The Jackie Blog

Oh man – it’s Lollipop Tuesday.  I LOVE Lollipop Tuesday.

Actually, I really don’t.  This whole thing has kind of backfired and each week is just torture as I allow myself to buckle under the pressure and go do something that makes me really, really uncomfortable.

This week, I gave up the Old Jackie ghost by taking Sarah’s suggestion from the What’s Lollipop Tuesday page – She said “go to a restaurant, the movies or a play alone.”

Now hear me out: this may not sound intimidating to you – I completely understand.  Even I, who harbors an arguably unwarranted fear of the outside world thought that maybe it didn’t meet the standards for a Lollipop Tuesday.  But after I decided not to do it, I was relieved.  And I noticed myself being relieved.  And I suddenly realized that I didn’t want to do it because I’m a big fat wussy.

I was actually afraid to go somewhere by myself.  Not in terms of how to navigate my own life, but in terms that I had absolutely zero interest in taking myself to dinner.   Even less was my interest in sitting in a movie theater alone.  So I seized it and tried to face the fear.

It was halfway to my dinner destination that I walked by an unfamiliar neon sign.  It was advertising a hole-in-the-wall restaurant named “The Mediterranean Grill” and was above a door that looked like the entrance to an apartment building.

I kept walking to the place I had already decided to eat.  It was upscale, I’d been there once before, and I thought it would be sufficiently awkward.    But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was taking the easy road.  I actually wanted to explore the neon sign but the unknown scared the bajeezus out of me.   Then I thought about having to admit in a blog post that I was too scared to explore the neon sign and how incredibly pathetic that makes me. I immediately spun around and walked back to explore the mystery.

It is a truly strange experience, eating with one’s self.  When I was first greeted by the hostess, she kept looking behind and around me for my friends, boyfriend or seeing eye dog.   Having found none, she promptly grabbed one menu and headed to the corner of the room.    She extended her hands toward the cornermost chair and suggested that “I could sit in the corner if I would like.”

She immediately assumed me for a hermit.

I gave her a look that expressed that general sentiment and was seated instead in the middle of the room.    Having been a hostess myself, I know there’s a particular part of the fine dining rule book that says you never do anything or say anything whatsoever to draw attention to the fact that someone is alone.   You just put them in a nice spot by a window, smile big, and go try to convince someone to take a table of one.

She totally failed.

When confronted with the menu, I was immediately accosted by the price of the place.  I mean – I had to walk through an apartment complex to find your restaurant.  There is literally a sign outside in the hallway that says “For Rent” on another section of this very same hall.   You can’t charge me 16 dollars for a chicken kabob.

But they can and did.   I retaliated with ordering a filet mignon.  Because if I only have to throw in a few bucks for an upgrade from chicken kabob to filet mignon, I’ll take the filet.

After all, I’m on a date with myself.

After I ordered, I had a general sense of discomfort.  What was I supposed to do with myself?  This place was actually a hit with one-toppers so I tried to take a note from the others but they all had books, newspapers, or smartphones.

Wimps.  Face yourselves.

After dinner, I had some time to kill and decided to grab some ice cream.  I started for the old faithful shop on the corner when I remembered a frozen yogurt place that was really trendy right now but I’d never gotten the chance to try.  You serve your own soft ice cream (they let you use the machines without direct supervision) and then go through and entire bar of toppings.  Gummy bears, cookie crumbs, pineapple chunks, cookie dough chunks – everything.  It was a regular fat girl’s picture of heaven.

Actually, it’s a business model of gold.  They let the customers feel like they have complete control of everything that goes into their ice cream, and then they weigh them per ounce.  They only  have to have one person working the register and the line for the place can be down the street.

I walked up to the front window, tried to size up the place, and decided not to go in.  I was headed back to my regular ice cream place when I realized I was being a wuss again.  I didn’t want to go in because I didn’t know the process.  I didn’t know how the whole deal worked and everyone else did and I was really too embarrassed to try to figure it out in front of everyone.  It took me 3 times.  3 times I had to approach the place and turn around again before I got the cojones to step through the door.

I am a pathetic slug.

I figured out the rules of engagement, successfully made myself a concoction my inner 12-year-old fat girl would pee her pants over, and indulged.  It was absolutely glorious.

To finish off the night, I went over to drop 10 dollars on a movie with myself.    My local movie theater is a complete ripoff, by the way.  I can pay just as much and go a mile the other direction to a state-of-the-art theater.  So the local one charging an arm and a leg to get in the door with 1/3 the movie selection and smaller screens isn’t doing so hot.

I bought a ticket and went into the dark mass of the theater all by myself, feeling truly strange and uncomfortable with the whole experience.   I guess I kind of underestimated how terribly the theater was doing.  Because when I walked into the theater, I was the only one there.

It was one minute before showtime.

I walked down the aisles, checking every nook and cranny for some sign of life but there was none.   Last night, theater 4 only rolled the film because I was in the audience.  Just me.  If I’d have stayed home, no movie would have shown in that theater.

Isn’t that glorious?  It was like some amazing gift to me for being such a good sport about the evening.  In fact, I’d learned so much about myself and been so proud that I faced my anxiety so many times that I took a trip over to the store before I got home and did something I haven’t done since freshman year of college:  I bought new underwear just to avoid doing a load of laundry.

Independence has its perks. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

image from ehow.com

Yesterday I ventured over to my local grocery store to partake of the fine conveniences of being an American: that is, having other people gather food in a central location so I can just pay them for it instead of getting it myself.

It’s awesome.

I immediately found myself sucked into the beauty that is the “10 for 10” deal.  That’s right: 10 items for 10 dollars.  That’s only one perfectly rounded dollar each.

This time it was on mangoes.

I’ll be honest: I don’t really care for mangoes.  I’m not against them, necessarily, but I don’t go to the store expecting to come home with a mango. But let’s face it – if you slap a $1 dollar deal on a pile of milarchy, I’ll walk out of the store with it.

So I’m over in the mango section, admiring the beautiful roundness of their hides, when I realized I have absolutely no idea how to tell if a mango is ripe.  As I eyed them over suspiciously, I was interrupted by a middle-aged woman who had no interest in nonsense.  She asked if I knew how to tell if a mango was ripe.  I told her it was a funny thing to ask because I was just there thinking I didn’t have the slightest clue myself.  And that’s when she said it:

“Oh.  You looked like you would know.”

I looked like I would know?  Let me paint a picture for you.  I typically head to the store looking like a hobo.  If I have to go do something adult-like and responsible, I’m sure as heck not about to do it all dressed up like it.    On this particular day, I was sporting a pair of sweatpants from high school that I cut half the legs off of.  I paired it with a very old, very much Dave’s, black hooded sweatshirt with little holes worn in the sleeves for my thumbs, which I put my thumbs through thank-you-very-much.  I topped it all off with a pair of sneakers I’ve had since freshman year of college.

This lady had low standards for melon experts.

I don’t have a good working knowledge of produce.  Up until a few months ago, I didn’t even know what a real, genuine green bean looked like.

I struggle.

But inspired by the idea that I look like the kind of person who might know about these things, I continued about the produce section, pretending to be an expert of various sorts.  I made up ways to tell whether or not things were prime for picking, and made ridiculous conjectures.  I looked  bok choy in the face and pretended I knew what it was.   I also ended up buying a lot of produce.  I probably spent twenty minutes just browsing around in character and it was glorious.

And then I remembered: this is why I don’t shop without Dave. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

I’ve been lied to.

I remember distinctly the day I learned weather patterns and how they corresponded with the months of the year.  It was very straightforward.  December-February is Winter, March-May is Spring, June-August is Summer, September to November is Autumn.

What a load of crap.

Honestly, I can’t remember the last time winter was over in February.  Or when it waited until December to start.  In fact, winter is launching an all-out attack on every other season.  It starts snowing in October, ruining Halloween for everyone and making it much hard for all the slutty sluts to dress like slutty sluts for their Halloween costumes for fear of frost bite.

Alice in Wonderland was much more modestly dressed than contemporary costumes would have us believe.

Somehow, winter manages to start its terror way back in October, ruin all the beautiful changing trees, and then goes full-force until March.  MARCH!  What a ripoff.    The same lying grade school teacher taught us all that March “comes in like a lion and out like a lamb”.   We had to draw pictures to match what we learned – we all set to coloring up a storm of tragedy to symbolize the beginning of March and a world of peace with no hunger and poverty to symbolize the end.

Or maybe I just took the lesson too literally.

Either way, it was a load of bull.  Not even a week ago, there was a hailstorm in my town so enormous that people’s cars were dented.  The weather was so freaky-deaky that a tornado managed to touch down right outside the city, flatten 9 houses, and rip the roof of a high school.

I’ve never seen a lamb do that.

Not only do I feel cheated by my grade school education, but I’m just generally angry that I believed the lies for so long.  This year, I’m putting the falsehoods away.  Let’s be honest: winter is a terrible, raging villain that has consumed 6 months of our year.  From October to March we are grumpy, frigid human beings.    We like to pretend that it’s reserved for Christmas time and the little bump of months surrounding the holiday, but we’re all lying to ourselves.  If we just admit that half our year is blanketed with cold and misery, maybe someday we can learn to accept it.   Or move to Florida, where all the people go who figured this out years ago.

I just had Raisin Bran for breakfast and I totally liked it.  I’m only a few old-person stages away from heading south myself. ♣

Old Man Winter: What a jerkface. Image by designer Edgar R. McHerly. Click the image to head to tilteed.com, where you can snag his stuff on cool tees.

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011

Get excited; it’s Lollipop Tuesday.

After last week’s Rock Climbing “Adventure”, I thought it appropriate to go a little more hands-off.  So this week, I went to my first opera.

I’m kind of surprised that I’ve been in theater for so long and never managed to encounter an opera.  Well, there was this one time when I was a teacher at a performing arts camp, but it was this absolutely terrible show about Ruth and Naomi and it was all sung poorly and in English.   And quite frankly, if there aren’t Viking hats or different languages, it just doesn’t qualify in my book.

So I ventured over to the theater having no idea what to expect.  I had kind of accepted that I would probably hate it.  I tend to make those decisions sometimes without really knowing anything about the subject.  But luckily thanks to this Lollipop Tuesday series, I’m slowly and painfully working on that flaw.  I’m finding that a lot of experiences are not at all what I make them out to be inside my head.

The opera was Puccini’s Turandot and as it turned out, there were no Vikings of any kind.  Just incredibly sweet sets, super awesome costumes, and subtitles.

I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought opera wouldn’t have subtitles.  I imagined something like the scene from Moonstruck where Cher and Nicolas Cage stare at the stage and just know what’s happening.  But I’m actually really glad there was a translation.  Reading the program guide can only explain so much when the lead begins a 15 minute long song, you’re staring at a cloak with 20 human heads hanging inside, and the whole village is weeping and gnashing teeth.

It was intense.

The thing that really surprised me was how extravagant the set was and how each costume was so intricate in detail and over-the-top in spectacle.   But I suppose that when you go see a show in a foreign language that has no upbeat dance numbers, you’ve gotta have something to look at.

I really need to get cast in theater companies with bigger budgets.

The only unfortunate part of the evening was the couple sitting to the far left of me, one row ahead.  Apparently they had a lot to say about, well, everything.  They didn’t even try to whisper, which is the real kicker.  And since I’ve been known to walk up to people who are rude in the theater and have civil, logical conversations with them about how they’re the reason people stay inside to watch movies, I was a little concerned about the little baby hellfire flame that was lit in the pit of my stomach when I heard them start to talk.

Luckily, their cacophony of disrespect was overshadowed by a woman who “snuck” in a bag of chips in her purse.  I’d argue that someone who isn’t a moron might try sneaking in something just slightly more discreet next time, but she seemed genuinely convinced that adjusting the packaging ever so slowly was an effective means of concealing her sin.

And she, like all others who make that assumption, was drowning in a thick, infested pool of denial between her loud crunches.

My thin, fickle patience aside, it was a lovely experience.  Dare I say I enjoyed it.

Man, I can’t believe I just said I enjoyed opera. ♣

Tags: 365 Project, Humor, life, musings, postaday2011