Today was the day my nephews and I were going to the city to do the toy trade, which has been both fun and profitable in the past (especially for the kids). I tried to get everything done, including hitting the library and writing before it was time to go (the events are always first-come first-serve, and last time, we got there late and there weren't any tables available).
I hit the library with only an hour or so available to me, and probably should have continued my Valentine's Day story (what? It's only two months late!). But I realized I had missed a scene in my last Lara Demming tale, because it starts out with her having a couple of high school friends/acquaintances, and then suddenly, they're gone from the story. So, I thought I'd write a little moment where she says the wrong thing to one of them--probably the one named Chelsea*--and those friends distance themselves from Lara for the rest of the narrative.
So, I was trying to find a place to insert it into the story, and scanned a couple of scenes with Lara talking to people and, wow, she is remarkably dumb. I know I prefer dumb people to smart people in my stories, but wow, she's almost like that girl in the Christmas story I wrote that is thrilled to proclaim herself a "Maniac Pixie Dreamgirl."
Maybe that's a problem. Maybe I should rethink how smart Lara should be, for fear that it starts being a character flaw instead of a sort of sweet quirk.**
Instead of writing it, though, I sat here and blogged instead.
Push-ups Today: 66
Push-ups In April: 271
I took the boys to town, and we got the best, most primo spot available to us . . . and it didn't really matter. I didn't sell a damned thing the whole night, but there was free pizza and I did pick up a few things I should have no problem selling. Because tomorrow is Easter, they put out Easter eggs throughout the store, and if you found them, they were worth five bucks in store credit each, and were filled with candy. They also had, for the first time, free brownies and soda (I got a water, since I'm trying to be good with the soda). My ten year old nephew announced, almost as soon as we got there, that he was bored, and demanded my phone. This upset me, but I let him have it, and I regretted it when, a few minutes later, I wanted to look items up, and didn't have my phone.***
I pulled up to a gas station pump and couldn't get it to take my card. It said "Payment invalid" when I tried, and my headache notched up a spot when I saw the line of cars behind me waiting to get gas act like the problem was me. I tried it three times, and then just drove away. There was another gas station, and I wish I had gone to it (it ended up being five cents a gallon less than where I ultimately went), but it was on the wrong side of the road, so just kept driving.
My headache got worse as the boys bickered, then demanded I take them to another store to look for Pokemon cards (they've spent hundreds of dollars on Pokemon this year alone . . . and it's April). Finally, the ten year old complained that he had to go to the bathroom, and when I asked him why he didn't go at Walmart (where we looked for cards) or Target (where we looked for cards), he said he didn't know. But there was a gas station I pulled into, and I told him to hit the bathroom while I filled up.
Weirdly, the gas reader wouldn't accept my card there either. I tried it twice, and the second time, it just said "Remove card quickly" even though I had taken out the card already. My headache was something fierce by this point, so I told the remaining kid I was going to have to go inside. But there were two kids inside the car. "Why didn't you go to the bathroom?" I asked him. "Watching YouTube," he may have said, or he may only have grunted. "Go in and use the bathroom!" I said, and to my surprise--although it shouldn't be surprising, at this point--he said, "No."
I remember my father's temper and the dangers of getting on his bad side, but I easily could have eclipsed him for violence in that moment. I screamed at him to go use the bathroom, and then I stomped into the gas station to pay for gas. And the credit card reader just did a spinning hourglass thing in front of me. "Are the systems down, then?" I asked, through gritted teeth. "Nah, your credit card's just bad," the clerk told me.
Notch up again. So I ran my debit card . . . and the payment went through fine. Hmm.
Words Today: 791
Words In April: 1601
I accomplished nothing more the rest of the night. It sucks because I hadn't gone running, or done anything more than push-ups when I was headache free, and now, well, all I could do was unload the car (with so little help from the boys it should have been funny, but wasn't), and then go lie down.
I'm reminded of that TV movie from the Eighties called "Boy With A Migraine." Remember that?
Anyway, I laid down and willed the discomfort away, and then opened my eyes a little while later, and realized I'd not done my sit-ups. So I went in the living room, laid down on the floor, and did ten or fifteen or so, but guess what? Doing exercise didn't make my headache go away, it only made it stronger, like feeding a troll, or telling a child not to use the word "wop" anymore, or criticizing some bullshit Tucker Carlson said on his show.
So, I laid back, just for a minute, and closed my eyes. And when I opened them, it was around three in the morning, and I was still on the floor, my sit-ups unfinished. I went ahead and finished them, then went to bed. My headache was gone, and I really should have taken the opportunity to get some work done, but I chose not to.
Oh, and the kid who played Boy with a Migraine back in 1984 is all grown up and seems to be doing well . . . at the still-quite-young age of thirty-seven:
Sit-ups Today: 100
Sit-ups In April: 300
*Chelsea is named after a woman I met last year who was, for reasons I can't explain, very nice and attentive to me one morning, and I was honestly puzzled what had changed, to the point where I told my cousin about it. It reminded me a little bit of how, years ago, when I was watching the BBC "Pride & Prejudice" on my sister's little portable DVD player and a total stranger (a twenty-something young woman) came up to me and said, "Why didn't you tell me you were watching that?!" and proceeded to watch some of it with me. I didn't know the girl, and I'll be jiggered (sorry) if she ever spoke to me again after that, but on that day, she seemed to think we were friends.
But I digress. I spoke to Chelsea several times over the past year, and sometimes she was standoffish, sometimes she was agreeable, but she never showed that level of friendliness to me as she did that morning. A month or so ago, it was her last day at work, and I went up to her to say goodbye, and she said, "Yeah, have a good life, okay?" and I just walked away, thinking, "Huh. I guess we were never friends to begin with."
**It does remind me, since I'm watching the show, how the two sisters on "Modern Family" are depicted, with Hailey being dumb and cool, and Alex being smart and socially awkward (and nearly every episode has them insulting each other, Alex calling Hailey stupid and Hailey calling Alex unpopular). Every once in a while, they'll give Hailey a line where she's almost cartoonishly dim-witted . . . and I love that.
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