, one which is not covered by insurance. It should be, though. HMO’s buy people wheelchairs, I don’t know why they can’t buy Esteban a dishwasher, since he’s obviously handicapped. Anywhoo, I lied about how long I was gone. Unfortunately, I did not lie convincingly enough. After stopping at St. Vincent De Paul’s with the clothes and driving out to the meat market and deciding that it was far too busy and I really didn’t want to smell a meat store, as that usually takes some mental preparation and a pep talk worthy of the final scene of a Disney movie about a team sport of your choosing, I decided to run and pick up Esteban’s belated birthday present, the Geek Fu release of The Lord Of The Rings, complete with authentic plastic book ends. But I was confused. I knew that it was something like $65, but I also knew that it was probably cheaper someplace else. I called home and talked to Esteban. “Could you please call Target, Wal-Mart and Best Buy and find out how much your DVD set costs?” “Why? Go to Target. It’s cheapest.” “Find out how much it costs please?” “It’s $60 or something.” “Would you please call?” “Is it worth me calling them for $10?” “I don’t want to make a trip and find out that they don’t have it. Please call.”
He called me back. “It’s $60 at Target.” “How much is it at Wal-Mart?” “I don’t know. Do you really care that much?” “Never mind.” I called information and got both of the numbers myself, costing myself about $2 in the process to get the numbers. The title of Smartest Girl In The World is certainly safe from my hands, let me tell you. Best Buy had them for $49, but they were out. They had seven copies in Appleton, which was 30 minutes away. Wal-Mart had them but they were $65. However, they would price match if I had the ad.
I called Esteban again. At this point, I was determined. I was on a goddamn mission from God. We already had purchased the Not As Great copy of Lord Of The Rings for $30 and now it was useless. They would not get one penny more of my money than was absolutely necessary!
“Look in the garbage in the kitchen. Is the paper still there?”
“It’s under apple peelings and grossness.”
“Dig out the Best Buy ad.”
“It’s under apple peelings. And grossness.”
“I understand that. I need the ad.”
“Is it worth this? Is it worth me putting my hand in the grossness?”
“If it was $15 lying there in the garbage, would you reach your hand in and take it out?”
“Yes.”
“There it is then.”
Sounds of disgust from the other end of the phone.
The garbage does not need a prop.
I ran home to get the ad (perfectly clean and dry, by the way… he was totally exaggerating) and found that Esteban had just only then managed to haul himself out of bed and get dressed. Then I went off to the most hated of stores.
MallWart.
Gah. I parked really far away from the door because poor people don’t like to walk. I hate going there. I hate it. I hate it so very much. When I die, I won’t be surprised to find that hell is one big Wal-Mart, with Satan’s mother running check outs and his sloe-eyed demons all standing by the door greeting everyone. I hate going to Wal-Mart, especially on a Saturday afternoon. It always has this feeling of urgency, like the hours before a big storm or the day after Thanksgiving. People are grabbing things, carts are overflowing, merchandise is lying on the floor and people are walking over it. Everything is permeated with the smell of popcorn, dirty diapers and retardation. It’s as if the mere presence of cheap plastic crap makes people lose their minds. Things that would not be acceptable in normal society become acceptable in Wal-Mart. Or perhaps they pipe in some kind of gas that makes everyone dull and listless, stupid and slow like cattle. Everyone but me, who runs through there like a maniac, trying to get out before I am infected with the listless sort of wide-eyed expression and have the urge to walk sluggishly down crowded aisles and then stop short with no warning and be enthralled by a display of Wesson Vegetable oil for $1.49. Or maybe the siren call of low, low prices only affects white trash.
Of course, I picked the most glacial line imaginable. It’s my curse. That and always having freakishly large people in front of me at concerts. But after about a half hour of standing there in my sheerling jacket and getting too hot and then getting that vaguely motion sick feeling I get when I am shopping and am irritated by the crowd and the noise and the everything, I finally made it through the line and dealt with the price change thingy (that took an extra fifteen minutes of hell, standing there with the big asshole behind me shoving his cart into my hip) and then fled to the safety of my car and NPR’s Classics By Request.
But I suppose it was all worth it, for when I handed him the ubiquitous blue bag with the moonish yellow smiling face on it, he grasped it in his hands like a sack full of penny candy, then extracted the hard-won box and stroked it, uttering “My Precious…” in a way that left me embarrassed for him.
And he hadn’t even touched the dishes, so stop feeling bad for him for having to dig through the garbage for the Best Buy ad.
To further cement myself into Evil Wife Of The Millennium category (seriously, Leona Helmsley had a bad rap), I explained that he’s only allowed to be a conscientious geek or a slacker cool guy. Not both. It’s the rules of Girldom. We go for the geeks if they have redeeming qualities or we go for the bad boys because they are just so damn hot that we’re willing to overlook their faults. There’s a reason that sloppy haphazard geek boys end up being 40-year-old virgins living in their parent’s basements and there it is. Thus, he endeavored to do some dishes. Sometimes, you have to haul out the heavy artillery, or in this case, a little dose of reality. That’s why wives get the bad press, honestly. The kid who pointed out that the emperor wasn’t wearing clothes? They beheaded him.
