Back to School With Wal Mart

Tomorrow I'm going to spend the entire day at AB Tech learning Flash. Yes! That's right! Soon, I too will join the rest of the internet in creating annoying pop up flash animations! Perhaps I will do line drawings with extremely funny soundtracks! (p.s. the official weebl & bob page is here but it's down at the moment and so I can't link to it in good conscience. But it will be back up and you will laugh.) Or perhaps I will gape in horror at all the terribly technological information and absorb nothing. But probably not. Hopefully I will learn, and then I will create, like, the worlds' greatest website right before both my hands finally fall off with the carpal tunnel.

The carpal tunnel has been bad lately, which is one of the reasons why this blog isn't being updated quite as obsessively as it used to be. I went to Wal Mart (forgive me, mea culpa) and bought some wrist braces, which I wear when I'm doing this data entry job. It's funny, god knows I spent all my unemployment time mindlessly surfing the web with my mouth and brain gaping open like a clam, but the minute I actually start doing real work that makes money on this very same computer, my wrists, both of them, lock up and hurt like hell. I look stylin', let me tell you, in my martini slippers, sweat pants, giant purple T-shirt and one of my dad's antique flannels that is big enough to wrap around me twice and falls to my knees AND my black wrist guards, which are about four inches wide, attach with velcro and apparently are keeping my hands attached. I am the queen of slacker chic; it's really terrible. Today I was eating cottage cheese for lunch as I typed in country allocations for major financial databases (Singapore, in all it's totalitarian glory, is an investment favorite) and I spilled it on my giant T-shirt; I didn't really notice until the dog got much friendlier than is his usual wont.

But I will be more fashionable soon, because they put amenable-to-buying-crap drugs in the air handlers at Wal Mart. I only went in there to buy shellac (which they didn't have), a wrist brace (I got three) and army men (long story), but I walked out with a jigsaw puzzle that is actually a 3 D picture of "space" (the kind of cool futuristic space where there are lots of colorful planets crowded around, also rocketships and attacking asteroids and, dude, comets) and, the piece de resistance, a pale green shiny faux satin lingerie looking top. It's not at all the kind of thing I usually wear but for some reason I fell for it. Which would all be fine and good, it cost $10, which is right in my budget, but as I was leaving I walked by the in-mart McDonalds. I was thinking about getting an Egg McMuffin, for I am fond of the occasional McMuffin, but standing in front of the McDonalds counter were two hugely obese teenage girls and I decided that that was a message from God and I would go home and have some diet cornflakes instead. One of the girls turned around then and I realized, with a jolt of horror, that she was wearing my shirt, and, lord, it did not become her well. The same shirt I had just purchased at that very Wal Mart, there on the rather, uh, overly large body of a girl probably 20 years my junior, and it was not good, no, no, not good at all. This is just not what you want to see when you have just bought something strange that you think might be sexy, albeit in a terrible Wal Mart kind of way.

Not knowing what else to do and reluctant to step back into the bowels of Wal Mart to try to return the thing, I brought it home anyway. A tried it on, and I tried it on, and we decided that shiny faux satin is really not the fashion statement that we (or anyone who is still sporting that attractive accessory, a brain) ever want to make, because honestly it looks like a) you forgot your shirt and b) you have terrible taste in lingerie, which is not a winning combination. And also, that pale satiny green, when combined with winter Irish skin, which is, essentially, also pale green in a kind of fascinating day glow way, creates a really unhealthy color mix: kind of the thing you might see in illustrated medical journals. So the shirt is now hanging in my closet; I'm just masochistic enough where I feel I should get my $10 worth and wear it to one of the several parties I have coming up, because, you know, it's awful and why the hell not? It's sexy in that Wal Mart, deathly pallor, post apocalyptic fungus glowing algae kind of way, and what man could resist that?