F M er L

Embarrassment is fleeting. Ephemeral. The dissolution of your pride is forever. Last week I forgot my cell phone at home four critical and excruciating times (iPhones are addicting), leaving me without the ability to text/call/FourSquare/Twitter/Facebook/take pictures of hipsters. I almost left my home without a bra on (I'm not enough of a hippie to do that on purpose). I forgot to eat dinner twice and ate two dinners by accident once. I'm dizzy, I'm spacing out, and I'm losing my mind.

All of this was merely harmless bumblery until Sunday. I drove to the store to pick up some food for a friend's barbeque. My braking foot slacked off at a red light and my car glided into the rear of the car in front of me. There was no damage and we exchanged phone numbers before the light even turned green. Shaking, I pulled into the nearest parking lot and immediately jumped out of the car to see if I had scratched my car in the incident, slamming the driver side door behind me and locking myself out of the vehicle while it was still running.

My cell phone was locked in the car. I wandered into a Whole Foods and asked to use their courtesy phone. Because of 411's voice recognition software (WE MEET AGAIN, electronic woman...) it took me 30 minutes to simply obtain the number of Durham's AAA chapter ("You're looking for Triplay?" NO. What the hell is Triplay?). It then took 20 minutes for the woman on the phone to correctly spell my first and last name (no, just because it sounds eastern european doesn't mean it has no vowels). I also learned that just because you paid to be a member of AAA in 2001 doesn't mean you're a member anymore.

The worst part about locking your keys in your car while it's running is that you have to tell people about it to get help. I dealt with this by acknowledging the facts right up front. "Hi, AAA? I locked my keys in my car. It's running, and I'm a complete moron." "Okay, honey, are you in a safe place?" "I'm in a grocery store, but I'd feel much safer if I could crawl into a hole and die."

The best news is that when you lock your keys in a running vehicle, you get placed on Top Priority, even if you're not really a member of AAA. I sat on top of my car in the parking lot and mentally gave the finger to all of the people walking by and laughing to themselves about my predicament. "See that dumb lady? That's what happens to your brain if you don't eat your organic raw sea vegetables," the mothers told their children. My salvation came in a red pickup truck 10 minutes later and managed to unlock the door without making too many comments about how ridiculous I was. He didn't even charge me-- I'm telling myself it was because I'm so cute, but I think that AAA made a mix-up and told them I was a member. Bwahaha.

I didn't go to the barbeque. I went to another grocery store (I can never show my face in Whole Foods again) and bought 1/4 pound of chocolate covered ginger to stuff the sorrows down my esophagus. Let's remember what we learned from my experience:

1. Don't use the window locks on your car unless your keys are in your hand.
2. AAA memberships must be renewed.
3. People are nicer to you if you admit your idiocy upfront.
4. American cars are easier to break into than foreign.
5. If you think you're going to lock your keys in your car while it's running, make sure you have plenty of gas.

How To Neglect Your Blog

Greetings, strangers. I am a bad, bad blogger. I offer you this posting as a pittance and excuse for my long, long, long, long, long, long absence: How to neglect your (beloved) blog in 5 easy and sometimes enjoyable steps.

1. Become embroiled in ridiculous personal drama.

I didn't want to be tempted to write about it on the blog, and yet it was all-encompassing in real life so I had a hard time thinking about other things to write. Because time has given me space from my hysterical perspective on the entire situation, I will summarize it for you now: I dated a guy. I became extremely interested in his friend. Guy #1 got angry and told all my peers about my extreme personal details, making me extremely angry. Following this, there was a dramatic vacillation between taking the high road and gritty, soul-gnashing revenge for several weeks (months...?) until awesomeness of Guy#2 made me realize Guy #1 is totally irrelevant.

2. Develop a personal life.

... And by personal life I mean, have friends and a boyfriend. It's lame to say that I neglected my blog because I got a boyfriend. Really lame. I apologize. I am not one of those girls who only has interests in things until I'm not single anymore, I swear. But in my defense, I've also been going to a lot (a LOT) of rock concerts. So I come back to you a more experienced Elyse.

3. Become interested in other things.

In this case, it's been documentaries on Netflix (which I honestly could have been writing about, but would you really want to read it?), eco-conscious living, and my cat. I got a cat! Her name is Free Tibet Glasseater Twisby. I'm not really a crazy cat lady, but I have to say that she might be the best cat in the entire world.

4. Graduate school.

Need I say more? It exhausts me.

5. Be a lazy, lazy, lazy, lazy, quasi-literate 24 year old.

Let's cut the crap. I'm a lazy little bitch. I sit around all weekend and overdose on documentaries, coffee, and emotional post-documentary crying spells. My only defense of this is that the documentaries give me emotional perspective, and the coffee keeps me from sleeping 15 hours a day. Okay? Okay?

Do you forgive me!?

I have a dream...

What if all the Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvds in the United States were connected to form a single coherent boulevard? Then we could take a luxuriously slow road trip around the United States, passing from city to city in a nonsensical labyrinthine path. This would benefit people who sometimes wake up in strange cities and find themselves confused by their orientation to home relative to the identically-titled but fundamentally unequal MLKJBs. I'm just sayin'-- it would save some people a lot of time that would otherwise be spent meandering around, burning fossil fuels, and trying not to cry in front of the gas station attendant.

Some people would also really benefit from intuitively renaming all roads according to her place of residence: "Direction of Ice Cream Store Street." "Intersects with Gym Road." "Pathway between Work and Home Skyway." "Full of Speed Traps Go Slowly Way."

Also, what if we outlawed parallel parking? I think it's discriminatory to people who never took the driving exam because they passed driver's ed with an extremely high grade. Some people can't help it if they are too smart for the system.

Today's edition of Things That Can Only Happen To Me

Today I was teaching a lab class about insect foraging, so the students and I walked to UNC's arboretum for some observation of the fast-paced world of honey bee life. I got lost. In the arboretum. By myself. The students had to come find me. It's a good thing I have a good sense of humor about myself because that is harikari-quality embarrassing.

If you've ever driven with me, you know I pretty much can't pass cars. I just can't do it! It seems rude, and you can't deny that changing lanes adds some extra hazard to being on a four lane road. You know it does, you devilish maverick driver, you. Well, this IMMENSE MOVING VAN cut me off in the parking lot of my gym (what was it doing at the gym? "Hi I think I'll relocate oh wait how about some cardio now") then ended up driving 25 mph directly in front of me from the gym to my apartment. It finally pulled into my own apartment complex and TOOK MY SPACE. That's what I get for being a neurotic, ultraconsiderate driver, I guess.

Why does this happen? Probably because my common sense IQ is approximately that of an anaesthetized rhesus monkey's.

Correction

I recently stated in this post that one cannot subsist on lentils alone. Some very un-thorough investigation (i.e. googling "on lentils alone" and reading a page summary without visiting the website) compels me to inform you all that you can indeed survive on a diet of only lentils. Ghandi did it.

I'm sure you'll all be very surprised, as I was, to learn that I do not possess a caliber of willpower comparible to Ghandi's. My bad, guys. I'm going to eat some chinese take-out and marinate in bitter tears while I contemplate my failures.