a little of this, a little of that

You may not have noticed, but posting has been kind of light around here lately. That's mostly because I am Going Through Something. No, actually, I meant I am Going through Something, with italics. I like to call it my ThirdChild Crisis. And when you are Going Through Something like that, you can't just be posting stuff on the internet, willy-nilly.

Because, Woe. It is Crisisful.

It's actually a lot like a Midlife Crisis, only without the money for a little red sports car.

In any event, everything I'm trying to write is crap. Hello and Welcome to my Crisis! I am 27! I have a lot of kids! I am sitting here at 10 p.m. waxing existential to the internet! Because my husband is out of town! And my friends are partying in Disneyland! And my parents are in Hawaii! And my kids won't sit still for a discourse on What It All Means!

But enough about that, you don't want to hear about that, you didn't come here for that. I have deleted my existential musings, and shall opt instead for an embarrassing story: an incident that I found so embarrassing at the tender age of 17, I'd even call it soul-scarring.

When I was a teenager I worked at this total dive of a Mexican restaurant. Forgive me for generalizing, but there were basically two groups of people working there at the time: girls who didn't like me, and illegals with rudimentary English.

So this one evening, I was in the kitchen having a conversation with one of the cooks; and by conversation, I mean he was asking if I liked to dance and drink and go to clubs, mainly by using elaborate hand-gestures.

I liked this cook. He was a really nice guy. And I appreciated the fact that he would try to talk to me, even though I spoke no Spanish and was horribly awkward in my attmepts to communicate. But without the subtleties of actual words, I was having a hard time figuring out just what, exactly, we were talking about. Was he being polite? Was he suggesting I needed to loosen up? Was he asking me out? I had no idea.

And so, craftily utilizing a fail-proof technique I developed for just such awkward occasions, I turned around and left.

I walked out into the dining room, and sat in the back booth with two of the other girls. I was staring at the table, trying to figure out what had just happened, when one of the girls, Katie, tapped me to get my attention.

"Hello!" she said in (condescending) amusement. "Thinking hard?"

"oh. No," I stammered in confusion. "I just ... I don't ... I think Guy maybe was ... hitting on me? I don't know. It was weird."

Katie stared at me for a minute.

And it was uncomfortable.

"I don't know," I mumbled. "Maybe he was just being nice? He's really nice. I don't know. It seemed like he was hitting on me."


The other girl was staring at the table, and Katie was still staring at me. She cleared her throat.

"He was just being nice," she told me. "He's a very friendly person."

And she stood up.

"Oh. well, Okay," I said. "uh ... thanks."

she left.

The girl still sitting at the table looked at me and shook her head. "Liz," she said, "Guy is Katie's boyfriend."

and I died.

The end.