Insipid

Ok shiz, does anyone even care if I finish this dalliance of a 4-month old story? Is there such a thing as an "anyone" who even reads this stodgy blog/life? I'm pretty sure I'm over the whole institution.

Peregrination

GREAT HONK IT'S NEARLY AUGUST!! The other "A" month!! I gotta finish this freakin story raaaaahhhhhh!!

Day ??
I went to bed a 29-year old and woke up a brittle-boned pensioner. It was like my 30 years of life were marched in with the insectual army and just hovered, waiting to pounce on me in the taffy puller way. No one told me that part of getting older was that your feet hurt when you woke UP in the morning. What the deuce? How counterintuitive for a day of stomping around DC! Freakin age.

Elainagans and I gathered up food items including mini bagel pizzas which there aren't enough of anywhere on earth, because I'd have liked to eat more than the 50 we had. We headed for the freeway telling stories and coining a few of the day's catch phrases like danielvaughan, and the resurrected AL-A-BAM-A, not to mention BOOOP! The noises coming from our car were like those huge room-sized computers in the 80's that come to life and blow up the Russians. Because pizza bagels aren't enough ever we decided to stop at McDonalds, chattering away as we went around the drive thru, and then both leapt in our seats at the "SCREECHTWISTPIIIING!" sound as Elaina rolled down her window. Omg...the window found the missing door lock. It had become an innie instead of an outie, which is the less effective gender where door locks were concerned. Luckily the window didn't shatter into a thousand pieces, we coined another phrase in "snap racks" and off we went. The drive was fairly uneventful except for E writing a new song called "COKEONMYPAAAAANTS, COKEONMYPAAAAAAANTS!!!"

We started to see buildings that looked very monumental so we exited the freeway and drove around looking for parking. To our dismay the city was in a tropical way weather-wise that day, and neither of us had thought to bring our industrial electric fans along with the bagels, but we bravely started walking. I wanted to see a jillion things, but most especially The White House. Where you can find The West Wing. Which was the name of a tv show I liked. You see my logic. (Like how if I ever met Michael J Fox I'd be all "OMGOMG you had a line of dialogue with Elijah Wood once!!") I really don't remember what order we saw everything, but I took lots of pictures of pretty things.* I was seriously impressed with both my new camera and myself. When we got to one of the main roads of the town (help me out here, it's the one with all the grass down the middle) it turned out that it was "Green Day" day in DC. And not the 90's band, but a bunch of people on stage promoting the environment in a yelling way. They gave a 12-minute build up intro to some cover band no one had ever heard of, and who did one of the worst versions of some obscure song I'd never heard and still knew it was awful. Luckily the city council, who might actually be the President, had thought ahead about hosting all those 2-dozen people at the "concert" and had installed a 3-mile stretch of Portaloos. I lost count. And even though my tinkleometer was bouncing towards full, I couldn't make myself crawl into one of those. I'm just not that kind of girl.

It was around this time that I started to realize the bones in my feet were slowly disintegrating. We'd only been walking for about 20 minutes, which is nothing when compared to a Disneyland day, and already I was wishing I'd brought my peg leg. I couldn't believe it, it was like I was a newborn infant with no muscle tone who is also a 700 pound old man. I tried not to let this new found self disgust distract me from everything I was seeing, but by the time we were in the avenue between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, my glass-shard feet and tinkleometer had me in a bit of a ditherspaz way. We found some park type restroom that was probably exactly as clean as the Portaloos, and in which my door wouldn't stay shut. Which made me do a lot of giggling. The poor people also peeing, dealing with tropical weather in Americatown while trying to piddle next to the weird giggling girl in the dirty restroom.

We kept on walking and taking pictures of everything, even flowers and parts of trees. And all the while, we couldn't find The White House. It was like they'd pick it up and move it every time we got close or something. We asked several people and were told a dozen different streets to walk down, and it was on none of them. We decided to take a rational approach that if we couldn't find the White House we should at least have 5 sweatshirts and a hot dog. We passed several little stands all selling variations on the "I stood in DC" theme, and finally found one with a very cute little couple running it. I walked away from there with 3 hoodies and 2 teeshirts, 1 of which was free for my birthday. They are awesome. My favorites are the black hoodie that says CIA on it (Alias rules) and the teeshirt that says "You don't know me.... FBI Witness Protection Program".

We realized it was getting later and we were do up in Baltimore for dinner. After a few more wrong turns, we finally found ourselves on the White House street. Which was about 3 feet away from where we'd parked. Had we turned a few degrees to the right when we started walking, we'd have bumped into it. They weren't letting us get very close but I took a couple of pictures and then started shrieking about wanting to find a cab. The glass shards had filtered up through my ankles and most of my shins at this point and I was insufferable to have to be acquainted with, even from a distance. We meander/hobbled through several more blocks until we found an intersection where several cabs were zipping past us. I nearly flung myself in front of one of them, preferring death by minivan cab to slow decay from gangrene in my legs. Finally some dear little man stopped for us and I blessed him and all his posterity for it. We made it back to the car with Elaina in one piece and me in several, and awaited the directions from JarelLaured.

I've never gotten so lost and still been going in the right direction. We would have turned into wandering orphans in rags had it not been for Google maps. I don't remember what life was like without a portable map in my hand, probably because I've blocked it out. We finally got there and had a very fun dinner with The Laneys, who I hadn't seen in years and who Elaina had never seen. I kind of wanted to make dolls based on their kids and sell them but so far I haven't even finished this freakin story. Their food was delicious, and we walked out full, tired and without my phone charger, which was still sitting on top of something in their house. Rats. Luckily they were nice enough to mail it to me. The drive home was going to take an ominous 4 days and Elainagans was exhausted, so I elected to break the law and drive us back. Me and my thoughts through black highways in another state with glass shard feet and 30 years of taffy-pull life. It was sobering. Especially when I got us lost on the freeway shaped like the One Ring, where there's actually no onramps or exits and no one can ever figure out how they got there or why they keep passing the same tree.

I think we may have stopped for more food, which made our day's meals pizza bagels, snap racks, hot dog entrails, amazing Laney food, and something else that escapes me. In fact most of the rest of the night is a total blur until we flopped back in the house and became heaps of lifeless carbon-based life forms, zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - arrrr nrrrrrr... I.... still..... hadn't...... done..... my...... effing....... homework......... how much do I loathe school? Especially given that I'm almost a decade too old for it? So I grumbled and raahh'd my way through my homework which probably said something like aldfkjasldkfjasldfjaalskdfjaslkfjaslkjfwasteoftimeasldfkjasdflkjaslfkjaslkdfjsalfjaslkfjaslkfj and then zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz............


Chant Down Babylon


*The pretty pictures are on display in my Facebook account.

PS) Appropriately this was my 100th post. Woot!

Circumnutate

Dude.....

Day 3 continued
After the Caper of the Wayward Card, we went back to Elaina's house to start getting ready for her opening party at work that night. Even though we were without new outfits in the tragic way, we decided to be brave and go vintage "3 months ago". We decided that I'd drop Elaina off at work since she needed to be there several days early, and then I'd come back and finish getting myself ready. We blathered around discussing how matching shoes affect the gravitational force of adjoining galaxies, when Elaina suddenly looked at the clock and realized she was due to be at work in just under 17 seconds. ZOOM. Off we flew, it was my first experience driving an automatic trans in another state in a couple of years so it felt very unnerving. I dropped her off and headed back to her house, crashed around in the shower knocking everything off the shelves and yelling loud "aslfkjaslkjf!"s again, and then commenced the ancient practice of laying down.

I'd been supine for just over 4 minutes and was nearly to the peaceful meadow where there's no invasion army of killer bugs mental place, when my phone rang. It was Elaina, and she needed ribbons. Apparently her quorum of bosses recognized that she was the only one qualified to get the ribbons, but she couldn't get them without her car. Which was sitting outside her house, where I was inside, laying down. I was obstructing the ribbons. I leapt back into the car, and after 25 minutes of pressing buttons and flapping hands and shushing her car alarm that went screeching off, I roared back to her work and collected her. We roared over to Walmart where I circled the parking lot like a criminal and she hopped inside to get ribbons. She could have also gotten bird seed and an anklet, which is why Walmart is cool. We zoomed back to her work, I leisurely flopped back home, and laid back down for another 80 seconds. No rest for the terminally foxy, so I selflessly got up off the floor and started rubbing various liquid and powder substances on my face. The good news was that after I'd re-washed my hair that afternoon, it was actually very nearly clean. I opted to wear clothes, and then warily approached the car again...after another 25 minutes of resigned sighing as the car alarm screeched, I went back to Dave and Busters for free food and strangers.

Elaina had a couple of friends who came to the opening too, and as I met them I made the quiet realization that I was appallingly overdressed. There was nothing for it though, I'd already burned half a tank of Elaina's gas going back and forth on the 3 blocks between her house and work, so I decided everyone around me would have to develop a complex about their plainness. The friends and I were seated at the bar while Elaina was whisked away to a darkened corner, and we immediately bonded over the heroics of firefighters and Harry Potter. We ate good food and were given a bunch of free game passes, but I gave mine to the friends because I hadn't made a very wise decision in the shoe way. So I left, went back to the house, and stared at the homework assignment I was completely not doing.

Elaina was ready to leave work a couple of hours later, after which our plan was to return to Walmart for not ribbons, and on my way to her work for the 73rd time that day I suddenly realized I didn't have my drivers license. Nor had I, all day, ever. It was stolen exactly a week before my trip, and the replacement hadn't arrived yet. And the paper copy was in my suitcase. Hahahahaha. So when I got to her work I switched seats with her and bid a gruff farewell to my illegal driving experience. For now...

As we got out of the car in the Walmart parking lot, I noticed Elaina fumbling at her driver's side door for a moment, and then bending down to either retrieve or see something. She slowly straightened and said "....come here...." I walked to her side of the car, where we both realized that the lock in her door was...gone. What? It was there when I unlocked it 3 minutes prior, no one visible had been jogging along side us to futz with it, and we hadn't driven over a series of jarring speed bumps or cliffs. The consensus was a collective WTF. How does that even happen? Anyone with theories, please submit. We decided not to linger in the parking lot staring at the lock that was no more, so we headed towards the store. Both of us wanted digital cameras, so we walked to the back of the store which turned out to be in West Africa, and were shown 1 or 2 good cameras out of the dozens that the employee guy accidentally threw on the floor. We both got the same camera and dobedites and warranty and big smiles from the 3 guys lurking around in the "it's late and you're cute" way. We chuckled our way up to sunglasses and keychains, I got myself a very fancy red pair of SG's that will lend themselves to future embarrassment. We went back to the car and to our dismay, the lock had not returned in our absence. We had to unlock my side and do the reach over, like heathens.

I'd been doing a little research about possible tours we could do for the next day, we went back and forth about a couple of them but finally decided to let our feet be in charge. I read a series of Happy Birthday texts and emails and FB shouts and listened to my mum sing on my voicemail, and was pleased with the fact that I still felt the same age as I had the day before.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Chant Down Babylon

Saturnalia

Day 3
It was Age Day. Elaina and I woke up around the same time that my mum started having her first contractions 30 years prior. We decided there couldn't be a better way to celebrate an anniversary of birth than with low-class food and sub-standard cleanliness, so we burrowed into various articles of clothing that didn't match and headed to The Waffle House. I was nearly hopping with excitement, I mean it's not every day you get to go to a place that 2 of your favorite comedians have made frequent references to, on your 30th birthday. In fact that could only happen one day ever. We arrived and shoved our way inside, both being in mild surprise that the whole expanse of the "restaurant" was slightly shorter and more narrow than my closet. And even better, there was a waiting line. For the 6 tables. The fact that I didn't have a personal space meltdown was indicative of my exhaustion and very sudden maturity, since I don't even like it when people are sitting at the next table, much less standing on you.

While we were squished into the sticky chairs being trampled by people who were crawling over our knees, shoulders and heads to be seated, I idly watched the workers behind the counter. Their spatial situation wasn't that dissimilar to ours, all with the jostling and crashing into each other, however Elaina and I weren't attempting to prepare other peoples' food while strangers stomped in it. I noticed one of the guys behind the counter in particular, and murmured to Elaina "You know, that guy's not completely ugly." She agreed, and we both stared. In our heads we both imagined the life and times of this random guy, probably a gamer, living in his parents' basement, spending his weekends drinking beer at the WaWa, working at The Waffle House strictly on edict from his family. It seemed probable.

When we were finally seated, yet again I had to remember I was in another state because every person within 3 inches of us was smoking, which is legal there, and gives the waffles that excellent charred flavor. After about 3 seconds, who should push and shove his way over to us to be our server than the Not Ugly Gamer Guy...he handed us menus and said some assortment of welcoming words, which completely went over my head because I was rooted to the spot by his obscure eastern-European accent. What? But...but you're a VA-based gamer in your parents' basement! His whole story changed in an instant, instead with focuses on fishing boats and belongings tied in scarves. As Elaina put it, he went from a lazy loser to a hard-working man just by having an accent. I particularly noticed his eyes, as he took my order for 25 waffles and a piglet, because they were a beautiful assortment of golden brown mixed with turquoise blue. I turned to Elaina and remarked that she should see his eyes because they were beautiful, not realizing that when he'd turned away from our table he'd basically only spun in a circle in the closet/restaurant and was still within hearing, smelling and tasting range. I said "Oh, hahahahahahahahaha" as I usually do when I dance on my own tongue. He just grinned down at me and looked at me with his eyes so I only laughed harder.

Our food arrived which to my great shock wasn't spectacular, we gnawed through as many pounds of it as we could manage given our delicate natures, and decided it was time to leave. The arrangement was one of those "pay at a register as you leave" affairs, the trouble is the register is directly behind a booth. As in, people were sitting there. And with the dozen children that had come in with one woman who were plowing past us up and down the 4-foot space, I practically had to lay flat against the very not averse teenage boys who were sitting in that booth as Elaina paid for our food. As she handed back the signed receipt to Not Ugly guy, he remarked "Cool signature," along with smiling and looking at her with his eyes. She burbled a thank you and we kicked and punched our way out of the restaurant. That night was the big opening party at her new Dave and Buster's so we decided to go to the mall and look at big opening party outfits. We were in one of Elaina's favorite stores and I was developing a deep crush on a pair of purple shoes, when she swept up to me in a panic realizing she didn't have her debit card on her. Given that it had been in her pocket all morning this was a troublesome thing.

We headed back to the car which was approximately 6 square acres from the store we were in, I wanted to have a logos-based discussion with the individuals who sketched out the parking/shopping arrangement of the mall, and we scoured the ground and trees and skies for the errant debit card all along the way. No love. We got back to her car and started flinging napkins and floor mats and french fries around, but still nothing. It was no use trekking all the way back across the plains to that store, so we started driving dejectedly back in the direction of home. Elaina figured when she pulled her phone out of her pocket her card may have accidentally gotten flicked out too, and landed in some nether region of inner space. We wondered if that region could have been somewhere in the vicinity of The Waffle House, since Elaina knew she had it when we were there. In fact she knew she'd paid for our potty-fodder with it, and was feeling a growing suspicion that it might be in the nether region of Still Being Held By Not Ugly Guy. This suspicion made her lurk in a very red way about the face, so when we got there I was commissioned to go in and inquire. As soon as I kicked an elderly lady out of my way and toppled into the restaurant, I noticed there was no sign of Not Ugly Guy. And there's not many places to hide there. But one of the girls behind the counter immediately shrieked "Did you leave a debit card??" I shrieked "Yes!" She suddenly turned into a security guard at Fort Knox and said "Now, for security purposes I'll need you to verify the name that would be encoded on the card-" and I said "ELAINA DAVIS RAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" She said "Whoa...ok ok, here." I skipped back out to the car but hid the card in my hoodie, and managed to play a forlorn bad news face for just over 4 seconds before I said "They only had this raaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!!!" It was a yay. I think Elaina should tell her Wal-Mart story in the comments now.

This is getting egregious. I'll finish Day 3 later.

Chant Down Babylon

Infiltration

Alright alright, I'm a lackadaisical trip story updater and I need to be slapped. I was going to combine days 2 and 3 as an endeavor for redemption, but I simply can't manage to do it because I'm hilarious.

Day 2
Elaina had to work on Friday much to our mutual dismay. She was up and out the door while I was still supine on the canoe-ton. I finally shoved myself out of it and into a standing position, when a sudden fit of masochism gripped me. Since I didn't have any glowing coals to walk on or bamboo shards to insert under my nails, I decided to go to the gym. Elaina left me her gym and house key so I put on my Sunday clothes and headed out the door. After wandering around for about 6 1/2 miles through Elaina's complex with a growing expression of discombobulated angst, I finally stomped up to what looked like a common area building and burst into the morning staff meeting of the Richmond mob. Apparently they run Elaina's complex and have a dress code of black suits and sunglasses at all times. Every head sloooowly turned in my direction and stared, which while I'm used to that to some degree still flustered me all the more because of the sunglasses. I managed to stammer "Erm...gym...woof...." and one of the ladies stood up, walked to me, placed her hand on my shoulder and turned me about 110 degrees to my left, and pointed. Wordless, the whole exchange was. I ran away. I finally found the gym under a padlocked steel door that had been buried under 6 feet of concrete, spent 10 minutes making up a silly dance on the elliptical and doing seizure faces in the wall-to-wall mirrors, and realized the whole plan had been dumb in the first place.

I got in the shower after my 20-minute walk trying to find the apartment again, and started inventing new expletives in the loud way each time I exhaled, which would knock over every object on her shower shelf. I returned to the canoe-ton for a few moments of reading and reflection before beginning the plaster of Paris process to be fancy for the night's impending party. After several minutes, my razor-sharp senses started to prickle, as I realized I was picking up a faint rustling noise directly to my right. I looked...and flooding in through the window was the entire invasion army of Obscure Insect Planet. It was like a scene from The Mummy, added to by my leaping and shrieking. My immediate thought was "Toxichouseholdproducttoxichouseholdproducttoxichouseholdproduct," I started opening cupboards and found a bottle of Windex. It worked for the dad in "Big Fat Greek Wedding" so I aimed and fired full blast at the buzzing winged things that outnumbered me 6 squillion to one. The bugs were very shiny with no streaks after this attempt, so I threw the half-empty bottle on the floor with another new expletive and texted Elaina in a panic. She said "EW!" and told me where to find the vacuum. The next 2 hours after the initial siege were filled with me perched on the very edge of the canoe-ton with the vacuum hose in hand, staring like a hawk at the window with my eyebrow raised. Every so often a lone bug would come blundering through the Windex swamp and would immediately join its comrades in the vacuum bag.

At this point I realized that it was approximately 7 seconds before the party was supposed to start, I was not appareled or covered in pretty goo, and that no where in the house was there a single sign of Elaina. I scrambled into her room and started flinging articles of clothing around until some of them landed on me in the right way, tried to wash the insect residue off my face, arms and torso, and did a Jetson's aerosol version of makeup. My hair was a different story, as the lack of bleach and solvent in the Richmond water system had failed to strip it clean so I may as well have styled it with Crisco. It was then 30 minutes after the party was set to start, no guests had arrived, and there was still not a particle of Elaina.

I was cleaning up the atomic disaster area around the Bug Window when the first people arrived, so I fabricated a calm face and radiant smile, opened the door and in my charming way barked "HI I'm not Elaina get inside before they eat you rahhh!!" More people arrived group by group and were introduced to wide-eyed frazzled and not Elaina me. Luckily they were all nice and the types of people who are entertained by shoes and ceiling fans. I learned a good 2/3 of their names after they repeated them 4 times, sweetly disintegrated one of the guys who sat next to me, took my phone, tried to crawl into my pocket and rest his cheek on my neck. Then I made another of the guys cry. I was a big hit. Elaina finally arrived home at 9 million p.m., bless her heart, they'd evidently shackled her by the wrist to the floor at work and wouldn't release her until some girl blew up a basketball. We all sat around and talked about things like blowing up basketballs and why the country is doomed, and I couldn't figure out why several of them were speaking in this extravagant southern accent until I realized I was in another state. All things considered it was very fun and I made several new one-night bff's.

Elaina and I had talked about going to the Waffle House at 3am to honor Jim Gaffigan, but at that point we'd both had such a weird day that we decided to collapse without another word and save that one more bad decision for the birthday morrow....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz..........

Chant Down Babylon