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.
  

Facebook and Me--The Untold Story

Kids have it easy these days.  When I was younger, we had to rifle through people's garbage to find out what they were up to.  Now, there is Facebook.  There are only a few reasons why I like this social networking tool.  It allows me to interact with people without actually having to see, hear or smell them.

We post our hopes, dreams and photos on Facebook.  There are people who post photos of their baby with the umbilical cord still attached.  There is some sort of an infinite hypersonic race to get photos on their "wall" with the breakneck agility and speed of a two-time Kentucky Derby winning racehorse as quickly as it is humanly achievable without actually being a horse.

There are times, though, that I feel like Facebook is like the evil pirate of life and I want to kick his peg leg from under him.

I have learned through battered experience that there are 3 things in life you NEVER do:

Pirates make me nervous and so does Facebook.  I resisted Facebook for a very long time.  I finally worked up the nerve to make a page and after very little thought or effort I put up a profile picture that looked like my eyeballs were hanging out.  I then sat back to see what I had.

Zero friends.  Can they make that zero a bit bigger so the aliens living in the next solar system can make it out? I felt like it was laughing at me, taunting me, pushing me further and further onto the plank of rejection only to fall into an ocean of seclusion and self-doubt.  It was actually a bit depressing.  I had to fill out the profile information next. My only skills are sleeping and eating. Now, the entire world knows. And to top it off, I was supposed to come up with a status on the fly, just like that.

I didn't want a ham-fisted potpourri of words to redeem itself as my status.  My status had to completely dominate the online world.  I became consumed by anxiety and started to wonder what the big deal was with Facebook anyway.

Apparently, people either text or Facebook now.  Do people actually talk anymore?  What about countries? Does Rwanda or Zimbabwe have a Facebook page? Would the world's problems be solved simply by not speaking and merely having statuses? After all, we need to know what is going on.

Sometimes, I believe that there is a bigger picture here that we do not see. Does Mark Zuckerberg actually work for the CIA? The CIA's work has been cut by two-thirds since the onset of Facebook (OK, I am just making stuff up now).  But, think about it.  Our entire lives (interests, friends, thoughts and what we had for breakfast) are consolidated onto one platform...Facebook.    What about "Operation Farmville?"  That pacifies the unemployed and retired so they are distracted from the bigger picture of not having any money to pay their bills because of the economy.  Everything is right there on one platform for the CIA to utilize.

At times, though, I have trouble keeping up with my newfound Facebook life.  I reached the point of having three friends and they started sucking the life out of me.  They posted pictures of their happy families and get togethers and I only have a picture of my blog.

As my Facebook page had grown to the three friends and other people had blocked me permanently, I realized that people stopped calling because it was easier just to "update."  My only outside contact with the world seemed to fade away into an abyss of loneliness and despair.  At times, I tried to convince myself in an argument not to get discouraged.  Sometimes, I was on the winning end of the argument, but then...

My initial thirst for Facebook imploded on itself, leaving behind this huge dark hole inside of me full of self-doubt and insecurity.  As though a special award was created for them doing so, the evil minions inside of my stomach started to pounce and jump in the hole the implosion had created.  As a result of the confluence of the many disappointments of Facebook, I started to feel defeated.  I pathetically started to expect failure from myself.  I began to think that the minions were rabid.

And then one day I get a message and a friend request from this kid I had never met.  

As I read this, the dark hole inside of me began to fill with this gooey sense of pride and joy and the evil minions became trapped in the goo and I think they died, which is a good thing because that is what I wanted them to do.  Not live.

I quickly accepted the request, but not too quickly (play it cool, Tracie, play it cool) and updated my status.

Ok, I have one more thing to say: