I love you, now please keep four feet between our bodies at all times, thanks.

I've been trying to find a way to put a funny spin on something very creepy that happened to me earlier this week, but I just can't. It wasn't funny, it was very very scary and way too real. So, because it was too scary for even ME to make hilarious, I'm just not going to talk about it.

My apologies, but if you'd like to, you can think of the creepiest thing that you'd like to happen to me and just imagine that that's what happened. I won't even ask you what you thought about. This is your only chance freaks, so make it good. After you have your mischievous dream bubble of creepiness sequence, please, continue on to your regularly scheduled Sass Attack.

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People always ask me why I don't like hugs. There has to be something fundamentally wrong with a person who hates hugs, right? I'm sure they all think I'm incredibly weird and a bit rude for cringing and dodging every time someone, even loved ones (perhaps especially loved ones), spread out their arms and wait for an embrace.

I've decided its not just because I'm strange and rude, its also because I loathe disingenuous displays of affection.

I hate when someone gets their arms around you and you can barley feel them pulling you in. Or when they tap the top of your back but keep a bit of air and space between your bodies. Or when the hug is so quick and they let go that its almost like your skin burned them. Oooh! Or when someone wraps one arm around your shoulder and pulls you into their nasty arm pit and doesn't look at you while they "hug" you.

Its not like most people sit around thinking, "Lets give Mars a really shitty hug and make her feel uncomfortable," yet they do it anyway. Even if you think your hugs couldn't possibly suck, I can almost guarantee you that they do. I don't even want you to try on the off chance that you're a shitty hugger because after you hug me I'll be forced to pretend that you're not while I'm secretly plotting in my head how to avoid ever having to do that again.

Seriously, bad hugs are just not worth it. I'd rather jump into a lagoon filled with Barracudas than have to hug someone.

Don't feel too badly though, because its not like I'm an expert hugger. I'm the kind of hugger that barley lays her arms on you and pats your back twice and pulls away two seconds later. I'm a two-second-hugger. I don't know how many times I've let go and been pulled back by another (equally bad) hugger. Then I feel even worse, because now not only did someone give me a weird unsentimental hug but I gave them my own variety of non-committal personal contact and I have to wonder if I made them feel bad by pulling away too quickly, which I know they noticed because they PULLED ME BACK.

Now, this person that I've hugged and I both want to go home and cry and wonder why the other person who we obviously care about enough to let into our personal space and touch hates us, because a hug that bad can mean nothing else. Do we smell? Are we sticky? Do they even love us at all? This just leads to abandonment fears, and attachment issues and suicidal tendencies. All because of a fucking hug.

Have I convinced you yet? Its really for the best that we don't hug. Good thing this is an Internet blog, because otherwise this could be really awkward. The whole... not hugging thing.

For the love of Trees... maybe.

At work once I'm done ringing a customer up, I always ask them, as it is my job, if they would like a copy of their receipt. When someone pays with a credit card or a check, and the receipt has their name on it, its an automatic thing; I print a copy for them. But then there are those times when a customer purchases a pair of $2.00 socks from me so that their gross little kids can run rampant on my equipment and not get their baby foot fungus all over everything. Sometimes, these people will actually say YES to a receipt.

When this happens, in my head, I start screaming "TREE KILLER! MURDERER!!! TREEEE KIIIILLLLEEEEERRR" because really, who fucking needs a receipt for a pair of socks that you just handed me 2 bucks for? All you're doing is using up a piece of paper that didn't need to be used. Now some burly ass lumberjack has to stomp out to the forest (which forest, I'm not sure, since we have so few left) and chop down another of our oxygen and vegetation sources, and put a few hundred animals out of their homes and onto the streets to become beggars, thieves, druggies, and prostitutes (because that's what happens to the homeless, even animals) so that I can put a new roll of receipt paper in my register.

OK. So before you start picturing me as some tree hugger who wears shirts day in and day out that say "If its yellow, let it mellow..." and washes her hair with patchouli dandelion shampoo that she makes herself, I need to confess. Part of my angst, maybe all of it, comes from the fact that I'm too LAZY to print up unimportant receipts and I feel that by being offended for our earth I can legitimize the annoyance of having to print a receipt.

Don't judge me Mother Earth, you made a lazy SOB, at least I'm spinning it to your advantage.

Adventures in Babysitting

Upon arriving at my parent's house today, I learned that my father was being interviewed for some amature documentary about people who haves homes, or something along that line, and that I was to be very very quiet and out of the way. I twisted his arm so that he would give me 7 bucks to go get a Vietnamese sandwich for lunch and took off.

When I returned I found that the documentary maker brought with him his 9 month old son who was now crawling around my parent's very un-child-proofed house. They haven't needed child proofing in like... 19 years, and as it has just been the two adults living in the house for the past 4 years, all of the edges have become sharper and the scissors have gotten closer and closer to the ground. It then became my job to babysit for the next hour.

The little boy was very cute, as I think, most 9 month old babies are. He was half Asian and half Black and hate cute little chubby cheeks and puffy lips and small jello-like baby legs. When he smiled his whole face lit up, and he smelled, like all babies should when they have the luxury of a clean diaper.

When I first sat down with the toddler, I put him as far back on my parent's couch as I could, I kinda... stuffed him in the corner pocket and handed him my cell phone. That entertained him for about 15 minutes. He kept slapping my cell phone, throwing the TV remote control and singing to me. I of course found things to do with him in those first 15 minutes like play the obnoxious game where the adult in the situation (me... cringe) picked up a stuffed animal and made kissey noises with it against the baby in the situation's face. He seemed to like that enough, but like any boy in the world had enough of the cutsey kissey frog... and me very quickly.

He spotted my cat and of course, wanted to play with her. My cat does not have the best track record in playing with others. I think, if she had gone to kitty school, she would have gotten "F"s in conduct until they finally kicked her furry ass out for kicking the shit out of anyone who looked her way. Needless to say, when this toddler flopped on his stomach and began to dangle himself off of my parent's sofa and swat the air between him and my cat's nose, I got very very nervous. When I tried to pull him away from my cat he screamed at me, saying what I can only presume was in baby "LEMME EAT HER!" and flopped back. He did this for a good two minutes until I found another way to distract him.

This time I decided to take him on a walk around the house and bounce him up and down. He liked the bouncing, though I'm not sure why babies like that, it would probably make me nauseous. Don't bounce me or I'll puke on you. I stopped by a spot on the wall where my mom, some years ago in an effort to be cute, had cut out a red heart and taped it on the wall for Valentine's Day. Babies like colors and shapes right? So I brought it to his attention so that he could marvel at the color. Shouldn't babies just coo and giggle when they see something they like like a big red heart? SHOULDN'T THEY? I guess not.

This baby reached out and ripped the heart off of the wall and proceeded to try and shank me with it. He wadded it up in his fat little hand and started slapping me with the sharper edges of the paper. Death by paper cut. I think that's what he was going for. I ran over to the television and thankfully it got his attention long enough for me to switch the paper into his other hand so that when he began stabbing at the air again it was in the direction of the teletubbies and not my face.

I finally sat us back down where he happily played with what used to be my mother's home decor. I looked up for one second, then back down to see him stick the crumpled up paper heart into his mouth and take a bite out of it. Kid, seriously, you shouldn't eat paper. I lunged for the heart, threw it behind me and looked back at him to see, with horror, that he had a piece of it in his mouth. I've seen plenty of mothers in my life stick a finger in their kids' mouths to scoop out something they shouldn't have in there, so I decided it should be easy and stuck my finger inside his mouth.

THIS KID HAS SOME RAZOR SHARP CHOMPERS! He bit down, disregarding the fact that my finger was now lodged in his mouth and continued to do so. I'm sure he was trying to eat me. He bit really hard and even when I pinched his cheeks together to get him to stop chewing, the second I stuck my finger in his mouth his teeth somehow came smashing down on it! I almost lost my finger. I decided that he could KEEP the piece of paper in his mouth and if he choked on it, it would be his own damn fault. Friggin' little kid. I'm trying to SAVE YOUR LIFE HERE!

Next he decides that he wants to try standing. So he makes me put him on the floor, then he holds onto my legs trying to pull himself up on his feet. Only, his legs are still made of jello and he can't pull them up under him or straighten them to hold himself up. So of course, this is all my fault, right? So he starts yelling at me in his baby language "You wouldn't let me eat your cat, or your phone, or your fingers... the only thing you let me do was almost die of eating paper and now you won't let me stand, I hate you!" Wow, they sure learn to say the H word early these days. I blame Noggin.

So I say back, "Look kid, your legs... they're not so sturdy right now. You're pretty much made of jello and poop, and that's just not my fault. It took me a good 21 years to learn to use my legs. You can't just decide at nine months old that you're gonna stand on dessert legs. You should just stop, and stop yelling at me, and take your clubbed feet and crawl on. Here's that weird feather toy that your dad brought you here with. Its cool, go play".

Very logical right? It was my best hostage negotiation voice, too. I even gave him a toy to play with in the end. If I were a baby I would have just cut my losses and rolled away. No. Instead he sinks his baby nails (why are their nails so fucking sharp?!) into my calves and tries harder to pull himself up. Since obviously his legs don't work he decides to bite my knee and hold himself up that way. Oh small children and your stupid victories.


After about an hour his father came out and he was once again smiles and sunshine and he kept holding his arms out to me like he missed me or something. I'm so glad he was strapped into his stroller. He might've tried to come get me.

Babies.

Absolutly Wicked

So, I do realize I may be a little late to jump on this bandwagon, though I feel that I can just pull the Literary Snob card and say that I read the book five or so years ago (more like 8, damn I'm old), but Wicked, is AMAZING.

Last night a friend called me up and said she had an extra ticket to the San Francisco production of Wicked and wondered, if by any chance, I would like to come. I always thought seeing a Broadway musical would just be a dream of mine. One of those, someday when I win the lottery/marry a millionaire, and take off to NYC on the spur of the moment I'll spend my time there watching plays and eating cheesecake kind of dreams. Then all of a sudden a friend, a new friend at that, offers me a Shiny Golden Ticket to Wicked... a Fifth Row Shiny Golden Ticket to Wicked, none the less. So I say, oh so nonchalantly,

"Maybe, I get off work at 5, I'll text you later."

For the record, I am just that cool.

The rest of the day I spent kind of floating around in my own little bubble of excitement. Outwardly I held in depth conversations with customers and barked orders at my staff, while on the inside I was planning out which outfit I would wear, how I would do my hair and wondering if I had time to paint my nails before my ride arrived. I ran three stoplights and cut off a cop on the way home, not to mention that I probably caused, and escaped, three traffic accidents.

Whatever, I got home in plenty of time to get ready for my big night out. I decided to try on a dress that I had banished to the back of my closet because it didn't fit me very well, but thanks to my new gym membership, it fit just right (actually it may have been a bit big... =]), opted out of painting my nails, re-did my make-up and added some night time drama to my face.

My ride was a little later than expected, which made me a bit nervous. Maybe I had been too aloof on the phone and she thought I didn't really want to go. I was about to call her begging for the ticket when she knocked on my door and I put my "too cool for Broadway" face back on. On the way to my car I got a toothless smile from a bum, and my gardener/neighbor whistled at me. So, I suppose my gym membership and low cut black dress was working for me.

When we arrived we saw that we were the BEST dressed people in the audience, at least, in our section, which hello, was made up of prime ass seats. Some of the people around us were wearing gross pants and windbreakers, like they just ran there from the gym. "Oh, that was a good workout, now lets run to the ORPHEUM and sit our sweaty asses in some $200 seats." Eventually the lights dimmed and I no longer had to gawk at their grotesqueness.

The show, as many of you may already know, was, AMAZING. From the opening scene, when the dragon clock starts spouting and waving about, until the very last where Glinda, with her GAH now silent, clutches to the Grimmerie and the memory of her dead best friend, I was hooked. I cried one tear in the first half, and then a bucketful in the last.

The stand by for Elphaba actually performed instead of the primary actress, but she was amazing and her voice was superb. I can't imagine how much better the primary actress could be, because the stand by just blew my mind.

I can now add to G*a*linda to my list of personal idols, so now the list is as follows

1. Karen from Will and Grace
2. Chelsea Handler
3. G*a*linda from Wicked

The list is short, but come these are some fierce ass role models, don't cha' think?