My Weekend
I double book my dates with women. It sounds all jerky and stuff, but when I make plans with a girl I don’t know very well, I almost always make plans with another girl on the same day and time. One of them invariably cancels, so I have a backup. What happens if neither of them cancels? Believe it or not, it has never happened.
This time, I was the cancellor, rather than the cancellee due to a series of crappy events that eventually got so ridiculous it made me laugh like a crazy person.
It all started at 8 am. I got up and decided to make my standard breakfast of scrambled eggs and a couple of strips of turkey bacon, or as I like to call it, “meat flavored paper”. In the course of making the eggs, I thought, “hey I should drop a little cheese on these guys and deep fry them, since just having eggs and bacon won’t destroy my heart as quickly as my ‘deep fried everything’ diet plan.”
I buy the shredded cheese in the re-sealable bags because I am either too lazy to shred it myself, or too poor to buy a cheese grater.
OPEN LETTER TO ALL PRODUCERS OF SHREDDED CHEESE IN RE-SEALABLE BAGS-
Please find a new vendor for the zip seal part of your bags. The zip seal bags you make can only be opened by destroying the zip seal part, thus rendering your cheese as un-resealable as every other crap cheese on the shelf.
Case in point- I tore the bag where they said to tear it, but the zip-up part of it was still hanging on with the tenacity of a fat chick who thinks she is in love. To solve this problem I used the man method, in which you overcome the offending object with brute force. The tensile strength of an 8 oz bag of sergento fancy shredded cheddar cheese is between 15 and 20 pounds, and results in catastrophic failure along the extrusion grain of the plastic (I know these fancy words because of several years spent as an industrial designer stress-testing products).
Shredded cheese showered down around my kitchen like a ticker tape parade. It was in my hair, in my shirt, all over the stove/counter/sink, and covering the floor. Nice. I got so involved in cleaning it up that I burned my bacon. Yes, it was the last two slices.
Grocery list-
Turkey bacon
Shredded cheese (non re-sealable)
I ate breakfast and checked my voice messages and e-mail to see which girl had canceled. Girl #1 had something else going on, so girl #2 was going to meet me at Willie’s on Piedmont at 12:30. Easy enough. I took a shower that was luckily uneventful and got I my car with plenty of time to spare. I had a flat tire, due to parking in the lot behind the building that is paved with glass shards and nails. I cannot put into words how much I can’t wait to get into my condo and away from this ghetto stinkhole building and the morons who live here. I always carry a can of “fix-a-flat”, so the tire problem was fixed in four minutes. By now I should have realized that today was going to be a tough one. I left and headed to Willies.
Not the willies on Piedmont, where the girl was supposed to be meeting me, but the Willies on Roswell because I am stupid. I think that after a couple of things go wrong in your day, you create the rest of your problems yourself. Having been preoccupied with the cheese dousing and the flat tire, I had a visual in my head of where I was going to meet this person, and that’s where I went, even though it made no sense. I pride myself in being on time or early, and arrived in the wrong place at exactly the right time.
By now I was pissed. Almost to the point of being unsalvageable. My own mistakes will irritate me more than anything else in the world, and once I reach a certain point of irritaedness, I’m canceling my plans because I’ll be in a foul mood and don’t want to be around anyone. So I had to call the girl and tell her that I was legally retarded and would be there in fifteen minutes. I said I’d call her when I got there and we’d meet up. Peoples’ agonizing driving habits are amplified when you are in a hurry.
When I finally got to the Piedmont Park area at 1 p.m. (we were going to stroll around the Dogwood Art Festival and make fun of stuff), I was turned away from three parking lots by rude cops whose job it was that day to make sure people didn’t use certain lots to park for the event. I didn’t get pissy with them, because after all, they are making $30k a year to get shot at and tell people where not to park. I was just having a bad day. I ended up driving around the surrounding neighborhoods looking for a spot to park, but was met at every turn by irate homeowners who didn’t want me parking in front of their house and more cops who said I couldn’t park anywhere.
Finally, I was parked in a spot about a mile from where I was going. I reminded myself why I hate big public events like this. I was going to walk a mile to go fight a crowd for a few hours so I can see a bunch of crap that I don’t care about and pretend to be charming for a girl who probably doesn’t think I’m as great as I am.
I flipped open my phone to call the girl, dialed her number, and was met with silence. My phone’s battery had died. It took every drop of my self-control not to spike my phone into the sidewalk and stomp on it until I felt better. Since I am a grown-up, I just put it in my pocket, got in my car, and headed home. I called her when I got home and apologized for being a massive flake. She was very understanding, and laughed at my account of the day’s events.
It really feels good to write about it. I am actually in a good mood again. Oh, I’m still a little nervous about the building falling down around me or something, but I’m all smiles. My chameleon is relaxing on the back porch eating bees and flies and stuff, the cat is doing a brilliant impression of a doorstop, and I’m about to resume work on the latest portrait.
Life is good.
