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Please Excuse the Pointing Gentile

16 Mar

Isn't it glorious?

The girl at my local bakery gave me a nasty attitude yesterday.

I don’t typically wander into bakeries, so when I do I expect them to be full of wonder and delight.  Pastries are happy.  Always.   In fact, when I began to daydream in the middle of the workday about the possibilities in store for me there, I pictured dancing jelly donuts, danishes, and beautiful, pristine cupcakes.  I was excited to stare at all the loveliness through the clear glass, all excited with eyes as big as saucers.

I guess I kinda forgot that other people go to the bakery a little more often than I do.  None of them really wanted to stop and treasure the special moment with me.

In fact, the girl behind the counter wasn’t having any of it.   Unfortunately, it appeared she hated her life, her work, and all beautiful things.   I can’t imagine a world where I hate pastries and find no joy in handing them out to others.  I mean, I may be a bit of a cynical recluse, but I can still get excited over the prospect of a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies and I might even go out of my way to give them to some people.

Perhaps her anger toward all that is wonderful was fueled slightly by my inability to pronounce the names of the things I wanted, which meant I had to resort to pointing.  I’ll bet she hated that.  I’ll bet that if I worked in a bakery, I would hate that too.  I totally get it.  But listen: I’m not Jewish and I live in a neighborhood full of Orthodox Jews.  I get newsletters in the mail from the local Jewish Community Center updating me on how they’re working to welcome the community into Sarah and Abraham’s tent.   But try as I might, I still sound like an idiot when ordering homentasch.  Which, for your reference, is also spelled   hamantash,  hamentasch,  homentash,  (h)umentash,  and (המן־טאַש).  So yeah, I’m not so sure on that one.  I’m really sorry.  Please excuse the crazy Gentile, making ridiculous demands and pointing at your pastries.

My entire idea of the bakery was shattered.  It was no haven, no refuge from reality.  Alas it was a shop.  A shop that employed people, some of whom I’m sure did not apply because of a deep, harbored passion for pastries.   Which meant it was only a matter of time before they became jaded grumplepussses (read: pointer haters).

So I’m sorry, small, pale, grumplepuss girl from my local bakery.  I forgot that the pastry world does not hold quite the wonder for you that it did for me.  But I memorized the way you said homen/humen/haman/hamentash/tasch, and I promise to not annoy you when I next visit.

Unless I need to order something else. ♣

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Mystery Dinner Theater in Space: Aw Yeah.

15 Mar

Sleuthing is serious business.

Hey.  It’s everyone’s favorite day of the week: Lollipop Tuesday!   If you battle with aggressive bouts of forgetfulness, feel free to check out the link “What’s Lollipop Tuesday?” at the top right corner of the page.

This week, I decided to do something I have long entertained but never acted upon.  I’ve been intrigued, I’ve been curiouser than a Curious Georgette, but never have I ever gone to mystery dinner theater.  Naturally, I couldn’t just go to regular old dinner theater.  To satisfy my funny bone and to sustain the high levels of geekiness per milliliter in my blood, I ventured over to a show called “Space Trek”.

Get ready for a double dose of nerd.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’m a bit of a Trekkie.   You have to understand that it was virtually impossible to leave my home at the ripe age of 18 and not have been at least brainwashed into liking the stuff.   I (read: my dad) was an avid follower of Star Trek: the Original Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager (ugh. worst ever.) and even shows like Babylon 5, which might has well been called “Star Trek: Babylon 5”.

For those of you who have no idea what I just said, just know that each of those is a different series with the same premise and different actors and a slightly different situation.  Just slightly.

It’s like Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess.  Same idea, different genders, and sometimes they would do a dual show together.

…Did I just attempt to explain to non-nerds what the different Star Trek followings were by relating the Hercules and Xena shows?

This is a new low.

Anyway, the point is that I know so much about Star Trek that it’s impossible to not take advantage of the opportunity to see it mocked and warped into a murder mystery.   Of course, Captain Kirk (Captain Quirk) is the victim.  He also happens to be a big womanizer, a bad actor, and suffer from severe cases of pun attacks.   A lot of people had motive.

As you can imagine, I’m not exactly the go-getter type in these whodunit scenarios.   I had every intention of just sitting down, eating a yummy dinner, and getting a Lollipop Tuesday post in the books.  But it turned out to be so much  more.

When I throw myself into a new experience for a Lollipop Tuesday, I do my very best to embrace it in its entirety.  Instead of being myself and curling into my hermit shell, I make a sincere effort to mimic the actions of others so that I can truly say I tried something.  And just when I put my feet up to relax and watch the show, I realized that I hadn’t at all anticipated the sort of folks who come out to these things.

I was fixating on what I might have for dinner when I noticed a bright suit set in my peripheral vision.  I looked up to see a woman not a day younger than 60 jotting down something or other in a fury.   I  glanced to her paper and noticed a list she was building.

Apparently murder mysteries are quite interactive.  Each table had a paper with a set of facts, with all but one missing.   It was our job to go around and meet people to get the facts we were missing so that we’d have the back story before the show started and would thus be better sleuths.   When I looked around, I saw a gaggle of old ladies getting up from their seats with yellow, #2 pencils in their hands, ready to crack the case.

There was nothing I wanted to do less than go meet people and write down their information.

…but I have a blog to maintain.

So I went full force and covered all 7 facts in a solid 5 minutes.  I looked over shoulders, bargained with whomever appeared to be the table leader, and even shook a few hands.  *Shudder* It was painful.   So, so painful.

All of my work was for naught – I didn’t crack the case.  Looking back, it’s totally obvious that the alien princess used her stinger on Shmuck and that he was under her command and stuck in a hive mentality that forced him to kill Captain Quirk for command of the Secondprize.

I don’t know how I didn’t put that together the first time.

I’m still kind of twitching from the double dose of nerd I injected so forcefully and all at once.   So you’ll have to excuse me, but I need to go watch stupid and popular TV shows like Glee and American Idol before I erupt in a nerdgasm.  ♣

Here’s a little shameless plug for the company who hosted by Lollipop Tuesday experience.  Give them some clicky love. http://www.musicalmysteries.com

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Reverting to Childhood

14 Mar

I spent last night in the thick atmosphere of farts and laughter.

That’s usually the case when I visit home at the same time as my two older brothers.   Dad and I will prop ourselves up at the table and throw down a healthy challenge for a game of Five Hundred, and they instantly answer the call with fangs out, ready to kill.  It starts out as a respectable game between adults and inevitably spirals downward into a vicious competition and a good, healthy dose of bathroom humor.

I love those moments gathered around the table.  I have brief glimpses back into my childhood as I’m caught up in laughter with the people who know how to make me smile most easily.   Sometimes I look beside me and see my 31-year-old brother morph into his 15-year-old self.  We all follow suit over the course of the evening and before we know it, we’re all back in our childhoods, giggling, fighting, and doing our best to annoy each other.   Usually about halfway into the game, my brothers begin to communicate with each other with flatulence.   Though dad and I are always grossed out, we are also always very, very amused.

Dad heads the table.  Never a true adult himself, he easily keeps up with us while still managing to keep his eye on the game and serve a good helping of whoop-ass.   Luckily, I’m always on his team.

Though we’re all grown and out of the house now, we never fail to raid mom and dad’s refrigerator before we go.   It always feels like we’re getting away with something, though mom knows very well that we’ll pillage everything we possibly can before we depart and cooks much more than she needs to just for the occasion.

Sometimes when I make the long journey back home and open the door to my apartment, I feel so incredibly empty knowing I couldn’t bring my family with me.  But I know that if I did we would all drive each other batty and go our separate ways after only a few short days.    After all, when we were all forced to live together, there were epic battles involving swords, Windex, kitchen knives, and fists.  Everything was a weapon, and every day there was a new duel to be had.

Looking back, I’m so glad we survived those battles because I can look back on them fondly, knowing they brought us closer together in the end.   And though my apartment feels empty without their immature jokes and laughter, I can always look forward to the next time I will be huddled around mom and dad’s table with them.

…alternating between holding my nose, and gasping for air from the laughter. ♣

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The Quest to Attain a Complete Family Recipe Book

13 Mar

A rare artifact from my mother's kitchen - battered, bruised, but full of delicious potential.

It’s a wonder any recipes get passed on from one generation to another in our family.

Let me first say that our family is, in my opinion, supremely skilled in the kitchen.  We don’t do fancy things, and we don’t do particularly healthy things, but if you’re looking for some tasty, warming, homestyle yumminess, we can rock it pretty hard.

The only problem is attaining the original recipes.

From my understanding, the majority of my mother’s most delicious recipes are either directly passed down from or are a derivative of something my grandmother makes, which are mostly passed down from her mother.  I assume this is the case in most families of good cooks, but I think that the fact that any artifacts survive through our blood line is phenomenal – because the original recipes usually can’t be found anywhere.

When I ask my mother how to make something, she uses imaginary units of measurement.  Her reference to things like “a little”, “some”, and “a bunch” leave me in quite a gray area. I’m a planner – I like to plan.  So to have all the necessary ingredients gathered and to be told to put them in the sauce “until it looks right” just isn’t gonna swing it for me and my type A personality. In fact, the only way I learned how to make her super awesome spaghetti sauce was by watching her make it over and over again.    There is simply no other way to do it – the woman makes the spaghetti sauce base, and then pours all the spices and goodness on top, measuring it by “how it looks”.

Even when I manage to find a scrap of paper with true measurements on it, my mother mentions casually that it’s just a  guide and doesn’t actually reflect the amounts used in the food I grew up on.     Which basically means it’s useless.

So the only way to attain super awesome family cooking skills is to spend a great deal of time in the kitchen,  huddled over my mother’s every move.  It’s not an exact science, but it sure is an intricate one.  And if you stick it out, you’ll come away with a book’s worth of recipes, safely sealed within your head.

So this weekend I’m at home, brushing up on my imaginary units of measurement and making sure the amounts in my old school favorites “look right”.    Yesterday, I had the pleasure of finding a real, genuine recipe that I actually saw mom referencing during her preparations.   I got excited and thought maybe she was looking at something that was able to be copied and taken away for a new start to the family recipe library.  If true references actually exist, perhaps I could be the first in the family line to actually create a comprehensive guide for them!

But after I had hung out in the kitchen long enough, I realized she was just brushing up on something she’d made a thousand times.  And after helping her through the process, I feel pretty confident that I can replicate the deliciousness we created.

And I started thinking – maybe I don’t actually want to write all these things down.  I mean, I kind of like that in order to master a family favorite, I have to put in the face time.  It’s a great bonding experience, it’s a good time, and it’s really the only fair way for me to inherit all these awesome foods.  After all, why should I just be freely handed information that took three generations before me hard time in the kitchen to acquire?  It’s one of the few things in this world that’s still old school and lovely, and I like that.

Come to think of it, maybe there’s a method to my mother’s madness. ♣

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Late Nights on Long Roads

12 Mar

Holy cow it’s 4pm on Saturday and I’m just now posting.

My avid subscribers are aware that I typically post at 9am every day.  Fun fact: I actually write posts the night before and aut0 schedule them for the following day at 9am.   But last night, I found myself on a long drive home to central Pennsylvania after using my Friday evening to explore my next Lollipop Tuesday event.

Dave was driving for a good portion of it, but there’s only so long a mere human being can go with no sleep before involuntarily passing out.  And since he was up at 7, worked his day job, and then went to his night job until midnight – things can get real sleepy real fast.  And that’s when I stepped in.

Of course, I’m almost always sleepy.  I can pretty much sleep anywhere, any time, and in virtually any position.  I don’t know why – I’m just special that way.  In fact, at one point my parents were so concerned about my constant tired state that they had me submitted to a sleep test center.  You can read about the beauty of my experience here, in a post from long, long ago when I was just a wee lass.   So it’s usually a crap shoot to have me drive.  I might start out bright eyed and bushy-tailed, but there’s no way of knowing how long it will be before I’m droopy, weary, and ready to cash in.

About halfway through my shift, I began to rotate through the myriad of tricks I’ve developed over the years.  They include

  • Blaring rock music
  • Playing music I can sing to (and singing in an awful and hilarious manner for my own entertainment)
  • Rolling down the window so that my face is stung with the cold winter air
  • Drumming on the steering wheel
  • Talking to myself
  • Writing a to-do list inside my head
  • Playing out hypothetical situations with myself
  • Waking Dave up to make him talk to me about silly subjects (last resort)

To further complicate the process, we were out of windshield wiper fluid and it was a particularly dirty, wet night.    I was playing an intricate passing lane game with a truck that was constantly splooging its dirt water all over the windshield, which then required me to pull over and send Dave to get snow from the bushes.

He threw snowballs at the car and I clicked the wipers.  It was a fun, sad game.

But we made it.  Slowly but surely we crawled sleepily across Pennsylvania and pulled into our resting place at 1:30am, where we promptly passed out.  Without writing a blog post.

And so here I am, paying for my neglect on a bright, beautiful Saturday afternoon.  But hey- it’s my first truly late post (but still easily meets my midnight deadline) in my 2.5 months of postaday2011.

And that ain’t so bad. ♣

 

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The Futility of Cleaning My Apartment

11 Mar
dishwasher sign, CLEAN versus DIRTY, magnet or velcro, black and white no.2
Sign by SmallGift, featured (and for sale!) on Etsy.com. Clicky clicky.

There is something truly transformational that happens to me between the end of my work day and my arrival to my apartment.

I’m still working on the many factors that are involved, but I’ve done the math and concluded that no matter the circumstances, I’m still almost 50% likely to mutate into a terrible, heinous beast.  Upon entry, I first look to the kitchen counter, which is usually covered in the filth I’ve left there from the night before.  Then I’ll shoot a wary glance to the sink, which is stacked to the brim with pots, pans, and strange, festering bacteria.

That’s when the mouth froth begins.

While I’m deep breathing through the sudden recollection of my own filth and disgrace, I move to the living room and am promptly greeted by whatever materials I was using to entertain myself the evening before.  Without a doubt, all those same things will return to their exact same places every single night, and yet every single day when I come home I feel as if I have to put them all back in their homes.

By the time I hang up my coat and put down my bag, I’m determined to clean everything in sight.  All of it.  I want it gone.  I’m in danger of becoming a fully fledged fire-breathing dragon of cleanliness and no nonsense if I don’t act soon.  So I go change out of my office work clothes and into my house work clothes  and I begin to a whirlwind attack of adulthood all over my apartment.   I’ve done it so often and so forcefully that I’ve gotten it down to a pretty consistent 20 minutes.  That’s all the longer it takes to make my apartment look like no one lives in it.    Because that’s the goal, right?

Cleaning is so futile.  What’s the point of putting away things I’m bound to get out again eventually and use in exactly that same spot?  Why do I feel like I have to hide all evidence that I live in my apartment when other people come over?  Who made these ridiculous rules?

I’m not sure what I expect to happen to the mess I made after I left it there without any pixie dust or magical cleaning dwarves.  But somewhere in between my leaving a mess, sleeping, working for 8 hours, and returning to the mess, I’d like to think that the house cleaned itself. I mean after all, I worked a full, hard day.  Once, just once I’d like the cats to pitch in.  But every day without fail they’re lounging around with their white, furry bellies up toward the sky.

They’re such non-contributors.

So I will carry on with my burden.  Or, after enough calculation, I will be able to determine the precise factors that are most likely to bring me to this mutant state of mind and I will change them and be freed from this hex placed on me.  Or I could just stop playing along with society’s rules an accept that when I use things often, they will often be visible and on-hand.

Except, of course, for when my mother visits. ♣

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What Would You Do…for a Better Product Design?

10 Mar

The fact that Klondike bars are still such a terrible example of product design here in the freshly born year of 2011 boggles the mind.

I have recently acquired a few packs of Klondike bars (for my lovely UK readers, I believe ya’ll call it a Choc Ice).  It’s a sneaky attempt to get my body to be satisfied with one succinct 250-calorie ice cream treat.   If I succeed, I can eliminate my constant desire to down entire pints of it, thereby eliminating a significant portion of my calorie intake.

You know you’re truly overweight when just changing the type of ice cream you eat can make you thinner.

And I’ll admit that so far it’s a pretty good tactic.   What’s not going over so well, however, is the last 4 bites of every single Klondike bar. Why is it that after all these years a better method has not been developed?  I get the whole ice-cream-bar-without-a-stick thing.  But I have to admit that the fact that Klondike bars are stickless is not the reason I’m attracted to them.  In fact, when I’m tonguing the last 4 bites out of the foil wrapper and the melted ice cream from the inside of the foil is folded over and all over my hands, I feel filthy and degraded enough to just not buy them anymore.

Listen, when people got annoyed with popsicles melting and plopping all over the sidewalk in the summer, some brilliant product developers blessed us all with the Push-Pop, which was amazing and yummy and well-worth however much money it cost my mother when I was a young whippersnapper.   When people got tired of milk cartons smushing all together at the opening, they were forced to try again on the other end and this ultimately resulted in millions of cartons everywhere being poked and prodded with forks and knives after the failed triangle method.  But some lovely product developers came along and put a hole and a lid on the top instead.    So where’s the soon-to-be-famous boy genius that’s going to look at the Klondike bar and finally realize it’s ridiculous to have Americans everywhere licking and slopping up the last few bites of its deliciousness?

Let’s take a look at how much attention the Klondike folks have paid to this problem.  Here’s the product back in the early 1900’s:

Image courtesy of Klondikebar.com

And here’s what they look like now:

 

Image courtesy of my freezer

So what’s the deal, Klondike?  I demand answers.  Because after I get to the bottom of these Double Chocolate Goodness Bars, there’s a miniscule chance that I will be too tired and degraded from licking the foil wrapper to finish the 2nd pack still waiting for me.   And if you don’t come up with some kind of hope before then, I might revert to Ben & Jerry’s pints.

That will severely hinder my pudding loss project. ♣

 

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The Blender of Shame

9 Mar

Last night I got in an argument with myself in the middle of the appliance aisle at Target.

Luckily this time I kept most of it inside my head, except for the portion I spoke aloud on the phone with my mother, who lovingly coaxed me through the decision-making process (and my teetering sanity).

My predicament took the form of a brand-spankin’ new blender, priced at a respectable twenty dollars and positioned exactly at my eye level, where I could easily examine its beauty.   It had a stark white top, a clear plastic pouring/blending doodad, and no less than ten buttons holding the promise of possibilities.

But before I could put it in my cart, I heard Dave’s voice tell me no.

You see, Dave has 2 reasons to oppose my blender acquisition and has stated them loud and clear many a time.  The first is that he has the “Made for TV” Magic Bullet, which can pretty much do anything a regular ol’ blender can do, but it looks cooler and takes less counter space.   It does, however, take up a great deal of cabinet space with its multitude of little color coded cups and contraptions.   In addition, it’s old and rusted and the last time I tried to use it my kitchen was overcome with smoke.  I usually stop using things when they start smoking.  It was a long, hard lesson.

The second reason (and my most hated) is that Dave has a food processor from the 60’s that has been handed down by I-don’t-know-who in his family.  It’s olive green and has more attachments than I know what to do with.  When he showed it to me in his excitement, I promptly pointed out how much space it would take up on my counter and in my cabinet.  I then took the food processor and all of its million, complicated parts, put them in a tote, and hid it all on the top shelf of the closet.

You may think it’s hard to hide a tote, but  I’ve moved 14 times in 24 years and Dave’s moved 12- we have a lot of them.

On top of it all, the food processor doesn’t have an instruction manual because it’s lost somewhere in the 1980’s – twenty years after it was invented.   Dave gets upset that I don’t make use of it and highlights its many wonderful features, including the ability to turn mere potatoes into fully fledged french fries.  It can make whips, dips, creams and salsas.  It can do things to a tomato that I can only dream of.

Actually, I can only dream about all of those things because without an instruction manual, I’m never really going to know how to work all those cranks, levers, and wheels.

So as I’m on the phone with my mother last night, I’m asking her about the many uses of a modern-day, low priced blender.  And as she’s whipping through all the beautiful things one can accomplish with a motor, a blade, and a water pitcher, my dad hears my discussion on speaker phone and yells out “IF YOU DON’T NEED IT, DON’T GET IT!”

So I tried to focus on his good advice and went over to the vacuum filters so I could get what I went there for in the first place.  But by the time I realized I didn’t write down the model number of my vacuum, called all my family members until someone picked up who would google it based on my phone description, and realized Target didn’t carry the one I needed, I forgot why I wasn’t going to get the blender.  And as I walked out of the vacuum aisle toward the checkouts, I passed the kitchen appliances…

Where I swiftly placed in my cart my newfound blender of shame. ♣

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No More Pudding

8 Mar

Happy Lollipop Tuesday, folks.

Lately I’ve been feeling  very… full of pudding.  I jiggle where I shouldn’t jiggle.  It’s been suggested that it has something to do with my lifelong affair with pizza and ice cream, but it’s all pretty circumstantial evidence if you ask me.

Nonetheless, Dave’s a Hottie Mchottie and if I actually plan on being with him for any longer, I’m gonna have to lose the pudding.   So this week, I whipped out P90X.

There’s a lot of talk about P90X.  There are YouTube videos and blogs everywhere that people have dedicated to its magical powers to shape them into something decent enough for other humans to be able to stomach.   If you aren’t familiar with it, allow me to indulge you ever so slightly.

P90X is a system that guarantees it can get you sexy in your birthday suit in 90 days or you get your  money back.  But you don’t need to worry about filing a claim because the entire system includes a nutrition guide, a special smoothie you throw together after your workouts, and some butt-kicking workouts.  It’s pretty darn impossible for you to not lose weight if you follow the prompts and eat properly.    The whole system is masterminded by a guy named Tony Horton (like Horton Hears a Who), who will simultaneously make you feel like a fat slug and make you feel like it’s okay if you aren’t a fitness model.

whoa.

Of course I didn’t do the entire system.  I tried a workout – you know… to feel it out.  I’m seriously considering doing the entire thing from start to finish because it’s truly impressive how great of a workout you get in such little time.   My poison of choice was the “Ab Ripper X” workout.  Firstly because it sounds so badass.  And secondly because I thought it would be a good shock to my pudding center.

And that it was.

This workout is only about 15 minutes altogether, and it will wreck you.  At least – it wrecked me.  I thought I was all right the day after. I kept commenting to Dave (who already does it regularly) that I felt all right but I was getting a little sore.  He snickered and told me to wait until the 2nd day.

The 2nd day is awful.

Not only were my abs in total agony, but the terror reached all the way down to my thighs.  It felt like little gremlins were gnawing at my deepest muscle tissue every single time I stood up from my desk at work.   It was glorious.

I don’t typically care for workout instructors.  Even my faithful Pilates girl is awkward and talks too much.  But Horton-Hears-a-Who is so good to me.  He’s firm, he doesn’t talk too much, and he tells me constantly that it’s okay to take breaks.  I feel safe with him – like he doesn’t want me to be made of pudding, but he understands that it’s hard to make pudding do things sometimes.

So I might actually head to the store this week to get the goodies I need to do this thing.  In 90 days it will be June, and I could be a Hottie McHottie.

And then Dave will have to dump me for my insanity, not for my pudding center. ♣

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Public Restroom Paranoia

7 Mar


Are you all as paranoid in public restrooms as I am?

I’m not so sure this applies to men.  Men are usually pretty proud of whatever heinous acts have been committed during their bathroom stays and so I imagine there isn’t much to be anxious over.

But I gotta tell ya – I’m anxious.  I worry a lot.   I don’t typically like to use a public restroom to do the dirty deed, but when you have to go, you simply have no choice.

While I’m in there, I like to be quick about it.  I wait until the absolute last minute until what I dub The Decision Hour, which means I have to either decide to use a public restroom to poo, or I have to poo on myself.  There will be poo either way.

I almost always opt for the first.

But I really hate it when people know that I’ve been in there.  Like if it smells. I hate that.  I’ve considered carrying a personal anti-poo perfume just so that I can eliminate all evidence that I’ve been in the bathroom.  And it doesn’t just stop there – I don’t like to be spotted.  Which means that I will sit in the stall as long as I have to in order to exit the restroom without anyone witnessing my being there.  In large restrooms ( a la truck stops, rest areas, mega malls) this is of no concern. No one can possibly trace a smell in there and there’s too much traffic to be able to pin it to one individual with any degree of certainty.

It’s those intimate bathrooms that are tough – like one with just 2 or 3 stalls.  Or worse – one with just one regular stall and one handicapped stall.   If the regular stall is taken and I’m in The Decision Hour, I’ve gotta go to the handicapped stall.  And once I’m in there, I feel an intense amount of pressure to hurry in the event that someone disabled comes in.  They’ll be waiting on me and will be  incredibly focused on my every sound and movement.

I can’t poo under that kind of pressure.

Far more intense is a situation in which I’ve been found out.  If I enter the restroom needing to poo and am followed directly by someone I know and recognizes me, I will quickly shuffle into the restroom, pee, and leave.  I will then reenter as soon as possible after they’ve cleared the area to do the actual business I arrived for the first time.

There was a time when I thought that I was the only one with this hang up.   And you know what?  It could be the bathroom conspiracy theorist in me (see The Underground Bathroom Society post) but I seriously think I’ve spotted this same pattern of behavior in others before.  Perhaps they’ll stick to their guns if they’re spotted by a friend  instead of attempting reentry, but I’m fairly certain that women have lingered in the stall for me to clear the area before showing their faces by the sinks.

Maybe, just maybe… I’m not alone. ♣

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