My Hang Ups

OK, what's the deal with hangers? All I have to do is open my closet and some article of clothing will kamikaze right off of a hanger without me even touching it. On the other hand, if I want to get an empty hanger out or if I need to pick a hanger up off the floor (every day), that hanger will stick to anything and everything like the world's best round of the  Barrel of Monkeys game. Today I tried to pick up a fallen hanger and somehow it hooked up and around the hem of my pants and locked in. I picked up my leg and that hanger was white knuckling my hem. I put my foot back down and tried to get better balance for the unthreading procedure and my other foot got stuck inside the hanger. Next I knew the game had changes from Barrel of Monkeys to Pogo stick riding and then to a failed Houdini trick. I seriously almost broke my neck doing this. I did break the hanger. Who designed hangers, Satan? I tell you what, design a better hanger system and you will be rich.ed to pick up a fallen hanger and somehow it hooked up and around the hem of my pants and locked in. I picked up my leg and that hanger was white knuckling my hem. I put my foot back down and tried to get better balance for the unthreading procedure and my other foot got stuck inside the hanger. I seriously almost broke my neck doing this. I did break the hanger. Who designed hangers, Satan? I tell you what, design a better hanger system and you will be rich.ed to pick up a fallen hanger and somehow it hooked up and around the hem of my pants and locked in. I picked up my leg and that hanger was white knuckling my hem. I put my foot back down and tried to get better balance for the unthreading procedure and my other foot got stuck inside the hanger. I seriously almost broke my neck doing this. I did break the hanger. Who designed hangers, Satan? I tell you what, design a better hanger system and you will be rich.ed to pick up a fallen hanger and somehow it hooked up and around the hem of my pants and locked in. I picked up my leg and that hanger was white knuckling my hem. I put my foot back down and tried to get better balance for the unthreading procedure and my other foot got stuck inside the hanger. I seriously almost broke my neck doing this. I did break the hanger. Who designed hangers, Satan? I tell you what, design a better hanger system and you will be rich.ed to pick up a fallen hanger and somehow it hooked up and around the hem of my pants and locked in. I picked up my leg and that hanger was white knuckling my hem. I put my foot back down and tried to get better balance for the unthreading procedure and my other foot got stuck inside the hanger. I seriously almost broke my neck doing this. I did break the hanger. Who designed hangers, Satan? I tell you what, design a better hanger system and you will be rich.

Pour Some Sugar On Me

I am the worst hypoglycemniac (is that a word?) that I know of. If I go for too long without eating I will get the world’s worst headache that won’t go away. Just before the headache though, comes a period where I sort of enter “the quiet zone” and my personality flat lines. I can literally hear myself talking like a robot. It hit me last night as I was trying to finish my holiday pre-shopping scan of every item in every store. Unfortunately I had just entered a store and had just started my scan when I flat lined and an extremely perky salesman approached. I felt my force field go up immediately. That’s a barrier no salesperson can penetrate.

He wanted to know what I was looking for, in what size and what color. I let out a stream of monotone “I’m just looking” and with each non-emphasized word, he got more excited. It was a challenge; I had dropped the gauntlet and he was picking it up. Oh my word, couldn’t he tell I was running low on sugar and thus out of “sweetness”? I was a hungry sourpuss, a Grinch who was Christmas shopping. All of his excitement and sales-witchery bounced off my low glycemic brain like water off of a Rain-X’d windshield. I just didn’t have the time or energy to explain that I was pre-shopping scanning, or what that was, or why I MUST do it that way. I needed silence to ensure my scanning downloaded properly. Silence was not part of his game plan.

Salesman (SM): …but if you did know what you were looking for , what sizes would you need?

Me: (flatly) I have it written down on a list in the car.
SM: What are the favorite colors of the people you are shopping for?

Me: It depends on what it is.

SM: (Sensing that he was getting nowhere, he switched to his “How to deal with a difficult shopper” sales routine) Could you help me with something? I am not trying to sell you anything; I have some things picked out for myself and would like to get your opinion on them. (I zombied over to him) See these suits? I am trying to decide about tie and sock choices.

I looked and he had two gray suits laid out with three ties and three pair of socks. Each tie was nice and had a few spots of bright color . In the first, it was silver for the most part with a few little dots of lime green. The socks were bright lime green. The next was a tie, dark gray, with some bright blue spots in it. The socks were bright electric blue. The third was in the purple category. Somehow in the midst of all this, I hit the “I’m over it” stage and was really ready to just go home.

SM: I love these tie/sock combinations with these suits; my boss thinks I am crazy. What do you think?

Me: (Without taking a breath and looking him right in the eyes) I think your boss is really smart.

He stood there frozen and silent (I finally got silence). I heard a loud gasp to my right. I turned and to my right was the cashier. Her jaw had dropped to her chest while she took in lots of air really quickly. I looked back and the salesman and he said, “Ouch”.

I felt so bad. Where was my Southern hospitality? Where was my smoothing this over and not hurting his feelings? I know better; I was raised better. Apparently my sweetness is directly linked to my glycemic levels. I made a robotic effort to tell him that the ties matched the socks and looked good together but that I would have to wear them without the suit…..what? I realized how odd that sounded but as it seemed to give me an exit note, I took it.

SM: Now watch how I turn this around and sell you something.

Me: Watch the door.

I exited center stage. I knew it was time for me to go home. I knew I needed to eat something ; my batteries we just about dead. Did I go home? No. I remembered that I needed to get a kid’s gift and ran into Old Navy. While there, I decided to do my least favorite thing in the world…try on jeans.  Why? I have no answer for that other than I wasn’t thinking clearly at this point. I tried on every style in two sizes and none of them made me look the way I think I should look. I sat down my stack of reject jeans by the first stack of rejects and the tired dressing room attendant said,”So, did any of these work out for you?” She had no idea that she was dealing with a drone at this point who was suffering from IBS (irritable boy syndrome) . I was really hitting the point of no return and I answered, “No, none of them worked. They are all either irregular or I have a fat ___.”  (Sorry ladies, pardon my French) I’ll let you fill in the blank. Every now and then, when the blood sugar is low and the timing is right, I speak French. The dressing room attendant just looked at me and said, “We don’t carry irregulars.” Bazinga! It was time for me and my glutes to exit stage left.

 I am going to have to start stocking my car with Power Bars or something so that I can enjoy the Christmas spirit when I am in the midst of the hustle and bustle of it all. You know something is wrong when you are expecting peace and quiet in the middle of the holiday shopping frenzy. You also know something is wrong when you are not patient/kind with people who have to put up with the crazed crowd of deal hunting shoppers. Let’s face it, they are stuck in a big over scented/overstocked box, listening to the same songs over and over again…all day long. It’s holiday waterboarding for those poor sales people. I am going to have to go out and spread some cheer today to make up for last night. If you are looking for me, just follow the trail of Power Bar wrappers and you’ll find me.

 

 

Holiday Stuffing

I am not a “have a pizza delivered” kind of guy. I don’t know why but it is just something I have actually never done. I’ll bet I can count on one hand the number of times I have gone out and gotten a pizza and brought it back home. The only time I actually ever eat it is when I go out with people to a pizza place (or Marina’s on the square). For some reason, Sunday night, I had a hankering for pizza.
We had just had a two hour car ride from our relatives get-together ( a good time was had by all) and I had partaken in everything that was served. I told myself that I really didn’t need anything for dinner as I was about to explode but somehow, around 7ish, my man/bear/pig appetite kicked in. I was out an d about and decided that since there was really noting at home to cook that I would just go to my favorite Chinese restaurant “Most Happy Panda”…or something like that. Yes, before you ask, that is the one that I am pretty sure served me dead baby koi for the Shlimp Spayshell but I think we have mended that fence. On the way to MHP , I started thinking that I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to wait for them to cook it and that maybe I should just run to Subway, get a pretend healthy sandwich and call it a night.

I pulled in to the parking lot and suddenly remembered that there was a new pizza place across the street. My stomach and inner bear growled and my pig squealed to I drove passed the glass door of MHP and in my state of paranoia I am pretty sure the owner was looking out the door and saw me slow down and then drive off. This feud needs to stop. Anyway, the thought of pizza had more appeal than the thought of steamed “chickey brahkrees” and I went to the new pizza place.
The only kind of pizza I eat is veggie , with the occasional chicken pizza. I rationalized all this in my mind as no being so bad since it had to be somewhat healthy and that maybe I just needed to think of this as some kind of “cheat day”. So I walked in the door to order just a small veggie pizza. In my temporary state of perceived starvation, I ordered the medium bacon pizza. Bacon? I don’t eat bacon...except for Christmas morning (it’s a religious thing…something about a manger, a giant star that shined like bacon in the night, etc). Anyway , they told me it would be about ten minutes. Apparently this is the kind of place that people normally just “call in” because I was the only one there waiting…the entire time.

I have no idea why, but after a while I found myself reading information about “fat burning exercises” on the internet. I don’t normally read that stuff, especially not on my phone but for some unknown reason I felt compelled to learn more about this subject matter. The site was filled with  info and several videos on how to perform the exercises. I can’t remember which site I was on  but there were tons of mindless videos to help me not sit there and think about how hungry I was. After a while “seatitis” set in and I had lost all track of time. It just seemed like I had been there a really long time.
I heard a guy in the kitchen say, “Who is that guy sitting out in the lobby? He has been out there forever.” I looked up to see everyone staring at me and I slowly mouthed back the word “FOREVER”. Two men came up front and opened up some kind of storage hot box and said “Oh here it is; are you Perry?” I told them I was and asked what had happed. All I got was a “thank you and have a good night”. I asked if they thought it was now going to taste like a cardboard box but I got the same reply, “thank you and have a good night. So I left and looked at my ticket. I had been there 40 minutes. Mentally, I was dying of starvation.

I got home and checked the DVR and sat there and ate a few pieced of pizza while watching some show that was just too important to miss but that I can now no longer remember. Mmmmmm bacon pizza…with a little pineapple (you’ve got to get in a serving of fruit…if you are health conscious) and a hot spicy crust. If I had to guess, I would say they brushed the outer ring of crust with jalapeno juice. It was good but it set my tongue on fire. I could feel the burn….feel the burn….I remember reading something about that on the fat burning website. I WAS feeling the burn; it had to count for something. The more I ate the more I burned.

The reason I went for the medium was so I could actually have the rest for lunch the next day. As I sat there I remembered I was going to a company party the next day for lunch and wouldn’t need it. “Bacon pizza, that should be good for breakfast,” I told myself. So that was the plan until I started thinking about the fact that every day of this week was going to be some kind of “cheat day” and that just because I had overstocked on pizza it didn’t mean that I had to eat. Then that “starving kids in Africa” saying sounded off in my head….so many voices in my head, it ‘s just hard to always know which one to listen to. I decided to not save any for the next day. All I can tell you is that the last piece was just as good as the first.

So yesterday, I finally remembered that I was out of all my vitamins and went to go restock. A very energetic, salesman, who was, from what I could tell, a doctor of supplementation, gave me a free sample . As he was putting this miracle drug in my bag, he said, “This is going to give you a really/super/hard/intense workout. I informed him that I don’t actually do really/super/hard/intense workouts but that if it gave me a little energy, I would be happy. He replied, “No, you don’t understand, if you take this, you WILL have a really/super/hard/intense workout.  I just said, “I don’t see that happening but I will give it a shot.” He replied, “Oh, it’s going to happen…by the way, you may get body tingles for a minute, that’s normal; it’s fine. It’s supposed to happen.”

I drove to the gym wondering why this guy thought I needed to workout harder by just looking at me. So with that in mind and a fond/loathing memory of a bacon pizza (RIP bacon pizza, you were loved), I looked at the ingredients to this early stocking stuffer that had been put into my bag. It looked like vitamins, amino acids and caffeine…a  thing of two I couldn’t pronounce but sounded like native plants from third world countries, so it sounded relatively safe. I mixed it with water and went in to do my  “slothfit” routine. In just a matter of minutes my face started to tingle. It was weird. It was just my face, somewhere between a tingle and a burn. It eventually went away. I think it did give me a little more energy, kind of like tons of coffee (with the added splash of Icy Hot as facial lotion feel). My heart wasn’t racing or anything. I know, I know, I shouldn’t do these things but the 20 year old supplement doctor said it was safe.

This morning I woke up and looked like a teenager. Wow! By “looked like a teenager” I mean my face had broken out, not that I didn’t have any wrinkles. Apparently I woke up the acne demon from my teen years. It had to be the face tingle. I don’t think I am going to put this product on my Santa list. So today I am back to my whole grain rice/barley/spinach trifecta and I will be once again trying to Frankenstein the low fat/sugar free/ mocha frappaccino…with a shot of protein…maybe. More Christmas events coming up and visions of sugar plum demons dance in my head. I know: pacing, portion control…it only happens once a year…life’s too short…you only go around once…yadayadayada. I will enjoy it, don’t worry, every last bit of it...bite of it. Oh, oh, oh, Merry Christmas.

Stop and Go Buster

 
Dear Man that pulled his car out in front of mine while I was travelling 50 mph down the road,

               Thanks for teaching me my car’s 50-0 breaking distance. Thank you, also,  for teaching me that my bladder can jump up and smack the backside of my Adam’s apple. I had no idea. There is just no way to thank you for re-shuffling my files that were sitting on my car seat. It’s different pages from different files …that’ll teach me to not ALWAYS keep them in my manbag/briefcase. Tomorrow I will find out if green tea causes a permanent stain in car carpet.  Thank you for rearranging my trunk. I was convinced that it was completely full….apparently not. I have plenty of room now, right at the front of the truck. Thanks for showing me how quickly I can get my heart rate up to its maximum. I will re-live this moment over and over again and I should be hitting my fat burning zone much more quickly now. Thanks for taking away the “buyer’s remorse” on my new overpriced, Otter shock absorbing rubbery phone case…no regrets. Thank you for having my bucket list flash across my windshield like something off the Matrix and letting me see that the list is full and that I need to get started. Really, all in all, I learned a lot today, all because of you. Thanks for the memories.

 

Dear Arthritis,

               Thanks for coming back to visit during the holiday season and for being a little bit early this year. Thanks for reminding me to be thankful for what I have. Thank you for giving me the inside scoop on impending weather conditions. Please ignore the massive bottles of Osteo-flex sitting on my kitchen counter. There’s your welcome, now don’t wear it out.

 

Dear Guy in Class,

               Thank you for crushing the myth that “there are no stupid questions.” Seriously…..dude.  When you raised your hand I had no idea that I was about to encounter a myth buster. Thank you for slowly articulating your overmedicated rant while still keeping one eye open. It was a question I would never have anticipated, “Why do the police pull you over just because you took a sleeping pill an hour before you hopped on the interstate to go home, when your doctor told you to take it an hour before you go to bed but didn’t tell you that you couldn’t drive after taking it?” Huh…what…oh. I apologize if I stood there for a while with my mouth hanging open not knowing how to answer. I also apologize for the wisdom of the weathered lady with the husky voice sitting on the front row that chimed in sounding/looking very much like Willy Nelson, “It’s kinda common sense…hello!” Thank you Myth Buster and thank you Wilma Nelson.

50 Shades of Faith (a serious note)

I am sure there are more than fifty shades of faith. As for me, I have always seen two kinds. It seems there are those who just have it, like an artistic gift. Just who naturally had a beautiful voice or the ability to draw or paint whatever they see, some people seem to have faith naturally. They all can polish and hone their skills and perfect their abilities but nothing is going to take it away from them. They will always have it.

 For others, like myself, faith is like a plant. It has to been nurtured, fed,  watered and given light. It requires constant attention. If left alone, it won’t grow, produce or even survive. It will simply dry up, wither away and die.
 
I don't think that one kind is better than the other; one is just more difficult than the other. I’ve always longed for the “gift” but I just didn’t get it. I can, however, like a struggling musician, practice. I can practice over and over again for years and years and in the end, hope that what I can produce and create can be just as good as someone who just “has it” naturally. Not everything in life is easy. Maybe it’s those things that we have to work the hardest for are what, in the end, we will cherish and appreciate the most.

Nanas and Tatas

I asked a hair stylist today about a new product  for my hair and they assured me that it would feel completely natural once it dried. I just used it and maybe it’s because I put it over a pre-existing layer of hair gel, but I am currently a helmet head. I think those two products have merged into a hybrid concrete of sorts. Anystiff, the product also has an extremely strong scent. I am not sure what this scent is called but if I had to guess, I would say that it is probably called, “Nana’s hand cream.” Seriously, it’s hard core senior-scented. I hope it doesn’t turn my hair blue. I don’t think I’ll be able to use this in the summer without getting swarmed by bees…or without feeling like I need a shawl.

 
Tonight I was at Cheddars and there was a two year old boy at a table by me and that kid screamed at the top of his lungs nonstop for about ten minutes. The parents were in their early twenties and you could tell they were at a loss as to what to do. I kept thinking the kid would eventually wear out but he didn’t. Finally the mom got up and took him outside for a few minutes. When they came back and the kid sat back down, he started the same screaming nonstop. I started to think that maybe there was something wrong with the kid. He screamed on and on, louder and louder, stopping only to take a deep breath for better vocal support.  Those poor parents looked so helpless. At the table was also the grandmother. At some point Nana couldn’t take it anymore and I heard her say, “Let me give it a try.” Nana disappeared with the kid for a few minutes and then came back to the table with him. Now, I don’t know what Nana did or said, but all I can tell you is that kid didn’t make one single sound for the rest of the meal. Sometimes, going “old school” is a good thing. You go Nana.

 
When I got home tonight I saw that I had gotten a letter from Dow Corning. It was from their Settlement Facility Claims Processing Department. It seems that I am part of a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit. I have an ID number and everything. All I have to do is send them the paperwork showing when I had my Dow Corning breast implants put in and when I had them removed. If I still have them, I can get them replaced and or repaired, plus compensation. Seriously?  Really?  I have an ID number! What the…..? Have they been reading my notes? Is this about me being paranoid that someone has been slipping me Yaz in my flavored water at the gym? How do these things happen to me? Please tell me that everyone in the state of Tennessee got one of these letters. I may just go ahead and send in some kind of before and after pictures; you never know…stranger things have happened. If I suddenly disappear from Facebook and you get a friend request from someone named “Marsha Perry” that looks a lot like me with pigtails, take the friend request;  dinner’s on her.

 

There is a picture that was painted back in the mid 1800s that I just love. I call it Sunday In The Park, or something close to that(A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte ,to be exact). It’s a beautiful painting that shows people dressed in their period clothes, enjoying a sunny day in the park. There is lush green grass, a lake, children, dogs, everything you would expect to see on a perfect day in the park. What makes this painting unique is that it isn’t painted in brush strokes; it is painted in hundreds, if not thousands, of dots. It reminds me of what you would get if you took a modern day computer picture print out and blew it up over and over again. After a while you would see that it is nothing more than a series of dots. It’s hard to believe that someone had that perspective, that way of seeing things back in the 1800s.

 
I remember seeing scene in a movie in which the camera had zoomed in on one tiny area of this picture. It was on a shadow. Thus, all you saw on the screen were a few little black dots, maybe a gray or two. On the entire movie screen it was just those few dots. Soon the camera started to zoom back and a few more dots started to appear. Some red, blue and green dots appeared and the camera continued to zoom out and more colors of yellow, purple and every shade of the color spectrum all looking like nothing more than dots on the screen. The camera continued to zoom out further and further until boom, there you had it; a big beautiful picture of Sunday in the Park. It was such a great scene and such a great moment.

 
I thought about that scene for a long time. It hit me that there were so many lessons to be pulled from it. It seemed to me that it could be like a picture of our lives. If we were able to have a huge picture of our lives, from beginning to end, A-Z, it could look like this. Of course, for most of us, much of this painting has yet to be created. But if we were to have this painting of our lives, it would be as if every day of our lives was a dot. Every person that we met, every experience that we had, every moment that we had on this earth would be a dot, all different colors and all different shades.

 
We have so many moments in our lives that seem so random, so meaningless. If we could step back and see the bigger picture we would realize that it all goes together; it’s what makes up our own unique, colorful life. Some dots would be bright and colorful while others would be dark and dull. If we, like the camera in the movie, only zoomed in on the dark areas, the shadows, and all we did was to stay focused on those clusters of black dots, we would interpret it all as a very dark and bleak picture, one that we would not like. If we went from random dark spot to random dark spot and that is all we looked at, we would be missing the bigger picture. Life is full of highs and lows. We need it all to appreciate the good, the bad, the unimportant and the precious moments. We love the sunny days but when the sun shines it is going to cast a shadow. You have got to have rain to have a rainbow. We don’t like the bad moments that happen in this life but they do make us appreciate the good and remind us to hold tight to the things that we love. They give us perspective.

 
We have to step back. We have to step back and look at the bigger picture. Sometimes we just don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to figure it all out and it might even take years for all the random dots to take form. All we know for sure is that each moment, good or bad, light or dark, help to make up a much bigger picture, a big beautiful picture that is our life. Not learning from our mistakes, making poor choices, poor twists of fate, all these things can create many more dark areas in our lives than we wanted but that doesn’t mean a beautiful picture is not going to be created from this. We just can’t waste our time focusing on the bad or worrying about the meaning of random events, all we can do is to try to focus on creating as many bright and colorful moments as possible and to appreciate the fullness and the richness of the picture that we are creating.