Category: People

I went into Starbucks this morning to get my once weekly latte. Caffeine gives me a jittery buzz followed by a headache, but on Sundays I succumb to the craving for a fine cup of coffee – fine meaning any coffee I don’t brew myself.

Because it was early and I was the only one at the counter, I noticed the tip box right by the cash register as I was handing over my money.  I got $2.50 back in change, which I wanted to pocket except that the tip box, already seeded with a couple of dollars and some change, made me feel like a cheapskate.

I carried on this really quick debate in my head: “All she did was repeat what I wanted to the barista, take my five bucks and hand me my change.  Why do I have to put extra money in the tip box?” To which I replied in my head, “They probably don’t make much money, and it’s only fifty cents, just put it in there, you tightwad.” To which I responded in my head, “Why the heck doesn’t Starbucks pay them enough money rather than making me feel like I’m taking food out of their mouths when I don’t want to reward them just for doing the job they were hired to do?”

The generous half of me won – I put the money in the box, grumbling in my head the whole time and wondering why tipping is becoming the norm these days. I worked as a waitress during college, and I’m not sure how they got away with it, but they only paid us half of minimum wage.  We were supposed to get the rest of our income from tips, which we all managed to do. One woman I worked with did quite well for herself. She’d race over to everyone tables and steal their tips if we didn’t beat her to it. It was like those bonuses managers gave themselves from the bailout money. They didn’t deserve it either, but that didn’t stop them from stealing our hard earned tax payer dollars.

I’m okay with tipping people who give you a lot of personal attention like your massage therapist or hairdresser. Also tipping the bellhop who drags your overstuffed luggage to your room. Paying him to put his hand back in his pocket and vacate your room is worth it.

But people whose whole interaction with you is to take your money? I’m not sure about that. What’s next? The grocery clerk at Safeway? The person selling tickets at the movies? The kid hawking Girl Scout cookies at your front door?

So I’m going to generously give you a tip, Starbucks, along with every other coffee shop and deli in the world. Put up a sign saying, “No tipping, please! We pay our employees more than enough to scrape by – they don’t need any handouts from you, thank you very much.” Then actually pay them a decent wage.

You guys are just like coffee. You leave a bitter taste in my mouth and give me a headache.

I find it fascinating that not one of us has a clue what is going on in anybody else’s head.  We can sit there with a new boyfriend in a quiet lull and say, “What are you thinking right now?” and he’ll either tell you what he’s thinking or flat out lie – and there’s no way on earth to know the difference.

One way people try to get in someone’s head is to use body language. People profess that they can “read” what you’re thinking by observing your posture or position of your head to see if you’re lying, flirting, daydreaming, and so on.  Up to now I’ve only been able to know three body language cues for certain: If a person burps loudly while you’re talking, they aren’t very interested in what you have to say.  If a person passes gas while you’re talking, they disagree with what you’re saying. If they stick their middle finger in your face, you can bite it if you react quick enough, and they won’t try that again.

But what about more subtle cues? I went to Google for answers and found a site, wikihow.com, that had all sorts of very scientific ways to read what people are thinking, followed by disclaimers that pretty much told you you’d wasted your time reading it. Like this one: “Dilated pupils mean that the person is interested. Keep in mind, however, that many drugs cause pupils to dilate, including alcohol, cocaine, amphetamines, MDMA, LSD and others…Also, some people have permanently dilated pupils (a condition known as mydriasis).”

So either the person is interested, inebriated, or incapacitated.  Thanks for clearing that up, wiki.  What is a wiki anyway?

I got excited when I saw the one that pertained to me, since I often cross my arms when I’m standing. “People with crossed arms are closing themselves to social influence. The worst thing that you can do to people with crossed arms is to challenge them in one way or another, no matter how they react. This annoys them. Though some people just cross their arms as a habit, it may indicate that the person is (slightly) reserved, uncomfortable with their weight (therefore trying to hide it), or just trying to hide something on their shirt.”

What’s annoying is reading an endless list of things that could be causing a person to cross their arms, and when you finally reach the end, not knowing anything more than when you started.

Personally, I don’t want to know what people are thinking. I have enough trouble keeping track of my own thoughts. If you don’t like me, or you’re lying to me, or aren’t interested in what I have to say, I don’t really give a rat’s ass.

My daughter is going to take the SAT test next month, and it reminds me of the day I took my ACT test and how my friends helped me prepare.

My best friend in high school, I’ll call her Mary because she’s a pillar of the community and might choke me if I use her real name, had called and asked me to come get her after her folks went to bed. She was grounded but could sneak out because her parents went to bed early.

It was a cold, clear Friday night in November and my friend, Clark, and I were cruising around in his gigantic Oldsmobile that makes today’s SUV’s look like matchbox cars. Clark’s first name was Pryor, and a few years back someone had made up a nickname for him because in those days, when whole battalions of kids gathered in the street to pass the time, making up fool-hardy names was entertaining. Clark’s nickname, say it fast, was: Pryor T Coon Type Dog Liar Makes His Rules Up As He Goes Along. This isn’t important to the story, but I thought you might find it interesting.

When we picked up Mary, she was drunk. “I just took a little bit of my daddy’s cough medicine,” she said. Mary lolled from side to side in the back seat, even when we weren’t turning corners, and I twisted around from the front and tried to keep her upright as best I could but it was a losing battle.

We drove out in the country, and Mary, who kept mumbling about the cough medicine and other things you couldn’t understand because her chin was resting on her chest, finally said something we heard very clearly: “I’m gonna throw up.”

We pulled over and dragged her, rubber legged, away from the car to avoid splattering. She lunged sideways, lost a shoe, and fell down backwards laughing like a drunken psycho. We tugged her to her feet like we were lifting a sofa, and she commenced to throw up an ocean of southern cooking into the shoe like it was a target. Meantime, at her very first heave, I got a gag reflex, and when the smell hit, I emptied the contents of my stomach like I was throwing out buckets of dirty water. Pryor T, bless his heart, braced us both up until the chorus of Ralphing subsided.

We got Mary in the car, minus the shoe, and took her vomit wreaking carcass back home, all windows down and the heat turned up full blast to melt the icicles forming on our faces. We knocked on her door until a light came on, then shoved her into the arms of her mom without much more than a “sleep tight” before we bolted. Pryor T dropped me off at home where I showered, slept, got up the next morning at the crack of dawn and took my ACT test. Thanks to Mary, Pryor T, the night air, and wretching, which must have cleared my head, I scored higher than all my friends. I don’t think I’ll recommend it to my daughter, though.

My brother and I went to the same college, and on trips home we’d entertain ourselves by making up stupid riddles. We thought they were exceptionally clever, but whenever someone else was with us in the car, they’d say, “That was really stupid.”  My brother would respond by passing gas, which both of us were genetically able to do on demand when the occasion called for it.

Here’s an example of one of our riddles. John: “Where does a bat get energized?”  Me: “In a bat tree.” Get it – bat tree…battery?  Really funny stuff.

The trip was 500 miles, so when we’d exhausted every riddle we could come up with, which was usually about three, we’d start making up poems.  One of us would say a line, and the other had to respond with a rhyme and so on and so on.  So I’d say, “The sky is blue,” and he’s say, “And so are you,” and I’d say, “I need to go to the loo,” and he’d say, “I won’t stop, boo-hoo,” and I’d say, “I’m going to smack you,” and he’d say, “I’ll fart if you do.”

Except that he didn’t say fart, which is such a crude word especially since we’d have to be saying it all the time. We invented the word “farnix” because, for one thing, it sounds funnier. To see what I mean substitute farnix in the above poem.  Plus it was something we could say in public. “Who farnixed in here? I’m suffocating!”

We were teenagers and bodily functions were hilarious. They still are, but when you cross over into being a grown up, it’s considered crude, not funny. Can you imagine a Board Room full of suits and someone cuts loose like a Whoopee Cushion?  People would have to sit there stoically and pretend that nothing happened, even when their eyes began to water.

So to end this missive I think it’s fitting to have another riddle, but I didn’t make this up, my daughter showed it to me. Try this on your friends or do it in a mirror – it’s a physical joke. You say, “Knock knock,” and they say, “Who’s there?” and you say, “Interrupting starfish,” and they say, “Interrupting….” And you immediately put your outstretched hand in their face. Try it, right now, you don’t even need a mirror just do it to your own face, really, it’s funny. It’s not stupid, trust me!

It’s hard to come up with a clever title. I always admire those newspaper headlines that seem to hit the nail squarely on the head. Like this one: “Body Cavity Search Reveals $4,000 in Crack.”

With my title, you probably think I’m going to talk about movies, and I am. But not about the way they move me. I rely on a magazine or newspaper or puzzle for most of my movements.  Okay, that’s tacky and I apologize.  Now let’s move on.

No wonder foreigners have a hard time learning our language. Words have so many meanings, or they sound the same but mean different things.  Like there, their, and they’re. If you’ve read an English paper for one of your kids, you’ll never see these spelled right.  For example, “There dogs are over their licking they’re private parts,” is pretty typical subject matter for an English paper around my house. If you didn’t notice anything misspelled, then you probably didn’t have Mrs. Massengill for an English teacher.

She would not tolerate anything short of perfection. That’s why she thought we were perfect idiots. The girls all wore very short skirts to class, and I remember one day she was sitting at her desk droning on about something while we pretended to take notes, and out of the blue she said, “You can’t even image what I have to look at from up here with those skirts.”

Well, first thing every one of us girls did was snap our legs shut, then we immediately started imagining the view, and she was wrong, we could imagine it very clearly, especially the guys. They started squirming in their seats and dropping pencils on the floor to verify they’re imaginations.

Did you catch that misspelled they’re? This story reminds me of the guys in my 8^th grade art class. The teacher wasn’t all their (another one), so we had total freedom to amuse ourselves. Boys in that class used to drop pencils non-stop. They’d drop a pencil, lean way over to pick it up, sneak a long look down the aisle, then sit back up and do it again. Pieces of broken pencil tips littered the floor like confetti. It looked like those video games where you bop the rodent on the head as he’s coming out of the hole, except with about 12 of them moving at  the same time.

So why don’t movies move me? I’ll get back with you when their’s more time.

I guess I revealed in my last blog that I talk to myself. Actually, it’s really just thinking out loud. Except that sometimes I do answer. After I say something stupid, which occurs more often than you might think, the first thing I do when I get alone is start in with, “I can’t believe you said that, what were you thinking?”…“I don’t know, it just slipped out.”…“I should have just left you at home…”Well why didn’t you?…”Next time I will.”

I talk to my 9 pound Yorkie Poo quite a bit when there’s no one in the house. I say things like: “Let’s go make lunch,  yo momma is starving!” I usually make it sound a little cutesy, because if someone’s listening, like a burglar hiding under the bed, I don’t want him to think I’m crazy.

If you work from home and spend a lot of the day alone, you’re going to talk to yourself. There’s a profound need to hear a human voice, even if it’s your own. That’s why solitary confinement is such a dreaded punishment, except for a couple of husbands I know, who probably fantasize about it.

But when you get in the habit of talking to yourself, it starts happening around other people. If I’m golfing and hit a decent ball, by accident, I’ll cheer it all the way. “Go, baby, flly, fly, fly, fly, fly!” Realizing what I’ve done, I’ll make up some sheepish cover story, like: “I’m just trying to help it along on sound waves,” but nobody’s buying it. I can hear them thinking, “She’s a couple of clubs shy of a full set, but it was a nice shot.”

I know I’m not the only one chattering away to myself because more than once I’ve been in a ladies bathroom and heard a woman come in, thinking she’s alone in there, and whisper to herself, “Who does she think she is with a comment like that? I ought to march right back out there…” or some such. You know that she knows she got caught because when you start rustling around, she gets very, very quiet, and she won’t come out of that stall until you’re gone.

We all do it, I’m not ashamed of it, and as someone very wise once said, “You’re not crazy until the toilet starts talking back.”

I went to a gathering last night and, as usual, saw many displays of cleavage all over the room. I call them fashion fruits. A couple of grapefruits were nestled in a fluffy pink sweater.  Cantaloupes hovered behind a saggy green tank top. And the plums, the poor little plums, straining to be noticed in a white scooped-neck t-shirt.

One set vied for center of attention. The turquoise top they were in plunged quite low, and I couldn’t really fit them into my little fruit metaphor except that they were like two oranges in flesh-tone socks that gravity was hell-bent on dragging to her waistline.

The problem for me is that I never know where to look. It’s distracting – I’m trying to focus on the person’s face, but those casabas are practically screaming at me to look down. A rat could scurry across my bare foot and I’d be like somebody in a neck brace.

For people like me who are never sure what to do, I think it’s high time we get this thing out in the open. Women are always tossing out compliments about someone’s hair or shoes or clothes.  We could just add,  “And that cleavage of yours is quite remarkable, it just makes your whole outfit. And it’s so natural looking!”

If it becomes socially acceptable to notice and comment, then the awkwardness will disappear. All those women last night could have complimented each other’s endowment, and the married men, reduced to enjoying the display with sideways glances, could openly relish the titillation. “Yes, I certainly have to agree with my wife, your cleavage is just breathtaking!”

When someone establishes the proper etiquette in these situations, everyone will breathe a huge sigh of relief.  Meantime, those of us with apricots and kiwis are counting the days until it’s turtleneck season.