Is it just me?

I have a confession to make. Sometimes the little things set me off. It doesn't even have to start with one of those sneaky hate spirals that Ali wrote about on Hyperbole and a Half-- it just springs up out of nowhere. Someone will say something totally innocent and probably not even think when they're saying it, and I'll get kind of ornery about it.

Do you get like that too?

The Nerak is with me often enough so she could probably gauge if I'm overreacting on this, but this is the one that usually gets me.

 And in my head, I'm ALWAYS like: 

I don't know. Some people are more sensitive than others so maybe I'm over-thinking it... I mean, I'm not ornery, am I?

Children...

At my place of employment, we have an old car that we let kids climb on. I like the idea, but sometimes I wonder...

The car is right outside the office window so we can keep an eye on it, and being right there, we can hear everything the kids say.

Hands down, the most common thing we hear (besides "vroom") is:

But when kids get together in groups, it's amazing how crazy they get. They say things that I'm sure they don't understand.

A few examples of actual things I've heard:
   1) An itty bitty kid pretending to drive his elderly grandma around.

   2) A grade school field trip.

(That's the Sean Kingston song "Beautiful Girls," if you couldn't tell.

Singing in the car at a young age = awesome. That song = less awesome but more hilarious.)

And one that I heard just today, and thankfully they repeated it so I could tell you this truthfully,
   3) A group of nine home-schooled kids, none older than 8.

Truthfully I thought they said "pawn shop" until they repeated it a few times. Their poor parents had so completely tuned them out that they didn't even notice. (Granted they had wandered off without the kids and were no longer nearby.)

Prior to this, I had been over at our local library where the woman in line in front of me had four boys that she was completely incapable of controling.

To one side of the line, the two older boys were fighting (probably 8 and 10).

On the other side, one boy had just wandered off (probably 5ish) and was poking around behind the counter.

The lady herself was holding onto a little boy who has sobbing and wailing so hard that his body had sagged over into a lump, but she still held onto his arm.

At one point, another lady and her two quiet kids walked by, cutting through the line between me and Mom #1. Her little boy (Boy #2) tripped on the other little boy's body (Boy #1) but Mom #2 had such a grip on that boy that she just kept going and pulled him (Boy #2) back to his feet without slowing down. The boy just kind of limply swayed as he floated back up into the air and onto his feet. It reminded me a lot of something being dragged behind a car.

So yeah... this kind of tapered off and lost it's funny. Sorry, guys! (But hey, my cars are getting better, eh?)

What's a... "music" store?

I had a brain glitch of sorts the other day. It may be because I had just finished final exams for grad school the night before and my brain is on vacation, but whatever it was I looked like I just staggered out of an institution and had never had social interaction before.

Here's what happened:

Karen and I went to the mall to pick up some Christmas presents. As usual, we had to get some of our favorite cold drinks first: iced coffee and peanut butter and banana shake, respectively. So Karen got her drink and I placed my order for my shake, and as we stood there, a lady who had just gotten her drink asked us, "Do you know if there's a music store in this mall?"

In no way is this an odd question to hear at a mall.

But for me...

 

Karen was looking around to see who the lady was talking to, and I went completely blank. I'm positive my mouth gapped open, maybe I drooled a bit, and the look on my face probably traumatized her child. I went completely blank. No lights on inside, no blinking, no life left in my eyes--- complete mental shut down.

But really, as brainless as I seemed, my mind was racing:

(And by courtyard, I mean center court.)

Finally she gave me a hint.



And I pointed in some undiscernible direction.

Maybe this lasted a minute but I'm sure a 45-second mental absence had to be alarming. Karen was probably concerned that a stranger had broken me and she would never get home again... unless she jacked my keys and stole my car... or called her husband...

I don't know if the lady believed me when I said it was by Penney's, and I don't know that she ever found the music store. Hopefully she never finds this blog post, though, because she didn't look anything like my fine doodle and Karen says her kid was a boy. Oops!