A Mixed Bag

I have approximately eight hundred and fourty two things to talk about today.

I was going to start this blog by ranting about how my work hat makes me look like an old Polish Baba, but something happened while I was waiting for the *sigh* bus that pushed that topic to the back burner. I saw a man in his car clipping his fingernails. IN HIS CAR! It was pretty gross. Almost as gross as when my roomates and I found a set of nail clippers on the kitchen counter and no one would own up to who they belonged to, or if they had, in fact, been used in the kitchen! How gross. Finger nails should be clipped in the bathroom, or the bedroom if you're very careful. The worst thing is when you step on them when they are hidden in the pile of the carpet and they poke you very hard. It's just so wrong to clip them in your car. Especially because he was clipping willy nilly! Just letting them fling about! Ugh! The carpetting in cars has a very low-pile. I bet you could see them all scattered about.

While having a pregnant-woman like bout of cleaning at work today, I stabbed the floor. If you look around at your local Grocery Store, you will see these metal barriers that are near the corners of things like refrigerated bunkers and displays so that you don't bash your cart into them and break them (because apparently, customers have a tendency to be reckless. I think they feel they are entitled to it because of the old adage "The Customer is Always Right" which is COMPLETE bullshit; anyone in the customer service business knows that, without a doubt, the customer is ALWAYS wrong, even when they are full of self-righteousness and think they are right, they are WRONG. Even when they are holding the product you said five minutes ago that you were sold out of, they are wrong. Even if you messed up the order, it's their own fault for ordering something complex. They're just wrong. I always think that I should like the customers, because without them I would have no job, instead of just a crappy one, however they make it IMPOSSIBLE to like them when they are picking away at my beautiful bagel display like vultures! Sometimes I want to scream at them to put the tongs down and just leave). Anyways, the metal barricades come out of the floor for some inexplicable reason. I was cleaning the ones that stand guardian over the bagel kettle because the honey-water from the kettle splashes around and I'm not sure we've ever cleaned them. While I was brilo-padding it vigorously, the entire metal guard came flying out of the floor! When I pushed it back down, a very strong smelling oil seethed out of the hole in the floor! I always knew my store had a heart of black. It was exactly like seeing something bleed black blood all over the place. It was weird and disturbing and bizarre and now I'm convinced that my particular Grocery Store is possessed, but I always knew that, so it's not exactly a shock. The action sequence was pretty good though.

When I went on break today, instead of being friendly I attempted to hide behind my technology. I brought out my troops: cell phone and iPod. With these two tools at my side, I can effectively ignore all the people in the break room I wish to avoid. Which is pretty much everyone. I'm such a bakery snob becuase I fully believe it is the most difficult department to work in with the least amount of slack given to us. The coffee portion of the store is the size of my bedroom (or smaller...) and it has the same amount of full-time people as the bakery, which is roughly twice the length of my entire house. Wow. Sooo fair.

My bakery hat makes me look very European. Not in the "Oooo how European" but more the European where I wear sturdy clothing made of materials meant to last through tough winters, or perhaps even leiderhosen, but that might just be because I like to pin my braids up to my head. That probably isn't helping me with my European feel. Either way, I have to take that hat off if I'm going out in public after work. This leads to many problems. 1) If I didn't shower before work, my hair looks realllly hat-heady and greasy. 2) I just got bangs and have been forced against my will to put them also up into the hat. When I didn't have bangs this was fine because my hair stayed under the hat, but with a nice side part thing in the front that kept me from looking constantly surprised, which happens if all my hair is pulled straight back. Now, I have to use a pully/lever system of a bobby pin and a hairband to keep the part in the right place and keep me from looking shocked. The problem here becomes the age-old irritation women everywhere have dealt with at one time or another in their lives. Why on earth can't Goody design a headband that actually stays in place? The ones they like to THINK work just use those little elastic bands to rip your hair out. They slide right off the back of your head too, which has you constantly tensed. No one looks good with a headband sagging off the back of their head. No one. Whose idea was One Size Fits Most? It's a horrible idea. They should have a key on the back of the pack of bands "Note: Only heads with a circumfrance of X number of inches need purchase this hair accessory". It's only logical. The entire hat-related problem only REALLY matters when I have to take the bus home. Since I am wearing polyester hounds-tooth patterned pants, I decide that it would only add insult to injurt in continuing to wear the Euro-hat on the bus. Also, if I take off my polyester white shirt with the snaps up the front, it's really only the pants that are a problem, and I can ignore that. Removal of hat and shirt actually are a bonus. I can put the shirt in the hat and try to hide as much of the bagel smell as possible in my purse.

Oh yes. There's a smell. A distinct bagel smell which is comprised mostly of honey, wood fire, garlic and onions, and toasted sesame seeds. My mother actually holds her nose when I come home, which has given me a bit of a complex. I almost fear a bus-full of people, lest someone be offended by my odorous nature for the 15 minutes I am forced to bus home. I feel like I should be wearing one of those mascot costumes. "Hello boys and girls! I'm here from The Grocery Store to talk to you about GARLIC!" I would be a perfectly plump little garlic bulb. That's how I feel sitting on the bus. Like each of my fingernails is it's own clove and I am emitting waves of garlic to the unsuspecting bus riders, who I assume all smell like vegetable soup. Ever since seeing So I Married An Axe Murderer when I was little, I am weirded out by vegetable soup. Charlie aka Mike Meyers says he broke up with a girl because she smelled like soup and I have always taken him to mean Vegetable. I think he says what kind, but it doesn't even matter because it will always be Cambells Vegetable Soup in my head. Maybe with Barley. I associate weird people with smelling like vegetable soup. I wonder is anyone associates weird people with garlic. If that's the case, I'm in a lot of trouble.

My bus ride home gave me a plethora of ideas to write about. Sadly I had left my spiral bound notebook at home to write them down in and had to fill up the week of August 16th in my agenda with tiny little thoughts to expand on later. I used to always carry a book around with me because I wanted to be Harriet the Spy, but without being Michelle Trachtenberg and having Rosie O'Donnell as my matriarchal figure. But I sure did want that book full of thoughts and ideas and spying. Spying is hard work. It's almost as hard as watching True Blood with parents home, which happened AGAIN last night, except this time it was on my computer and therefore, twice as bad. I tried to spy on the people on the bus but kept on getting distracted by things out the window. These things included:

A U-Haul lot and an advertisement for something in Birdland.

The U-Haul lot made me wonder: If you could choose which graphic you wanted on the side of your U-Haul, which would you pick? The map? The description of the spacious insides of your loaner van? Personally, I would want the giant trout being hooked. It's the most woodsy one of them, even though U-Hauls really have nothing to do with camping, or the outdoors, but I'd still choose that one. U-Hauls imply road tripping to me and I always see myself road tripping in the southern states of America, and that somehow reminds me of trout. I have very strange word associations. Yes, more than U-Hauls = West Virginia and Weird People = Vegetable Soup. I'm sure they'll come up sometime in the future.

The thing about Birdland really irked me. Why on earth is it that people think it's okay to refer to their neighbourhood this way? "Birdland" is a place where all the streets have the names of birds. I'm not 100% positive on this, but I'm 99.8% and that's close enough. Streets like "Cardinal Cresent". So therefore, they get to be known as "Birdland". I think it's ridiculous. People who come from areas where every street is some old-man name don't say they come from "Geriatricville" because they know that people will know where "Arnold St." is and if they don't they'll do what everyone else does and Google it. Birdland I tell you! Tuh!

Also, people who sing along to song lyrics while on the bus need to know that's not acceptable. It's makes you look like a crazy and you probably will suffer from a case of the vegetable soup-smell if you keep it up.

I had an attack of good manners as I left the bus that embarrassed me. It's very odd when you want to be polite and mind your P's and Q's and end up looking silly, even though you're doing the right thing at the time. I exited from the back door of the bus and said Thankyou to the driver from that location, which is a bit too far away from the driver to be non-chalant. You have to really want to be polite to say thanks from the back door. The trouble is, I had my iPod on, and therefore have no real idea how loud my voice is. I have this problem in the mornings at work when I ask someone a question and they're standing next to me and I'll think I'm almost shouting but it turns out I'm actually speaking VERY softly because my earphones make me sound 1000 times louder in my own head. I hope the driver heard me because she did an excellent job of not being a bumpy driver, even though she went over the curb a few times. At least she didn't slam on the breaks and shatter my kneecaps. That usually happens.

Sweet, Mom just told me I get the car for work tomorrow. Wednesday's blog will probably not have as many disconnected or jumbled things in it since I'll be lacking the bus-fumes.

My bagels were gorgeous today. They were atoning for their partying ways yesterday, I could tell.

~Jess~

P.S. Moist = Brownies