I'll Take Potpurri for $200, Alex

Okay, so I don’t know why it seems that so many of my blog entries are strings of randomness, held together only in the most tenuous fashion by the common thread that clearly I must be crazy for sharing these tidbits with you. But apparently, that is how I’m most often able to get anything at all posted, so here you go. Bask in the absurdity.

• Sometimes when I am running late to work, I pay extra to purchase a day pass to park in one of the parking garages that is only a three minute walk from my building (my normal structure is a 15 minute walk). The other day I pulled up to the parking attendant booth, presented payment to the attendant and as he handed me the day pass, he said “Park in the structure, now.” This struck my as a very odd thing to say, as clearly I was no novice to this parking thing – the evidence of my parking awareness comes in the form of an accumulation of day passes from the past two months strewn all over my dashboard. It made me wonder for a second what problems they were having with people’s parking habits that he found it necessary to tell me to actually go ahead and park in the structure I just purchased a pass for. Next time I’ll just respond casually that while I had intended to take the elevator in my building up to the top and park on the roof, since he told me to park in the structure, I will just this once.

• Driving in Montebello last Saturday, I saw a sign that I could have sworn on first glance read “Cat Wash - $5.00”. And I thought “Wow, I know the schools need the money, but that seems like an awfully hard way to have a fundraiser. They should at least be charging a lot more – y’know to pay for the tetanus shots and whatnot”. But, as you may have guessed, when I got closer, I realized that while the lower case “r” looked a lot like a “t”, the sign did in fact read “Car Wash - $5.00.” Some people have to ruin all my fun.

• Have you ever been in a really long line for the women’s restroom (I’m assuming the members of my male readership have not had this privilege, but then I don’t know your history and who am I to judge) and had one woman cuts through the line doing the pee-pee dance so violently she’s bruising her ankles, and everybody in line feels sorry for her and lets her in the next available stall? Well, I have a few questions about this. Considering that the rest of us have dedicated the past 20 minutes of our lives to waiting in line, is there a chance that no one else “really has to go”? Knowing in advance that the establishment sells beverages and that it is full of other people purchasing said beverages, and that the more crowded an establishment is, the greater the likelihood that the women’s restroom will have only two stalls, how do you let yourself get to the point where you have to choose between breaking a social etiquette code to cut in line or ruining your new shoes? And of course, the biggest question: is my staged pee-pee dance good enough to fool anybody into letting me cut to the front the next time I’m faced with a big line at a sporting event?

That's all for now folks. Tune in next time to watch me read an entire stack of magazines and fall asleep on the couch watching a PBS program on the history of the hot dog. Good times.