The Universe and Me

I recently joined a gym.

Sometimes, a cute guy will happen along.

Then, the inevitable happens.

The universe begins to hatch a distinct plan.

Things were going too well for me for 30 seconds of my life.

Life will then begin to go into direct contrast to what I hoped it would.

The universe is definitely out to get me.

Jump ropes are in on it.

Got Choco-Choco Chips?

For those of you who aren't satisfied with free water, New York City has now tapped into that market with a water cafe.  It is right next door to the saltine cracker cafe and the pretzel cafe so make sure you hit those up first, not second.

It should be a crime how hot I am with a water mustache.

Personally, I suck down Coke Zero like it is water, but my Coke mustache looks like a real one, just with more bubbles.  I'm not as hot with that 'stache, though.  I look more like a cab driver.

I wonder if New York is ready for a Coke Zero cafe.

Also, in other news, I have created a new chip.

Lays has a contest open to see who can come up with a new flavor.  This is my flavor and my bag (don't touch!).  Did I mention that first prize is $1,000,000.00? My other flavor is cow chips.  They haven't made me a bag for that one, yet.  I am sure they are working on it as we speak.

Yesterday, I bought a bag of air and someone was kind enough to put 3 or 4 chips in the bag.

Yes, I am one step ahead of you.  New York needs an air cafe...and chocolate air.

War-Machine Hero Sandwiches

In the interest of full-disclosure I must disclose the fact that I am not in the new Spiderman movie.  I am certainly not bitter about this.  To my millions of fans, please do not be too disappointed.  I am taking it well.

Actually, though it is not obvious because of my sweet Adobe skills, I edited that picture just a bit. This is the real image.

There is an actual sniper tower in the background.  In the interest of me living longer, I don't drive down this road.  Ever.


Is there a baby parade going on around that corner?


You will be happy to know that I really have been trying to stay out of trouble.  

Yes, I am a professional fly botherer.  I do get bored easily, but I don't want to be one of those desperate people who talks to flies.  I just help bring them to their full potential.


I did get a globe as a gift once. Still have it.

I actually enjoy animals.  I take them all in without hesitation.

It doesn't make me a hero, though.  Sandwich shops make heroes.  I would be an amazing sandwich if a sandwich I were. 


My goal is to travel.  I am going to Costa Rica at the end of the year and will share that in another post. 


There is, however, one place that I will never go.  It is not because of the people.  They are really great people.  The blame falls on just a small handful that do not represent the ones who live there. 

On September 1 of this year, "dolphin hunting" starts in Taiji.  

Image taken from savejapandolphins.org

This picture was not edited.  The water is that red.  Thousands upon thousands of dolphins and whales are slaughtered in the water.  Though some people do eat dolphin meat, it is believed the fishermen actually kill the dolphins because they eat the fish and it affects their own catches. 


Some dolphins are sold to aquariums and zoos.  Over 50% of them die once they reach captivity.


I am horrified by this every year. 


As ham-fisted jumbles of words toss themselves about chaotically in my mind, I have not much to say.  


I find myself wanting to morph into some sort of rabid hurricane ready to pick up an entire continent and spew my foaming anger all over anything that threatens to come near me.  


I don't want to fight. That never solves anything.

Instead, I am just a helpless wanderer traveling in this shell of my mind hoping that people stand together, fight and become raging war-machines against people like this. Raging.


I always hope that I can have more potential as a hero than a sandwich does.  

I have also joined Pinterest and am trying to make my images more "Pinterest friendly" so that ones like the dolphins can be shared.  Anyone is welcome to follow me and share my images in a positive manner.  If you feel inclined and I hope you do, you can check out savejapandolphins.org and maybe write some letters and sign petitions.  We need to stop encouraging aquariums and zoos, also.


Whatever you decide to do with your life, be raging. 

P.S. just don't be like these people. This is a different kind of rage that is in guise as misery.

Adventures in Being Complicated in Wal-Mart

My life can be particularly complicated, like when I am trying to give birth in Wal-Mart or in a barn with no medical or adult supervision and either a small child or a large baby monkey keeps throwing bananas at me.

My water broke in Wal-Mart. Yes, the birthing water stuff, not the bottled water stuff.  I have popped a water bottle in Wal-Mart.  Two different spills.


It began in the back of the store, in Sporting Goods.  I knew that I was having a boy, so I was just a little eager to buy him a football.  When my water broke, I didn't know what was happening, so I nonchalantly walked from department to department hiding in the aisles.  I had "wet pants syndrome."  


I singlehandedly turned the entire store into a lake.  Ducks and everything.

The store employees actually would not let me leave. I think they were afraid I would flood my town and cause mass chaos.  I was held hostage.  I think they also wanted my baby because he was going to be awesome.  You know what it feels like after you have been wading around in the swamp all day and you just want dry, warm clothing while not standing around in Wal-Mart? Yeah, I felt like that.

Facebook wasn't around then or I would have gotten ALL of the "likes" that day.   Yep, they were as good as mine.  I feel old now just thinking that Mark Zuckerberg was probably in Kindergarden at the time.  He was busy drawing thumbs.

Now, he is old enough to go to Wal-Mart himself.

I worked as a radio personality at a radio station before I had my son.  I had to be funny on air whether I was funny or not.  There was no time to think.  Being funny is an art, like dancing, except there is no music (ever), no choreography and no combination of me ever shall be a comedian.  My handle was "Foxy T."


Besides the fact that my last name was "Fox" at the time, I was very foxy, but mostly my last name was "Fox." When I am nervous, my comedy skills come out, like skunks and possums do at night, only with my comedy the mange and rabies are usually not involved. 


I always thought that comedy would be my ticket out of the flophouse.  It wasn't.  

So, there I stood trapped in Wal-Mart...battered, wet and million-dollarless hiding in the women's bathroom because the people greeter was blocking the door.  I had only one prayer.

I actually had a different vision about where my baby's birth was to take place.

I don't always hit a homerun with comedy and I am OK with that.  There have even been times where I have walked into a room, tried to be funny and the room became completely bereft of laughter.  


I had sucked any and all life sources even remotely related to happiness or laughter out of the room.  


Crickets didn't even bother chirping.  I can't swear by it, but I think a mouse shot me the finger once.  Not a good finger.  The bad one. 


At least I try and if I fail, I try again.  I know people who won't even post on Facebook because they are afraid that their "friends" will laugh at them.  Well, either they aren't really your "friends" or you are afraid to try.  Maybe both.


If I had lived in medieval France they would probably have had one of those people reading a scroll to me. A scroll reader person.

I can't say that my shopping trip that day rekindled my lifelong love affair of laying on a wet bathroom floor, though. 

It's not nearly as fun as you think it would be.  I did have the capacity to be like a normal person and get to the hospital when my water broke instead of being in a Mexican Standoff in the bathroom of Wal-Mart with the Wal-Mart employees.  


As I lay on the floor and no one around me was laughing, I knew then, that this was serious. 


Even the spiders crawling around on the floor were unusually well-behaved.

I metaphorically began to make a "deal with the devil."  By "devil," I mean the manager and by "metaphorically" I mean I sat there and cried like a baby and begged and pleaded for them to let me go.  Finally, they got a hold of someone who would come and pick me up.  I had to leave my car there.


Life doesn't always seem to go into the direction I would like it to go into, but I had my beautiful baby boy.  I know that he is here just to replace me.  Out with the old and in with the new.  


And I'm OK with that, too.  Things do get better. 


I am in this continual state of remote disbelief that the supply of well-behaved parents was exhausted and Someone made a bet on me that I would do a good job as a parent.  

I admit that my comedy skills and my parenting skills can always be called into question, but the fact that my son is an amazing person and I am the luckiest person on the face of this Earth never will be.


My son never did play football.
  

GPS

I have this distinct tendency to occasionally get lost in life.  Sometimes I feel like fate brought me there.  Fate can be much like a football field in which you are sitting on the wrong side next to strange, unpopular people cheering for the wrong team and wondering how you got there.


I invested in a GPS.


There are many different settings.  You can set them to male or female voices and they can scream or speak softly to you.  I have my own variations.

My driving skills are very advanced and I am usually on my way to a Mensa meeting or to a secret meeting of the Underground Extraordinary Women's Club somewhere when I need to use my GPS.

I notice at times during my Mensa or Club travels that there are people who are very distracted while driving.

It is really difficult to put my citizen involvement into action at this point.  I can only become very disgruntled at seeing this.  Watching someone else's car veer into three different lanes while that person texts makes me often wonder where the cops are. 


Texting only reminds me of several things that never made it as a sport in the Olympics.

At times I drive too fast and have some wicked sweet car passing skills that may or may not put me in the category of amateur stuntwoman.

Getting lost is a lot like changing a diaper.  You don't always know what you are going to find and usually it is the unexpected.  

One time, during my lostness, I pulled my car over to the side of the road and got out.  I strained to see if I could hear those beautiful words in the distance that were not only my first words, but could possibly guide me home or at least near a high-class civilization. 

We once loaded our buggy with about fifty 300-page trivia books that were on clearance really cheap.  They were all the same book, but we had fifty of them in case a hurricane came along and blew forty-nine of them away.  We were set on trivia knowledge for years.

You would be very surprised at the amount of useless knowledge that takes up space in my head.

Our car was so old and loud at the time, though, that it gave our competitor clearance shoppers notice that we were on our way with our clearance money.  They could hear our car from a few miles away, so that gave them about a five minute jump on the good clearance. 

My job was to just grab as much as I could as fast as I could.  It was cheap enough that it didn't matter what it was.  

I don't always make the right decisions in life.  Sometimes I wish that I could just plug that GPS up to my brain and let it guide the way.  I know that I have a brain because I was in a serious accident when I was 22 and everyone told me how relieved they were when the doctor did a brain scan and said I had a brain.  I knew I did.   How else would I know important information?

I have gotten a few speeding tickets (ahhh...that's where the cops are--watching me) because I don't know how to use my cruise control and because I speed.  Take this as a word of advice:

Whatever you do, don't tell them you are friends with the A-Team.  That just doesn't go in the direction you think it would.  They also don't like it when you ask them, "What is the option where I don't get a ticket?" I have found out the hard way that a cop's "happy face," his "I'm gonna give you a ticket face" and his "I'm about to throw you into my squad car face" are eerily similar.  

But whatever you do, don't abandon humor altogether.  Humor is your friend.  Mostly not in the back of a squad car.

I do pay a hefty price for my actions.  I need a Global Positioning System to guide me and to help me make the right decisions.  Don't get me wrong.  I'm not out there robbing banks, lately. 

But I'm also not perfect.  

At the end of the day, if I take a wrong turn somewhere, I would like for people to be there to say it is OK and realize that just because I accidentally rerouted myself that I am worth reprogramming and guiding in the right direction.  I know where I am going.

Getting there is the hard part. 

Everything we do has a consequence, just like me and my collection of traffic tickets that may be actual collectibles one day.  I hope to never justify my wrongs and maybe slow down a bit (a lot) in my wrongness of things. Most importantly, I hope the fact that people give up on me doesn't affect my ability to believe or never give up on them.  I don't want their weaknesses to lead me down the same road.  Give up on me, I still won't give up on you.  

If I did, I would just be lost, again. 

Note to self:

    Stop at cookie factory...num, num, num!