Speedy Grease

I recently got an oil change at an establishment that, to avoid attention from their legal department, I will call “Speedy Grease.”

My town has almost 20 Speedy Grease locations, which is good because I can never return to any of the three I have used so far. The first time I couldn’t figure out how to pull up to the service bay, so now they know that I’m not competent to care for a vehicle. The second time I absentmindedly tried to get in my car without paying, so that crew knows about my tenuous grasp on the conventions that govern society.

In my shame, I slunk away to a third Speedy Grease shop. This time I managed the whole transaction with only minimal failures of sentience.

All that success went to my head, and it took until Monday to notice the impressive constellation of scratches on my windows. These new decorations can only have come from that adorable little dance where they pretend to wash your windows, presumably using an old sweatshirt stuffed with gravel.

I was upset for about ten minutes, and then the battle joy started seeping in. After work, I got to go yell at Speedy Grease!

I love the prospect of a conflict that calls for righteous speech-making. Planning out a biting diatribe satisfies my primal need for occasional violence, with the added bonus of minimizing the bloodshed. On the other hand, 100% of confrontations work out better in my head than in reality. Typically, I’ll plan something like this:

…but thanks to a genetic tendency toward anger-crying, I usually discharge that frustrated energy through my eyeballs in the most humiliating way possible:

This is the same recipe by which I accidentally got a grade changed in college. It only takes a few key ingredients:

One misunderstood assignment...

One attempt to explain...

A double handful of panic about damaging a GPA over an elective music class...

…and one terrified grad student instructor who did not see this coming.

Ultimately, though, I did not so much as sniffle at the Speedy Grease guy. I also didn’t get such impressive results. In fact, the reward for my little wrath spree doubles as its own punishment: I have to go back and face that same crew to redeem my 50% discount on another oil change.

At least now I know which direction the door opens.

P.S. If you are forming a band, you can have "Wrath Spree" for free.

Planes, Names, and Automobiles

I call myself weird pet names when I get anxious. This habit has given me a new understanding of the term “pet name”—I’m starting to feel like my own puppy.

This is a great way to draw attention to yourself in airports. Of course, you can accomplish the same end by being the only person with a cowboy hat at both the Albuquerque and Atlanta ends of your flight. By the end of my trip, I had accumulated one of these…

…and one of these…

…and one of these:

I also had zero of these:

When I reached the rental car counter in Atlanta, I was firmly reassuring my canine self.

Then it was time for the nerve-wracking process of learning a new grown-up skill. I fumbled for cards and papers, knowing that any minute I would do something wrong, they would realize I wasn’t responsible enough to trust with their vehicle, and I would have no way to get to South Carolina.

As it turned out, my cover held, and I got to borrow a nice, gold Elantra. I even brought it back without any dents punched in it from the time the alarm went off all day next to some kind people’s tent.

At the outset I asked how to return the vehicle, and “You just drive it in!” seemed like a thorough response. The agent did not mention the magical secret labyrinth of steps, including counterintuitive stuff like parking in the middle of a traffic lane to collect your luggage. Instead, I ended up at the center of a honking and angry-flagger-stick-pointing tempest until I figured out the code. Thank goodness I’m so easy to train.

Anyway, I’ve successfully added Car Rental and Return to my list of grown-up abilities. After an adequate recovery interval, I may try to tackle another item.

Have Some Candy

I might be the teensiest bit anal retentive.

I work at the front desk in my office, which puts me in charge of the candy jar. I have plenty of prior training for this job responsibility, thanks to my lifelong social skills compensation technique of offering people sweets as an inducement to like me.


I am also thoroughly provisioned because the nearby yuppie grocery store sells saltwater taffy in individual bins, so I can count out an equal number of each flavor.

It’s important to ensure proper flavor distribution in the jar, so I sort out all the taffy into little piles on the desk and then layer them in. One of my coworkers caught me in the middle of this process last week.





You can’t let all the strawberry ones end up on the bottom.

Come to think of it, this compulsion toward order is probably behind my inability to appreciate the “shuffle” feature of my MP3 player.

When I finally get tired of listening to the Muppet Movie album on repeat, shuffle always sounds like a great option. But then every song that plays reminds me of two or three more I want to hear. The buildup of music options is compounded by uncertainty: With 8 gigs of music, it could be weeks before I get around to “Uptown Girl.” Worse yet, what if I change my settings in a moment of weakness and disrupt the shuffle cycle? Then it’ll start replaying stuff I’ve already listened to, and my thirst for '80s falsetto will lie unquenched amid the horde of other songs stabbing at me all over.


It’s a lot of pressure.

TANGENT: I also get anxious around comic strips that repeat the same word a lot of times for effect, because I have to read it all thirty times even though I’m aware that that’s stupid. Panels like this take me ten minutes in case I missed one:


Luckily, I’ve discovered a solution to the music attack problem. My player lets me run through all the songs in alphabetical order, irrespective of artist or album. The effect is a lot like shuffle because “Babylon” is followed by “Back in the USSR,” but I can feel secure in the knowledge that I will eventually get to everything that’s on there.


This method is also good for discovering that I have three different copies of “Hakuna Matata.” The only down side is that now I want to make graphs of which letters are most common for starting song titles.

Woof

I took French in high school and again in college. This decision showed great foresight and career-mindedness for a person living in New Mexico, where nearly 30% of the population speaks Spanish at home. That’s just how prepared I am.

Speaking of foresight, I forgot about the language requirement in my high school until my junior year, which made me the only upperclassman in a French I course with a bunch of 14-year-olds. If you’re thinking that being older made me cool in any way, please take a look at the rest of my blog.

Still, I was holding on to my dignity pretty well until Rico came through the door one morning and announced, “I hear you used to bark at people.”

The trouble with truth is that it’s difficult to refute convincingly, particularly if the witnesses survive.

The witness in this instance was a girl from my middle school who I didn’t previously realize had something against me. She had clearly been squealing, but I couldn’t picture how the topic had come up.

I should point out that it was perfectly reasonable to bark at the people in question because they already thought I was possessed. They never mentioned how they got the idea, but it might have been the amount of time I spent talking to a stump in the cafeteria courtyard. Or the day I wore plastic grocery bags in my hair. Or maybe my homemade respirator mask with built-in windshield from the year they re-roofed the school.

It wasn’t the invisible birds I used to chase; that definitely came after they had started throwing M&Ms at me.

I kind of liked attention.

(Aside: Believe it or not, I maintained an entire friendship through all three years of middle school.)

Here’s the thing, though: I definitely still bark on occasion. I also lick dessert plates, pretend that I’m invisible, and slide down carpeted stairs on my butt. Dorky stuff is fun. Just don’t let 14-year-olds catch you.

(P.S. You want to go for a full-bodied woof, like a German Shepherd or Rottweiler. Any animal that bounces when it barks doesn’t count.)

You borrow my brain for 5 seconds and just be like, "Dude! Can't handle it!"

I talk to myself pretty much all the time, even when I miraculously manage to avoid doing it out loud for a while. Occasionally I’m writing or making a grocery list, but often I’m just replaying a loop of the last thing to enter my mind until a new thought happens.

This habit is distracting and psychologically worrisome, but it doesn’t become a problem until I forget I’m in a public place and open my mouth. I’m apt to hold lengthy discussions with myself at the grocery store—it’s a consequence of the fact that, since finishing college, I can no longer do simple arithmetic without speaking out loud.

This process eventually devolves into shouting at various groceries for their myriad infractions.

They never submit to my authority, either. In general, I’ve noticed that the inanimate objects I address have a disheartening tendency not to follow my instruction.

It’s like they aren’t even trying. Somewhere in the midst of the melee, I’ll look up and realize that other people are around as well. Then I get all self conscious.

When they eventually take me away to a little white room with bars on the windows, at least I won’t be lonely.

Is There a Continuing Ed Class for That?

Somewhere in middle school I missed the class on how to dress in clothes that look good. This omission left me incapable of distinguishing between outfits appropriate for not getting teased in 7th grade and those appropriate for repainting a doublewide outside Wal-Mart in 1987.

Conveniently, I also missed the lessons on how to be self-conscious, thus preserving my love of brightly-colored stretch leggings and extra-large t-shirts from the science fair. That’s how I reached the decision to adjust for cold weather by wearing red stirrup pants with my new lavender dress.

This was the day my balloon of blissful ignorance began to leak and I begged my mom to buy me a pair of jeans. This was also the same classmate who, a few weeks later, took advantage of our napping substitute teacher to wrap masking tape around my eyes and drag me across the floor by my braided hair, so I got those lessons in self-consciousness after all.

Anyway, my continuing lack of fashion standards makes clothes shopping an ordeal that I only attempt when all of my existing garments develop enough holes to be used for draining pasta. Paralyzing anxiety about the term “business casual” couples with my ingrained unwillingness to spend more than $20 on anything short of a life-saving appendectomy.

On top of that, I primarily shop at discount superstores that require you to navigate around the 87% of the options that proclaim either “Hootchie Mama” or “Thanks for coming to my retirement party.”

I am also not big on shopping when it comes to gifts for non-relatives approximately my own age. I have no ability to determine maturity-level-appropriate presents. I also can’t use the “buy something you would like to receive” metric anymore because I would just get everyone Play-Doh, and anyone who has invited me to a previous birthday party already has some.

(Two-hour intermission while I browse the Play-Doh website. Did you know there’s one with confetti in it? You can also buy it by the pound, or teach children to inject it into dogs.)

Ultimately, the only shopping I really enjoy is at the grocery store. While I’m there I can imagine myself as the kind of person who prepares mouthwatering delicacies instead of just smearing things with peanut butter.

That’s how I end up with a pantry full of orphaned crab meat and saffron and a kitchen spattered in Cement of Béchamel Sauce.

The resulting failure-related reversion to a ramen-based diet is also why I keep having to go shopping for pants.

Odometer, Part II

Remember how last month I was weirdly obsessed with my car's odometer? I kept getting close to seeing awesome numbers like 0987654, missing them by tenths of a mile, and feeling devastated way out of proportion to the actual magnitude of my tribulations.

Well, guess what? I suddenly realized that life is bigger than seven plastic wheels, conquered my need to control pointless minutiae, stopped talking to my car, forgot about palindromes, and haven't looked at the odometer since except to check when I'm next due for an oil change.

Just kidding. That's silly.

What I did instead was realize that even if I did catch sight of a magic number, it would only last a second or two before disappearing forever, and then I would have no purpose in life but to wait for the next one. I needed a way to immortalize these perfect events, so that I could remember forever the day I saw 1234321.

So I started driving everywhere with my camera in my purse, just in case a really cool number came up. It's a good thing I did, because this weekend the digits rolled past 099980, and I switched into Heightened State of Alert mode. After a few more miles, the effort of watching all the dials while simultaneously not crashing into anything became too taxing, and I had to take drastic steps.

It only took fifteen or thirty loops of an empty church parking lot to pull everything together, and just look at the reward for my dedication:

What could be more glorious, you ask? Only THIS:

Now I can start a photo album! One day when I'm old, my descendants will gather eagerly to see pictures of the day Great Grandma's car reached 101010.1 miles, 222.2 of them since the last tank of gas. Then I'll turn the page and show that piece of gum I stepped on that looked just like a question mark, the light through my kitchen window reaching exactly as far as the dishwasher, and the bag of M&Ms with the same number of every color. Finally, I'll regale them with the story of how I learned to rotate my socks to wear all the toes evenly, and they'll head home to bed, exhausted by all the excitement.

Either that or I'll put on slide shows for my 47 cats and ask myself questions in their voices.