"Some days even my lucky rocketship underpants don't work." -Calvin & Hobbes

Monday, June 3, 2013

he said, she said, I said...

Note: I don't use people's real names in my blog unless I know it's ok with that person or if I really don't care and/or want to embarrass that person. If you are featured in this blog, you know who you are, and thanks for the laugh!

Boy, "You look really nice without crutches." I'm not really sure how to respond to that one....thank you?

After a doctor's appointment, I went to coffee with a friend and was whining about how my foot/ankle is permanently messed up and that no one is ever going to love me. Knowing that I can't stand when people tell me, "It could be worse," my friend says, "Well, at least you have a nice face!"
I'm still laughing about that one. Thanks buddy.

Back in college, two friends were having a heated drunken debate about whether it is better to shave your face before or after you wash it...
Boy #1, in a slight* drunken yell/slur, "Well my germatologist says...!"
Boy #2, "Your germatologist?! What are you, German?!!!"
Shout out. Miss you guys!

On a second date with a boy, he starts to talk about movies.
Me, "I don't really watch movies that much. It's too much of a time commitment for me."
Inner Monologue, "Stop talking. Stop. Talking."
Out loud me, "I mean, 2 hours to sit and stare at a t.v. screen? I have a hard time with it."
Inner monologue/voice of reason that I never seem to listen to, "Ohhhhmygod...stoptalkingstoptalkingstoptalkingstoptalking"
"I'm kind of a commitmentphobe in a lot of aspects of my life."
Face, palm. "You're done. Just stand up and walk away. There is nothing left to do here. There is literally no way to make this any more awkward than you have so just up and leave."
I found out later that he ended things because of that exact moment. Whoops. Obviously he doesn't read my blog and realize that I say stupid things all the time without thinking. Duh. 


*not slight.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

Speech! Speech!

I had a difficult time trying to decide on a title for this blog. My alternate title was "My Friends are Assholes" which is a much better fit, but less appropriate for posting. But let's be honest, my friends are assholes. Keep in mind, however, that this is coming from a girl who has actually said to her grandmother, "When you croak, can I have that?" So I guess that is why we make such good friends. A bunch of hilarious assholes.

I recently went down to my friends' house to have a Game Night/Celebration after I graduated from my teacher credentialing program. The program had been extremely intense and I was finally going to get the chance to hang out with my friends after far too long. Mike and Ashley, the hosts, even had champagne for me. How sweet! We all hung out around the house for awhile, drinking, eating, and making fun of each other. After awhile Mike got out the champagne and began pouring a glass for everyone. He said that he wanted to say something. A speech? For me?!

Now, I would like you all to know that I have this all on video, but I know that my friends would kill me if I posted it on the internet, so here is a transcription of what happened. I will NOT, however, be changing any names. This is all much funnier on video, but I will do my best to get the point across.

Me, "A speech, for me?!"
Mike, "Uh huh."
Raises glass. "So here's to denote a lot of really hard work and a lot of long hours..."
This is when I start to question what is going on...this speech is far too sentimental.
"...to finally attain a goal..." Ok, what's the catch?
"...of me and Joe mounting the new TV!" 
Vinnie, Joe, and Ryan erupt in cheers, I start cracking up, and Ashley says above all of this commotion, "Waaait a second, wait a second."
Ryan, "That really is a hell of a television."
Joe, "You know, I didn't come down here and help you with that just for this, but it really means something to be acknowledged like this."
Mike, "Cheers!" All the boys clink their glasses.
Vinnie, "Hey, I came in in the clutch though."
Joe, "Yeah, yeah, we couldn't have finished it without Vinnie coming in at the end there."
Ashley, "Wait, wait. Can I just say something about Lindsay, our friend, and the reason we are here, as opposed to our television (laughs). Lindsay...."
Vinnie interrupts, "She's not in 3D though."
Ashley continues, "Lindsay, my best friend, and your guy's good friend, but not as good of a friend as she is to me...(nice speech, nice speech, joke about East Palo Alto, etc.)...and she is a fantastic person who is going to be shaping young minds, and I couldn't be happier." Awwwww.
Boys, "To the TV!"  
Well played, gentlemen. Cheers.

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Makeup or Makedown?



                I have bought my eyeliner and mascara at the drugstore since I started wearing it in high school.  It works fiiiiine.  When I try to cover up a blemish using makeup, it ends up being a more obvious spot than when I started. So do I go with a red dot or a huge, oddly colored brownish splotch? Le sigh.
                I recently took a trip to Sephora with my friend, Ashley, who is another not-much makeup-wearer (however, she is a bit more knowledgeable on the topic than I am).  I was there to return an item of makeup that I received as a birthday gift.  It was something that I would NEVER use and I am not quite sure if it was a not-so-subtle hint that I should start wearing more makeup or just an I-have-no-idea-what-to-get-you-for-your-birthday kind of thing.  Either way, it was getting returned.  I had no idea what to use my store credit on.  Ash mentioned that she was curious about the new BB creams that are all the rage these days.  Obviously, I had no idea what she was talking about.
                Turns out, it stands for “Beauty Balm.”  It’s a moisturizer, sunscreen, skin even-outer, magic potion that also does your taxes for you.  Ok, great. We asked a Sephora employee about it.
                First of all, I have a really hard time getting on board with the amount of time and money it takes to prepare oneself for the day.  As it is, I already take FOREVER to get ready in the mornings, and the last thing I need is to add more minutes to my already packed morning schedule.  I suppose it’s a vicious cycle; more makeup time equals less sleep, while less sleep is going to equal more makeup time. Interesting.  Secondly, I have an even more difficult time with the idea that I am supposed to trust the employees of Sephora (or any other makeup counter) to offer me advice on how I should be wearing these products.  Have you seen these people?!  They have so much makeup on that it looks as though their face will crack if they smile too widely.  In other words, it’s a lot of makeup.  The girl who took my return had teal blue eye shadow on, all the way up to her eyebrows.  The girl that helped us with the BB cream had more blush on that any human ever should wear.  For the first 7 minutes that she spent talking to us, I’m not sure what she was saying, because I was staring at her, trying to figure out if she was a female or a transvestite (she was a female).  So when I tell the employee that I want to look “natural,” I’m never really sure if their interpretation of this word is the same as mine.
                Anywho, when I first expressed interest in a BB cream to Tranny Jen, the first question she asked me was, “Ok, do you want to be able to see your freckles or should we cover those up?”
                I stared at her blankly. “What?” I didn’t know this was a thing.  Since my freckles are darker than my skin tone, does that mean that I would have to use a darker color to match my freckles in order to get all of my skin the same color? Do people do this? Are black people even real or are they all just Caucasians wearing makeup that is covering freckles?!  My whole world has been turned upside down.  Now I look at people and wonder what they really look like underneath it all.  Who are you?
                As I write this blog, I realize that I should have said, “Get rid of the freckles! Make me one solid color!” just to see what I would look like.  But since I was so taken aback, my response was that yes, I want to be able to see my freckles and that I simply want a “natural” tone, whatever that might mean.  She put some stuff on my face, I couldn’t tell the difference between any of them, but I needed to use my store credit on something, so I bought one.  I still can’t really tell a difference.
                Another thing that I have learned that came as a shock to me is that a LOT of my friends color in their eyebrows.  What?! That’s a thing too?  However, two things that I have noticed about myself in my old age (not including my grey hairs) is that my skin is turning weird colors and my eyebrows are thinning out.  What the eff.  This growing old crap is for the birds.*  So I asked Tranny Jen about my eyebrow problem as well. 
                I left the store looking like the overly makeup-ed transvestite version of myself.  Not long after we walked out, I rubbed my face (oops) and then looked like the leaving-after-a-one-night-stand version of myself (I would assume).
                I have since tried to draw my eyebrows on my own and let me tell you, it’s not pretty.  I either use too much and my eyebrows look like Crazy Town, or not enough and there is really no difference except that I have wasted three minutes of my life.  So, alas, I have given up. For the time being, I will be sticking with my drugstore mascara, use it however I feel necessary, and go on with my life. Let’s be honest, there are far more things that I need to work on to perfect myself other than my face. Ha.             
*I have also been using expressions such as “for the birds” that seem to come with age as well. Le sigh.  

Thanks for raising me, here's the bill for my psychologist.

My mom woke me the other morning with a text and a picture of a big red cut on her chin. The text said, "Cut myself shaving today...my legs! Go figure." And suddenly, so much of my life makes sense.


For the record, my mother makes fun of me just as much as I make fun of her (see "The Time my Mother Made Me Eat a Dog Treat"). However, she doesn't post it on the internet for everyone to read. Maybe we can get a two-for-one deal on a psychology appointment. Groupon, are you listening?

Sunday, March 24, 2013

The Continuing Saga of Ms. "Anberson"

Kids are so dumb! You seriously have to teach them eeeeverything! It's like they have barely been alive or something.They can't even figure out which way a "d" faces. Silly 5 year olds.
I've been in a kindergarten classroom for 2 months now, and I really have some gems to write about.

Today, my master teacher hands me a book right as i'm bringing the kinders in from lunch. "Do you want to read this to them? Sorry, it's the only book I could find that relates to President's Day." What was that book you ask? The freaking Gettysburg Address. With pictures of course, but the actual speech. Which I had to read to a class of 5 and 6 year olds. There were about two lines per page, which I would read and then have to stop and explain before I went on to the next page. I also had to explain the title, "The Gettysburg Address." So I explain to the class what an "address" is, and then told them that Gettysburg is a town and it is where Lincoln gave this speech. Here's the good part... one of my students raised his hand and said (and I'm going to type this as speech impediment-y as possible), "P'getty idn't a town. idt dometing you eat!" ...and from now on, I will refer to this speech as the Spaghettisburg Address.

I was out on yard duty one day, and two boys from another Kindergarten class came up to talk to me. I've never talked to either one of these boys, but one of them I have definitely seen around. He is an adorable Asian kid with a full-on mohawk. Obviously, I'm smitten. The other kid is a brunette white kid who I wouldn't be able to identify in a crowd. I don't know, they all look the same. Anyway, the two boys come up to me and point to my huge velcro orthopedic boot and ask, "What happened to your leg?"
So I told them the condensed 5-year-old version of my story, "I wasn't watching where I was going, and I stepped in a pothole in the grass. My foot bent backwards and a bone inside broke."
They both looked up at me with wide eyes. The brunette says to me, totally serious, "How did you survive?!"
In my mind, I instantly pictured myself trudging through the treacherously manicured lawn in Sal's front yard. This was my 'Nam.  As I dodged around my car, the pothole was too quick for me. Down I went, writhing in (slight) pain, onto the grass.  
As I looked back at the boys, I just shook my head and said, "I don't know, man. I don't know." 

My students have "Reading Buddies" once a week.  I take my class of kindergarteners over to a 2nd grade classroom where they are paired with a buddy to read with (in case the activity name wasn't clear enough for you). So last week when we went to the 2nd grade class, my master teacher was reading out her students names and the buddy that they are paired with. She called out a boy's name and a few of his classmates said that he wasn't in class that day.  One of the boys offered up a little more information about the kid's absence and said, "He got bit by a mosquito!"
You are probably thinking the same thing that I was at that moment; a kid stayed home sick from a mosquito bite??? I tilted my head and looked over at the second grade teacher, inquisitively. Huh? She laughed quietly, and swirled her finger around her stomach area, saying, "He has a bug."


And finally, one of my favorites...
The kids had to cut out snowflakes with colored paper and then title the snowflake whatever it was that they decided the design looked like.  I had to ask this student what he wrote here. "Hey, L. What does this say here?"
"Robot and peanuts."
"Oh, yeah. Ok, that's what I thought, but I just wanted to make sure." (Not what I thought at all)

Monday, January 21, 2013

Cops Have No Sense of Humor

Many of you know, I am no stranger to the traffic violation. I have frequently been caught speeding and/or rolling through stop signs. (But it's called a "California Roll!" If not in California, when is this acceptable?!) I have tried to cry, tried to deny the violation, tried being extra sweet, and tried being straightforward in attempts to avoid the cop putting pen to carbon copy paper. Alas, none of these tactics have worked. The one and only time I have successfully gotten out of receiving a ticket was when I explained to the officer that I had just gotten a speeding ticket on the other side of town two hours prior to him pulling me over (this second time being pulled over that day was for "speeding" through a school zone. I was going what I thought was the proper speed limit, as it was July. Turns out I was near a year-round school. Blimey).
Needless to say, I have had many a conversation with the fuzz. Some of them are nice, some of them are big a**holes, just like any other profession. However, none that I have talked to have had much of a sense of humor.

Incident #1:
Last month, while I was home for the holidays, a house across the alleyway, behind my mom's house, was broken into. When Dave, my dog, raced outside, barking incessantly, I first assumed that it was because someone was walking their dog down the alley. It is usually that, or that he heard a leaf drop to the ground that would cause his raucous barking. What can I say, the mutt likes to bark. But then Sal's dog, Steve, started going a bit crazy too. I looked out back and noticed a police car parked behind our fence. Curious as to what was going on, I pulled on my bulky grey grandpa sweater over my t-shirt and sweatpants, pulled on my god-awful tan Uggs, and walked out back, clutching my cup of hot coffee as the snow lightly fell onto the dogs and myself.
When I reached the back of the yard, I noticed that there were not one, but two police cars there. The dogs had stopped barking, since they knew that I had the situation covered, and I slipped out the gate, leaving the dogs in the yard, where they could calmly guard the perimeter.
One police officer was busy writing a report, two officers were checking out the house and it's shattered side window, and the fourth was talking to one of the neighbors who had been the witness to the strange car of hoodlums whom she had noticed were suspiciously lurking outside of this house as she was returning home from work. This woman was the one who had called the police to report the situation, so she was talking to the officer about what she had seen. She also explained the situation to me and then had to run inside her house to get her ID for the officer.
As she walked inside, I stood there with the 30-something man in uniform. As most of you know, I am not one who can very easily handle an awkward silence. And how do I handle any given moment of awkward silence? With an even more awkward joke, many times referred to as "word-vomit." I took a slow sip of my steaming coffee, which was quickly cooling from the snowflakes that were falling into it, but still slightly keeping my hands warm. My neighbor was all the way in her house at this point, with the front door propped open about an inch. The cop had briefly stopped writing. I looked up at the fully uniformed man in blue, and with snowflakes falling on my glasses and melting into water spots, and asked, "Sooo...what do you do for a living?"
He looked over from his metal writing tablet and stared at me blankly. He didn't say anything, just looked at me. I couldn't tell whether he was honestly confused by my joke or was simply unimpressed. Whatever it was, I will never know for sure. I looked down at the coffee cup, grasped tightly in my cold hands and slowly mumbled, "Uhh, it was a joke..."
His only reply was a quick nose snort. It was the kind where you blow a short gust of air out of your nose in a huffy way and your head and shoulders huff along with it. And with that, he went back to filling out the police report. Luckily, my neighbor came out of her house right at that moment, and I was off the hook for any more awkward silence filling. I can only imagine the possibilities of where my one-sided conversation would have gone from there, but thank goodness, I don't have to.

Incident #2: Spoiler alert! Lindsay gets pulled over for not fully stopping at a stop sign.
It was a beautiful, sunny day and I had just had a great lunch with a wonderful friend.  As usual, my plans went longer than I had anticipated, and I was running late for my next get-together, and was racing to the next location. To make things worse, I really had to pee.
Aaaaaand, there go the flashing lights. Crap. I didn't even know what I had done wrong. Was I speeding? I'm pretty sure I couldn't have been, because I was in a residential area with a stop sign at every corner. Argh.
Pull over, roll down window, hands on wheel. I know the drill. The cop stops his motorcycle (yes, motorcycle, the most cliche kind of cop). Side note: I would gladly accept a ticket if I were ever stopped by a police officer on a horse. That would be far more entertaining. Anyway, he comes to my driver's side window. "Do you know why I pulled you over ma'am?"
"Uuumm, no."
"You didn't stop at the stop sign on _____ Street."
"Uumm, yes I did."
"I do this for a living ma'am, and that was not a complete stop."   
Whoa, buddy. No need to get all crazy. I freaking stopped. But there was no time for that. I was late and as I said, I really had to pee. So, as I stared at my steering wheel, I asked him innocently, "Ok, uuh, I'm pretty sure I stopped, but I don't know how I can prove that at all. Is there anything, a-ny-thing, I can do to get out of this ticket?" 
In the split second after I said that, I realized the possibility of the horrible connotations that could have been implied with that statement and the awkward way I had said it. I froze. My eyes got huge as I turned to look up at his face, which was stoically watching me begin to freak out.
"Oh, my God. I...I didn't mean....I mean, uhh...oh my god. Uhhh....never mind. Just...oh my gahh...just...just write me the ticket."
With that, he collected my license and registration....and wrote me the ticket.