How did I get here?

There’s a question I ask myself a heap of times a day.  Mostly I ask it in the morning when I’m hosing myself off in the emergency eyewash station we call a shower in our four hundred square foot efficiency.  I guess you could say it’s intimate.  

The apartment sits on top of a photo printing and processing lab where most of my immediate family has worked the majority of their lives.  I’ll be working there until I get to Austin in a couple months, too.  

Sidenote:  I worked there for a day once in the dark room with my now current step mother but only because I was on suicide watch after ingesting all of the Sinutab and Nuprin I could find in our medicine cabinet.  I think my pre-adult whoreanus girlfriends had rubbed Oreos in our window screens the day before and I simply had no choice but to relieve my sinus pressure TO DEATH.  Fifteen was a turbulent year!

The low point of my week is having to cut through the boardroom on the way out of the apartment in order to get to the office.  I tip toe and dress as tawny as possible in order to blend in with the walls, but they turn around every time.  Occasionally I’ll get a side-splitting, “HEY APRIL, I HOPE YOU DON’T GET CAUGHT IN TRAFFIC!”  Then I’m beaten with the uncontrollable urge to raise my middle finger.  I have to hide it behind a composition notebook like a middle school boner.

My birth control is no longer in pill form because I have to look at a ton of newborn baby photos closely resembling a bald, asphyxiated Archie Bunker.  

Don’t get me wrong, there are upsides.  It’s been incredible to live so close to my family for a change.  

We were even able to visit my aunt at a nursing home in Minneola, Texas where she’s recovering from a stroke like a god damned soldier.  We all played a game of Farkle (yeah, my dad and I couldn’t leave that one alone for long) that day so she could practice using her frankenhand and I saw my very Mormon grandparents drink two cans of miscreant, caffeinated soda.  

My hands were visibly vibrating as I scooted them across the table.  I wasn’t sure what would happen when the Diet Coke hit their lips.  Surely nothing short of what we all know happens when you feed a mogwai after midnight.  I imagined my grandpa’s white hair swooping up from both sides into the center to form a mohawk like the bad Gremlin leader, Stripe.  

I’m just super thankful that my grandmother was too jacked up on the pop to hear one of the residents approach me in the hallway with the following pick up line,

“Why don’t you follow me to my room?!  I’ll show you where I beat myself up!”

Read Full Post »

We meat again.

The most wonderful circle of friends a gal could ask for went behind my back to gather money for someone else to get behind my back and rub on it for a large sum of money. 

Some people call it a massage.  I call it admitting to the spa staff and you all that I’m really nothing more than a piece of food.  Albeit a very relaxed and mouthy morsel.

I waited for a few minutes at the end of a dark hallway watching people come in and out of doors.  Some like me were there to be marinated and tenderized while others were going to be plucked, sucked, waxed, and stoned. 

I didn’t take the seaweed wrap option because you really can’t be too sure they won’t feed you to a giant with a craving for human sushi afterward. 

Joe, my massage therapist, looked like an updated version of a He-Man action figure.  For the record, he blew my mind and melted my insides with the mystical power of Grayskull. 

I have to admit though, I spent the first few minutes wishing someone would slip me a downer.  They should really rethink the musical combination of waves crashing against the shore accompanied by a crying piano.  I couldn’t stop thinking about shipwrecked beauties like the RMS Titanic or the movie, The Piano.

My stars, all this time I had no idea what I was missing.  I felt downright sloppy drunk when he was through.  Thankfully I was all alone in that room when my oily, Gumby foot hit the stepping stool.  People falling is funny enough with clothes on, can you imagine? 

Don’t imagine.

Read Full Post »

“Just relax!”

“I’ll take care of the squealing, wretched, pinhead puppets of Gotham!”

I was followed from the gym all the way through the parking garage and up to my car last Friday.  It was raining, so I had my hood up, and my umbrella in a grip so tight I lost feeling in my pinky. 

(Here’s a shocker:  I can be a bit too big for my britches at times.  I tend to believe I’m a lot tougher than I am because I spent many years of my childhood faking my older sister out so she would stop giving me dutch ovens in our Alvin & the Chipmunks tent.  And Erika, if you’re out there, I sincerely hope you’re not doing this to your children as an alternative to a time out.)

I was in complete denial until I approached my car door and he stopped, stood there, and watched me.  He had his hood up and I’m crazy enough to say he was the Grim Reaper.  I carry a stun gun in my purse, but my idiot instinct was to hit him with my umbrella.  I’ve seen Batman Returns too many times.  

He said, “Hi!”  then pretended to look around and up toward the ceiling.  I barked “HI!” back, but in a most threatening, gatekeeper-y voice similar to that of demigod, Zuul. 

It was that, the “I Love Brains” sticker on my car, or the person who just happened to stroll past the two of us in a Greeting/Staring Match at the perfect moment that sent him walking lickety-split on out of the parking garage.

Knock it off, universe.

Read Full Post »