Margaritaville

I think I've figured out I'm not as creative when I'm happy.

Bummer, that.

Any way, having a pleasant three-days-off. Yesterday I ran errands in sweltering heat (the only downside to living here is that it's hot in the summertime. I don't do well in hot weather. Then again, I do worse in cold, so I suppose I'll take the hot summers and snowless winters and shut my mouth.) As I was trudging up four flights of stairs with groceries I was thinking, "My, for a skinny thing working on a cardiac floor, you're sure as hell out of shape."

Alas. The days of my 3-5 mile runs (oh! my knees!) are done. Very sad, and Tuesday at work I suddenly felt my right foot arch get all painful (hey! I'm not an ortho person, okay, so kindly keep your snotty guffawing to a dull roar). It feels like I tore something, or at the very least, strained something, and it hurts to bear weight on it. I probably should be applying warm compresses followed by cold compresses, but being a crappy nurse, I haven't done anything but gimp around on it pretending I don't have three twelve hour work days ahead of me.

Other than that, I'm having a good time being a lazy ass. My only complaint is that the margarita flavored wine coolers I bought yesterday don't taste a bit like margaritas. I'm not sure what they taste like--maybe alcohol-flavored battery acid, but they don't taste like margaritas, no matter how much salt I put on my tumbler glass rim.

This sidebar brings me to a funny (okay, mildly amusing) postcript in the annals of my life. The postscript being I am almost thirty years old (I staunchly refuse to believe this is true, and shall hereforth refer to it as my "second twenty-ninth birthday) and am still carded on an alarmingly regular basis when trying to purchase alcoholic beverages. Once, mortifyingly enough, I was with my parents at a restaurant, trying to order a margarita (with my mother) and the waitress asked for my ID. I was, you know, with my parents and so I didn't have an ID or anything, because I wasn't driving. Short version of the story: they wouldn't let me have a margarita, and I had to make do with taking furtive/clandestine sips from my mother's margarita.

I told you it was a mortifying story.

Any way, I can't figure out why people think I look like a teenager. In the last three months I've only purchased alcohol once without any one asking for proof that I'm in that sweet demographic of "twenty-one-and-over." The clerks look really embarrassed when they see how old I am, and I suppose it's flattering but Jesus.

Maybe it's the waifishness, and the short haircut, plus the flat-chestedness, and the short stature thing.

[I have to interject--I'm sitting on my couch writing this entry, and the rabbit, who's out of her cage at the moment, is lying on the cheesy faux granite fireplace hearth in front of me, all Kicked Back Bunny Style. The funny thing is she has this random little stare in her eye, which has morphed from "Clueless blank bunny stare" to "Yes, I'm lying on your faux granite hearth... so what of it?" She also has this annoying habit of climbing in the fireplace itself (with the faux logs; she is a very urban bunny, you see) but that's another story for another day.]

My brain is like so much oatmeal, except without the interesting bits added by Quaker Oats. I did go to Barnes and Noble today, to drool over the latest copy of Mason-Dixon Knitting.

I am insanely jealous of one of the co-authors Ann, who lives in Nashville. Okay, so not actually insanely jealous, but I do miss Nashville, and wonder if I'm ever going to live there again.

I then did something nefarious, which was to copy a baby sweater pattern from another book out on a scrap of paper . I am a Bad Human Being. But I can hardly afford $50 worth of books, so I went about my fell deed with a sociopathic conscienceless zeal worthy of the most tightfisted manifestation of my Inner Ninety Year Old. In the same pennypinching vein, I decided to purchase said books on Amazon.com, but later, when I actually have reasonable funds to purchase frivolities like knitting books, as one thing I need like a hole in the head is more knitting books. As I was saying to a friend of mine, knitting is much like a crack addiction; it matters not what you had fifteen minutes ago, it's all about the next fix.

I suppose I shouldn't be talking about crack addiction that way. Then again, who cares. I'm sure I'm the only crack addict reading this blog any way.

[Nota bene to state licensing board, JCAHO, hospital and employer for which I currently work: I'm only joking about the crack addiction. Really. I swear.]

In between pawing through a stack of fifty books tottering precariously on one of those cafe tables--no doubt garnering unheed dirty looks from the poor employees whose job it is to reshelve the books--I also spent a fair amount of time weaving in and out of aisles peering over fresh armloads of texts, very disheveled and Hermione Granger-esque, I imagine. On one of my treks back to the knitting section, I caught a glimpse of a book that I think was called "How to Set A Man's Thighs On Fire."

Don't ask me if that was the whole title of the book or not. I haven't a clue in which genre this book falls, but I supposed it was some Cosmo type get-him-hot-and-bothered stupid thing I don't have time for (because I'm busy knitting like the ninety year old I aspire to be.) But then, the Warped Nurse side of me said, "Geez. That's not very nice. I imagine sustaining third degree burns on one's groin would definetely take the fun out of foreplay, but whatever deviant sex practice floats your boat, I suppose."

Also, I noticed a book michesviously misshelved sex tips book in the knitting section, with a note on the dust jacket illustration that said "Sex tonight, XXOO" in lipstick. I had to look twice, to make sure it wasn't actually some kind of funny, risque knitting book (I'm sad! I know! Stop laughing at me!) . Then I thought to myself, "What kind of cheesy people actually leave notes like that for their partners?!"

I know for me, a note like that on my pillow that would be an instant turn off, and I'd spend the entire day at work looking even more glazed-over than usual as I planned how to get to bed first and pretend to be asleep so as not to be subjected to more of my partner's lame cheesiness. Then I had some random, free-association thought about a teacher's blog I read once, about how some teacher got tired of his students saying, "Motherfucker!" in class and said, mildly, in response, "How about Mater Fornicator?" Then his students thought he was nuts, but I thought it was funny, and now parrot the phrase in my head on occasion (but only in my head, so people don't learn how really crazy I am.)

I know, my thought doesn't quite track. Like I said, the brain hasn't been working properly lately (read: for the past few years).

I was having a sort of Fellini-type day, I suppose, as after my bookstore excursion, I ended up wandering off in the wrong direction in search of a bottled cola product. I passed an Old Navy store with mannequins dressed in the latest ready-to-wear. On my way back (turns out the damn grocery store was in the opposite direction, and I didn't figure that out until I'd walked the entire length of the shopping mall in the sweltering heat) one of the girl mannequin's pants had fallen off. This made me laugh and simultaneously feel vaguely scandalized, for some reason.

Ah well. Back to internet surfing and muttering-to-myself in a manner befitting of one's Great Aunt Edna.