Can we just discuss something for a minute, you guys? I can’t even tell you the battle I’ve been having lately with buying jeans. It seems that in the past year, one of two things has happened- either the leg length of the average woman has increased by like four inches, or whoever puts the labels on the jeans in the jean factory has been smoking crack and just sticking on the sizes willy-nilly without care for the sanity of those of us who need new pants. Or they’re just doing it as a joke.
Okay that was actually three things. Whatever. Sometimes when I get worked up I get a little careless.
Anyway, my point is this- jeans usually come with labels attached identifying them as either “Long”, “Regular” or “Short”. Naturally, one assumes that these are for long, regular, or short people.
Not so.
These labels apparently have no bearing whatsoever on the actual length of the jeans. When I invest my time in a shopping expedition (which for me is like epically slow Chinese Water Torture) I expect the regular length jeans to be just that- regular. 'Tis the season for flip-flops and flats, and I don’t want yards of gratuitous fabric flapping around my ankles when I’m going for a nice, leisurely stroll around town. This past spring I completely ruined the hem of my favorite pair of jeans while walking around Venice because they were too long for my flops but I didn’t want to wear heels on the cobblestone streets.
(I could have gotten my point across there without being specific to location, but I want to make sure everyone knows that I wrecked my pants in Venice. Booyah.)
Right about now you might be thinking to yourself “Geez this chick is lazy. Why doesn’t she just buy the regular pants and then hem them if they are too long?“ Here’s why- I don’t want to. I want what I was promised on the label to be so. I don’t want to buy pants and then spend more money to make it so. (Captain Picard fans should have gotten a little thrill just then. To everyone else sitting there scratching your heads- we are cooler than you. Go check out Star Trek: The Next Generation and then get back to me.)
I understand that everyone wants a pair of jeans that they can wear with a fun pair of heels/boots/wedges etc. Naturally, these need to be a little longer than usual to accommodate the extra height, or else we would look silly, right? Of course. That’s what the long ones are for! Hear me, oh rich and powerful Magnates of Denim: There is no reason to make the regular length jeans longer! You have already provided for this with your "Long" length!!! Does anyone else have this much trouble, or is it just me?
All that whingeing aside, I actually did have some margin of success yesterday- at Wal-Mart no less. (Oh my gosh, spell check recognizes Wal-Mart as an actual word!) Here’s the secret. Ready? You have to buy petite. Not really a word I would ever use to describe myself, but apparently if you want jeans to come down just to the soles of your shoes, that’s the way you have to go. Which leaves me wondering- what is the difference between 12 petite and 12 short? Because I tried the petite ones and they were the perfect length, and then I tried the short ones and I looked like a sailor from On The Town. Go figure.
Ordinarily I’m not a shout-out-y type of person, but tonight I’m making an exception. You may have noticed that after my post in which I begged for more followers in order to appease my Number OCD, my number increased from a seizure-inducing eleven to a much more calming and visually pleasing twelve. So I’m sending a big shout-out to Deanna Fleming, my fellow French Honors Society alum and the person who helped me to make it through my 7:30am Intro to Psychology class in high school. (Honestly, what person is mentally prepared for such an advanced level of cogitation that early in the morning??)Prior to her selfless act of generosity, every time I looked at my number of followers I felt an impending sense of dread that is not unlike the sensation I get in the moment right before the whirring dentist office toothbrush smeared with gritty dentist office toothpaste accidentally hits my tongue and I nearly bite my hygienist’s fingers off in disgust. Now, with twelve, it’s more like the feeling you get when the teeth-polishing is over and you are allowed as much water as you want to wash the residual grit and bloody saliva out of your mouth. So, thank you Dee! Every time Maxime Le Forestier comes on my ipod and sings “C’est une maison bleue…” I think of you and Viv, and being stranded in a blizzard in Québec with nothing to do except go see an extremely disturbing French-Canadian movie that was actually kind of like soft-core porn.
Before reading this you might want to buckle your seat belt, or at least put a helmet on or something, because we are about to go deep into the recesses of my mind and explore the mystery-enshrouded brain hiccup that I like to call Number OCD. Are you ready? Hold on tight to something. I assure you, the ride will be bumpy.
Anyone who has ever ridden in my car with me has most likely experienced this particular quirk, and if you have ever tried to touch the volume on my radio you have surely had your hand slapped away/been subject to a raving, nonsensical lecture. My car radio is sacred ground, and the biggest manifestation of my weirdness.
The way it works is that there is a turny button for the volume, and a digital display that tells you the number of the volume level. The volume is pre-set to 25, which means that whenever I turn my car on, no matter what the volume was set to when I turned it off, it starts at 25. This is a perfect number because it is half of 50. I can’t tell you why that’s perfect, I just know that it is. It makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside. Kind of like how you feel when you're looking at a box of kittens.
Anyway, 25 is not nearly loud enough. Never mind the fact that I could just change the setting so that it’s pre-set to a higher volume. I’ve thought of that before, but it came to me set at 25 and that’s the way it shall stay. So I always have to turn it up, and here’s where it gets weird.
Do you remember the scene in Monty Python and The Holy Grail when they find the Holy Hand Grenade? And do you remember what it says in the Book of Armaments? Let me give you a little refresher:
"First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin, then shalt thou count to three, no more, no less. Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.”
That’s kind of what it’s like in my mind. The number of the volume in my car should ideally end in a five or zero. A number ending in a two, four, six or eight is acceptable, but not preferred. Of the four acceptable numbers, six is the least preferred because six is only one number away from five and why would you turn it to six when five is RIGHT THERE? I realize that four is also one number away from five, but it’s less than five so that’s okay. Having five as your next higher volume option is fine. But there’s no excuse for turning it only one past five. If you’re going to go past five, please have the decency to go further than one click. What makes six acceptable is the fact that it’s an even number, otherwise it would be stricken from the list. You should get down on your knees and thank God for your easy divisibility, Six. It is the only thing saving your bacon.
Under no circumstances may numbers that end in one, three, seven or nine be used. One and nine because they are too close to zero and why wouldn’t you just turn it to zero, and three and seven because they are right in between two even numbers - either of which would be vastly preferable to the odd number between them unless that odd number is five - so there’s no reason to leave it on three or seven.
There are other, smaller ways in which my Number OCD comes out, but I think I’ve done enough damage with these few paragraphs. And Number OCD is not the only type of OCD that I have. Don’t even get me started on colors. (Just ask my mother about how every time we play Trivial Pursuit I have to take all the colored wedges that she has haphazardly shoved into her playing piece with no regard whatsoever for the natural order of the world, and put them back in rainbow order. It drives her crazy when I do that.)
Symmetry is very important to me as well. I was unable to watch any of the coverage of the Inaugural Ball for fear I might see the First Lady, who unfortunately had chosen for her dress that night a gown that only had one shoulder strap. You have two shoulders, Mrs. Obama. Why would anyone choose a dress with one shoulder strap? Why? (For that matter, why would anyone make a dress with one shoulder strap?)
So now you guys know I’m crazy. That's not nearly all, but it's enough. It is now safe to remove the helmets/seatbelts/harnesses. The ride has come to a full and complete stop.
I was asked to blog about my number OCD and also my love of Hot Pockets, so, as promised, here it is. (Actually, I said I would blog about them in my previous post, and then I was asked after that, so I would have done it anyway. But I prefer to say that I’m doing it because I’m such a magnanimous person.)
I think I’m going to do this in two separate posts, because there’s no smooth transition to be made between warm, cheesy heaven and mental illness. There's also not a whole lot of difference. That being said, I’m hungry so let’s do Hot Pockets first, okay?
I discovered the Hot Pocket when I was 19. I was a sophomore in college, living in an on-campus apartment with five other girls and extremely pleased with myself because I had lived in a dorm when I was a lowly frosh, but now I was Big Cheese.
*Quick note about freshman year (this will be important in a minute so pay attention)- I did not have a car. What I did have was a dorm room that was ten feet away from the dining hall, and a meal plan that let me eat there three times a day. Sophomore year I had a car, and my apartment was located approximately one hundred million miles away from the dining hall. Needless to say, I never set foot inside that building again.
I am an extremely lazy person. I totally could have walked to the DH for my meals, but I had my car and my own kitchen, so I was like “I’ll just buy groceries and make my own food like a real adult. It will be fun! I’ll eat healthy!” Yeah right. Enter the Hot Pocket.
The Hot Pocket, for those of you who grew up under a rock, (or North Korea or the former Soviet Union or some other place where having fun is against the law) is a delicious concoction of cheese and usually some kind of meat, wrapped in a pastry-type crust. Biting into it is like biting into an angel straight out of Heaven made of chocolate and baby laughter all wrapped up in the moment that the Wizard of Oz turns from black-and-white to color. Words cannot do it justice.
But it can turn on you.
From my Hot Pocket diet (still the happiest nine months of my life) I went from 152 pounds to 170. It has taken me FIVE YEARS to get rid of it. And I still have three pounds to go. So take a lesson, kids. All things in moderation. The Hot Pocket can be your best friend, or your worst enemy. It all depends on how much will power you have. For me, it is no easy thing to keep Beelzebub at the stave’s end.
Okay that got a little dramatic. It’s not cocaine or anything, it’s just a microwavable sandwich.
Recently I’ve become obsessed with wanting everyone in the world to read my blog. I don’t know why. It’s not worth reading. I’m absolutely certain that immediately after you read whatever my latest lame story is, you probably sit there thinking “Why did I waste my time on that? That took me at least two to five minutes to read.”
You could have used those minutes to read something worthwhile, like The Economist, or The Beijing Times. Or better yet, you could have used two of the minutes to microwave a delicious hot-pocket and still have had three minutes left over to eat it while you were reading something that would fill your brain with important thoughts because you are a suit-wearing intellectual with many accomplishments under your belt and a snappy briefcase that says "I'm Somebody", and not a 25 year old sweat-pants-wearing fake-adult who still lives with her parents. (By the way, two minutes is the exact amount of time it takes to nuke a hot-pocket. I know this from experience. Someday I’ll tell you about how this knowledge helped me gain twenty pounds during my sophomore year of college.)
But you are not doing any of those things. You are sitting here reading all of my nonsense. Or maybe you aren’t, and I’m writing stuff that disappears into the vast wilderness of cyberspace and winds up lost and alone, discovered only by the poor, confused soul who’s just Googled “hot-pocket” and “The Economist” simultaneously and is now wondering which circle of Hell he‘s stumbled into.
Welcome to my mind, hungry smart person. There is no escape. I have you now.
Either way, I don’t really care because blogging is an ego-centric activity and in the end I still get to write funny things for my own personal enjoyment, and that’s all that matters because this is about ME, right? RIGHT??? That’s what I thought.
But I still want people to read.
So…tell your friends. Also tell your enemies. Being forced to read my blog would be a great way to torture someone that you hate if they are afflicted with no sense of humor and do not enjoy pointless but also hysterically funny stories.
It is also acceptable to tell perfect strangers. You could be like those people who stand on the street and hand out pamphlets promoting some club or self-produced DVD of a lame stand-up comedian who also happens to be your friend and you really don’t want to be standing outside on the street for seven hours breathing in traffic fumes in the middle of August promoting this person but they’re your friend so you do it anyway because that’s what friends do. That would be awesome and although I don’t have a club to invite you to, I would probably most likely bake you some cookies.
So there you go. Tell everyone. My undying gratitude and some free cookies are waiting.
P.S. In case you were wondering about the title, I really do have number OCD. I’ll tell you all about it sometime soon.
