2005-04-18

This Entry Is So Long, You Would Think I Wrote About Something Interesting.

I understand that my life is fairly mundane, and I'm okay with that. I'm okay with it because I tend to be amused at things that others may see as normal ol' stuff. I guess that's a good thing, or I would probably be bored all of the time. That being said, I think my weekend was pretty funny.
On Friday evening, I had agreed to help Dee and Alisha with a store function of some sort, but I wasn't sure what it was when I agreed to it. They are my friends, and owners of the store where I'm now working part time. Good gals. Anyway, They told me this function was from 6-8:30 PM on Friday evening. Apparently they had agreed to have someone from the store make an appearance at a fundraiser function that a local daycare center was having. Well, it was a fundraiser function cleverly hidden under the disguise of "Children's Health And Wellness Day". Basically, we were supposed to provide a gift basket for a silent auction, and set up a table with some samples and coupons at this day care center. It sounded easy enough.
Since I do demos all the time, I have my own table and tablecloth. But I was told beforehand that I wouldn't need it. I show up at the daycare center with a gift basket and a box of supplies, and ask the first adult in uniform I see where I should set up. I told her I was from such-n-such store, and she says " Oh, the nutritionist! You're setting up out in the preschooler playground!" Uh oh. A nutritionist? Was I expected to give a talk of some sort? Hmm. Since I'm not a nutritionist, this could get tricky. Turns out that was not an issue. I go to the preschooler playground, which is outside of course. Also set up out there are two different games for the kids to play. Two lame-o games, I might add. The one I was right next to was a big laminated picture of the USDA food pyramid laid out on the ground, and the kids had to pay 1 ticket to throw a bean bag at the pyramid. Then they got a crappy prize, like a straw or a pencil.
So I'm standing in this playground, still holding the basket and my box o'stuff. I ask someone when the tables are coming, and eventually someone brings me out a little plastic kids drawing table. I mean, it's teeny. Standing behind it, it came halfway up my shin. Fine. I set up the samples, coupons, etc. I stand around for about twenty minutes, when parents and kids start to come by. They play the lame-o games (which each ticket cost $1) and they walk by my "table" with twisted looks on their faces. "What are you doing?" They keep asking me. I tell them I'm giving out samples of children's chewable multivitamins and organic cereal. They look irritated and walk away. The cereal was a hit with the young 'uns, though. They were all walking around eating dry cereal out of the bags. So this goes on for about an hour until another teacher comes out and tells me and the two other teachers with the lame-o games to move them around to the other side of the building. So we do. And what else was on the other side of the building? Well! There were three nice, long, adult sized tables with table cloths on them. Set up on those tables were a chiropractor, some folks from a fitness center, and a massage therapist. WTF???? And here I am with my kiddie table. In the preschooler playground. Really, WTF?
By the time I was told to move up to where...oh, everybody else was (!), most of the parents had already left. Then a teacher decided to set up a boom box about two feet from me. And blast kid songs from it. I was in hell. I may as well play the food pyramid game, since I don't actively participate in the food pyramid in real life.
An older kid (about 7 or 8 years old) wanted to play the game, but the teacher manning it had stepped away. So I took her ticket, and she started tossing the bean bags. She was joking around about it as she played. She threw a bag at the bread group, and said "Cereal! My favorite group!" and made other little jokes as she tossed the bags. When one landed on the meat group, I said "The meat group! My least favorite group!" Jokingly. (sorry, I had to. It was too easy! Come on!) And she got all serious on me. She stopped playing and said, "I like meat. Meat is good for you." I had a vision of being tongue lashed by a parent, so I decided carefully on my next choice of words. "Okay." I said.
Anyway.
But my Friday night was only getting weirder. Ken and I went to Emlyn's birthday party at a bowling alley on Buford hwy. where Liz had paid for an hour of karaoke. I have never seen or participated in karaoke before, and it was funny as hell. First of all, there are all these private, soundproof rooms for karaoke, much like the one from Lost In Translation:

We go into this private room where all the other party goers are. There'a big couch, and a television set. You pick songs out of the books provided, and enter the number of the song into this big, boxy remote that you can't read the buttons on because it's in Korean. Then the song lyrics appear on the tv screen, in addition to all this other strange video footage. By "strange", I mean pictures of sheep eating grass, people water skiing, people walking down a sidewalk, waterfalls, etc. It made no sense whatsoever. It was really fun. The song choices were equally as weird, especially because of the unusually large number of obscure hair metal choices there were. I saw at least three Helloween songs listed. Three! Dio, Dream Theater, Europe....what to choose?? I chose to sing "Puff The Magic Dragon" with one of Emlyn's friends. Ken sang Metallica's "Battery" with Steve, and the hits just kept coming. It was just funny as hell. After our hour was up, we went bowling. Also very fun.
Saturday morning, Ken and I headed out to Athens for the day. I scheduled a demo out there so we would have an excuse to drive two hours in order to put Cosmo's postcards out at the veg restaurants around the area. Ken did that while I did the demo. It was a long afternoon, and we were starving. We planned on eating at The Grit since we were out there, and we drove on over there. But The Grit was closed!! It didn't open for dinner for another two hours, and we were too hungry to hang around that long. So we drove back to Atl. and headed to Cameli's. Ken called up his friend Genna to meet us there, and when we all got there, Cameli's had a sign on the door saying that they are closed for the week. What? The? Hell? At this point, my stomach is eating itself and I'm needing some water very badly. So we drive to Soul Vegetarian. Thank you jeebus, they were open. They had no air conditioning, but they were open. And the food was divine. And we got to put out Cosmo cards there! Woot!
Today has been very mild. I was scheduled for another demo, but I wanted a break so I'm going to reschedule it. We slept in late, and bummed out for most of the day. We had an awesome dinner of fresh collard greens, white beans topped with zucchini and onion slices covered in walnut sauce, and a salad with avocados, olives, and red leaf lettuce. It rocked, and it also sat like a rock in my gut for a good three hours. I think I ate too many greens.
This entry is way too long. And It's way too late at night for me not to be tired at all.