Cue The Band Perry's great song: Done
If you know me, a few things on this list aren't going to shock you. I was personally surprised that pumpkin spice didn't make the list. But then again it's not pumpkin spice's fault that people have lost their MINDS (yep found cat litter that, while it didn't use the words pumpkin spice, was a seasonal fall cat litter. Because...cats look forward to when their crap buckets smell like falling leaves and pie?)
Anyway, here we go: Five things that no longer have a place in my life because I am done!
5) Pantyhose and high heels
Granted I haven't worn either in a couple of years, but recently I thought it might be a nice idea to have a "go to" dressy outfit for a funeral or a wedding or something. I went high heel shopping and after trying on a couple pairs realized that at my current weight class I'd be doing more harm than good to a perfectly fine pair of shoes and as for pantyhose...well they never made them exactly in my size anyway. I was either too short for my weight (and had extra "pantie" all rolled up at my waist, not very attractive) or I was too heavy for my height (and I would shred ever pair of hose I had simply by expanding them too far.)
DONE
4) Commercials
God bless DVD's, the DVR, and Netflix. I spent the entire summer catching up on TV shows sans commercials. I powered through 11 seasons of Grey's Anatomy in two months. How? I watched not one second of advertising. And guess what? I'm not going to watch one more second ever. I'm not going to watch commercials. I'm not going to watch TV shows about commercials. I may actually watch the Superbowl FOR the game!
I'm tired of skinny women selling me diet aids and men looking fifty different kinds of dorky but women all looking like they once won a beauty pageant. I'm tired of being told I'm a bad parent if I don't buy my children this toy or if I do feed my children that snack. I'm REALLY tired of watching commercials for medical issues that weren't even WHISPERED about when I was a kid. (We had the Oscar Meyer bologna kid singing to us. This generation knows all the side effects of penis enhancement pills.)
I already start watching most of my shows later so I can whip through commercials. I've started doing it with sports. So yeah. Way to go advertisers. You had almost two years of caring about my age group (cuz once you're 49 you may as well be dead to the advertising people) and you lost it.
DONE
3) French fries..and possibly onion rings.
I've long wondered, if it were socially acceptable to just eat ketchup or mayonnaise straight from the bottle, would any of us eat French Fries. Well, I don't need to wonder anymore because I'm not going to eat any fries any more. I might even give up onion rings. Neither fried dish has made my stomach happy in a while, and I realized the other day as I forced down an order of waffle fries, that I really like mayonnaise and ketchup, not so much the fries.
With restaurants offering more choices in place of fries, I may just branch out...try the fruit cup or the bean salad or maybe just not have a side dish.
DONE
2) Maury Povich.
I know. I used to praise the white trash wonder that was the Maury
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| And I'm not the audience anymore either. |
The last couple days I've watched the show, after not watching it for a few years due to my job. But now I have my afternoons a little more clear so after lunch and a healthy walk, I sat down to what I thought would be a nice 42 minutes of truth telling and human debate.
Unfortunately, Maury's allowed his show to disintegrate into what Jerry Spinger's show turned into several years ago. The couples I watched today screamed at each other using a language I don't recognize as English (or any other language for that matter) while the audience members all shouted their opinions. The result was you couldn't hear or understand what anyone was saying...and all you saw was Maury laughing.
Fun for him because he gets a nice check. Not fun for me anymore because if I wanted to see people screaming incoherently at each other, I'd go to Walmart.
DONE...and that brings me to
1)Walmart.
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| No...I wanted cashiers who spoke clearly and paid attention to me. |
The jokes about the societal freak show that is Walmart have been around for a long time. Gone are the days when the commercials for the store showed us a little old grandma who got all her crafting supplies from Walmart and made a sign for her door that said, "If I'm not here I'm at Walmart."
Gone are the days, too, when Walmart posted signs showing us small American businesses that were still in business because Walmart believed in America first.
Yeah, now it's just cheap crap for strange people.
A few years ago we got a Super Walmart and I thought for certain I would never shop any other place ever. Except I realized that you really don't want to go to Walmart after dark...it's a strange place after dark where there are fewer employees, the aisles are mostly abandoned, and the people who are there are...scary.
I've started to think that about Walmart during the day. You know all those movies where the cops go to a shady part of town to a bad apartment building, which is denoted in film by bad lighting, bikes in the halls, barking dogs and screaming babies?
That's Walmart all the time.
The screaming kid thing gets to me I'll admit it. I've raised my kids. Sure, I took them to Walmart when they were little, but that was still back in the charming days of Walmart, slightly before people got into open fist fights in the health and beauty department. Now it seems like every kid in the store is screaming like they're on fire and the parents, for the most part, have left the howling offspring in the carts to go rummage through the $5 movie bin. I know this because I've been armpit deep in that bin with those same parents. And it's all I can do to not yell at them, "HEY, you wanna go deal with your yowling spawn?"
But it's not just the screaming kids. Lately, the adults have been screaming randomly at Walmart. I was there one evening, a Sunday evening, not yet 7 Pm, and a gentleman was yelling into his phone over and over, "I TOLD YOU TO NOT CALL ME!"
Reminded me of that scene in "Joe Versus the Volcano" where the boss is on the phone yelling about whether or not a guy can get the job. (and since I know none you have has seen it, here you go.)
I thought the screaming guy with the phone was an anomaly. I was wrong. I was at Walmart earlier this week and there was a group of adults, and yes, they seemed like they were from some sort of group home. But the entire forty minutes I was there I knew exactly where this group was because they would shriek every five minutes or so. At first I thought someone was being hurt. Then I realized, nope, just Walmart. (For the record, I've worked in group homes, and I've worked with groups of small children. It is possible to take both groups to a public place and keep them from alarming those around them. So I'm not being mean, I'm just saying Walmart's become a place where people just don't seem to care whom they are annoying or alarming or frightening.)
But let's not talk about Walmart's customers for a moment. Let's talk about their employees. Mostly, let's talk about their cashiers. These are the people who are supposed to be the final thing you see when you are in a Walmart, they are your final impression. They are the face of Walmart.
And in the last two years I have yet to get a cashier who doesn't either mumble incoherently or ignore me altogether.
The mumbling is annoying because I thought something was wrong with my hearing. Nope, apparently DICTION at Walmart is not important. So they have a script for each customer. "Hello."
"Did you find everything okay?"
"Your total is..."
"There's website at the bottom of your receipt, please take the survey and let us know how we did."
The last several times I've gotten mumblers who basically treat this interaction as one long sentence to be mumbled far below the decibel level of the screaming People of Walmart progeny.
But I suppose that's better than when I get a couple cashiers in neighboring lanes who are so busy talking about their party the night before or the next night or on Tuesday or WHATEVER, that honestly scanning your laundry detergent is just too much of an inconvenience for them, so hey, they wind up shutting down their lanes (I see you there, you know I see you, you can't all hide behind the racks of magazines) and you wind up at the self check...which would have been one of Dante's ring of hell had Dante been to Walmart.
Yep, sorry Walmart. DONE
When I told Skippy I was done with Walmart, he was surprised. He said, "WHY?"
Then he thought about it for one second. "Oh, because Target is so much better? Except it's not open 24 hours. Except you don't care about 24 hours anymore."
Well put, boy. Well put.
So there you have it. Five things I'm just done with. If you see me at a Walmart or eating French fries or sitting through commercials or wearing high heels and pantyhose or watching Maury Povich, call the authorities. Clearly I'm being forced to against my will.
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