Crash Into Me

As if I needed another reason to hate SUVs/SUV drivers... picture from gtcarlot.com

I got hit by a car. Okay, I wasn’t so much hit as tapped by a car on my walk to work this morning. Now, I know the woman was driving a giant assed white Mercedes Benz SUV, which just states, “why hello, I am a giant tool,” but it always kills me when a female driver does something incredibly stupid (like hit pedestrians), because it just perpetuates the myth that women can’t drive. Alright, I can’t drive either, and am cognizant that I, too, perpetuate the myth, but I have never once hit a pedestrian. I think I should mention that I am also wearing a nuclear spill-green dress today. It’s practically radioactive. You can see this color from space, so when I’m standing 2 feet in front of your car, I really can’t be missed.

I can’t even be upset about the situation though. One, because I wasn’t hurt; and two, because the look on the woman’s face was absolutely priceless. She literally had the look of “Oh dear Lord, I just shat myself.” And it might have been the most fantastically hilarious thing I’ve ever seen. I actually started laughing out loud because she just looked so ridiculous sitting there, staring at me, with her eyes wide, and her hands clasped over her mouth.

In that moment, I looked her directly in the eyes, with my hand on the front of her unnecessary SUV, and I gave her a big thumbs up. I hope she understood the sarcasm of my gesture. As I rounded the corner for the next block, that big white Benz was just starting to roll up the hill. The poor lady was probably wondering if she had time to go home and change her pants now that she’d crapped herself.

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Glitter in the Air

One of my favorite things about glitter? Random glitter transfer: when someone unsuspectingly gets sparkled by coming in contact with a glitter freak such as myself. Image from http://fancydressheaven.co.uk/

I love glitter. And by “love” I mean I have a slightly sick obsession. I wear glitter make-up, glitter shoes, glitter accessories, glitter shirts (I do not own a single pair of glitter jeans, but that’s more out of the fact that they only come in kids’ sizes).  I don’t know exactly when the obsession started, but it was probably in Girl Scouts. At the crafts table, liter-sized vats of the stuff shimmered in the cafegymatarium.  By the end of day, the tables, floors and each little crafter was a disco ball.

Now, let’s make no mistake here. For a majority of my young life, I was a tom boy. I wore baggy cargo shorts and over-sized t-shirts and had the most ridiculous collection of bandannas. I think the bandannas were the key sign that someday I would  grow out of the tom boy stage, not because they were feminine in the slightest. They weren’t. But I owned a bandanna in every color imaginable. I’d coordinate them with my outfits. The tan one went with my Old Navy tan and brown camouflage shirt. The navy one with my navy shirt with the bright orange eagle emblazoned on it.  The Marvin the Martian one went with nothing. I really wish I was making this up…

I couldn’t even do my own make-up until after high-school, but the one thing I always had was glitter. I wore purple glitter hair junk for the entirety of 7^th grade. In 8^th grade, I ran the applicator from a tube of rainbow glitter mascara through my bangs. The only make-up I owned in my four years of high school was a little case of Urban Decay Drifter, a very sparkly purple eye shadow. In my senior year picture, there I am in an ill-fitted black collared shirt with a pea-green tank top underneath, hair a mess, and no make-up except for the burst of purple sparkle on my eye lids.

What’s the point of this? The other night I was washing away the day’s coating of glitter, when I realizes after the suds were splashed away, I could still see myself sparkle in the bathroom light. I exfoliated away the top layer of skin, and the sparkle remained. After years of drenching myself in shimmer, it is now a part of my skin. I’m sure there are some dire health effects associated with this, but except for strippers and drag queens, I really don’t know who else would have this sort of issue.

As a side note, someone told me I’d be a good drag queen if only I’d been a man. I couldn’t help but smile. Those ladies always look so damn fabulous.

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The Blog Girl

Around 1:00 p.m. every week day, I get a half hour where I leave the office, sit in the park, and don’t have to think about blogging or destinations I can’t afford. Then the other day I got an email for my boss requesting a lunch meeting. My half hour in the sunshine gone.

On the day of our allotted meeting time, I went to his office, where he quickly brushed past me without so much as a hello. As I stood in the hall clutching my bright blue spiral-bound notebook, I wondered what it felt like to not be the very bottom of the food chain. Fifteen minutes later, he emerged, talking over me to my supervisor, he asked if she was ready, and as she grabbed her purse and he started for the door, I realized I had misinterpreted our lunch meeting. I ran back to my desk and grabbed my purse, I wondered where the heck we were going. As we rushed down the stairs, out the door, and down the street, I felt like a little kid again when my parents were rushing to some event we were late for. As we booked it across the street and onto the wharf, I had to run to keep up with my boss’s long stride. Without even stopping at the hostess stand, my boss announced our arrival, and the hostess sat us at a table. Without a moment to breathe or realize that we were in one of the nicer restaurants downtown, my boss turned to me and asked “So, Lauren, what are your plans for the future?” Plans? Future? Right now, I’m an MBA student who still cleans bathrooms on the weekend for near minimum wage. Yeah, my future is bright…

As the waitress took our orders (I ordered the first thing on the menu I saw without reading the full description), my boss etched notes onto a PowerPoint presentation I’d sent him. As I justified my worth at the company, I felt like I did back in high school, sitting across from my guidance counselor, running through everything I did in high school that would help me get into college.

“How long have you been with us? About 6 weeks?” He asked.
“Um, about three months…”

“What makes you stand out?”

“I write the blog?”

And as the questions went on, I realized this was an interview of sorts and I was failing. In my oversized pink button-up, black sweeping sweater and flip flops, I knew I wasn’t impressing anyone with my interviewee skills. Without letting me speak, my boss went on to say how he likes what I’ve been doing and to get to the gist of the story, they want to keep me but don’t have any place to put me, but they might someday if I stay and just keep doing what I do.

So here I am, actually a professional, career blogger. To think I was going to take a film class instead of that blogging class in college…

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