Originally published in the Cheboygan Daily Tribune...
You can’t tell it from looking at me anymore, but I am naturally blonde. Which means I shouldn’t laugh at ‘blonde jokes,’ but a lot of times they’re too accurate for me to be offended.
Sometimes, being blonde makes for a good time. I trip over air. I have never eaten ice cream without spilling some on my shirt. I walk into glass doors, catch the hem of my shirt in drawers, bump into stationary objects, and once put my phone in the fridge and my take-out box on the counter by the charger. I am known to say a lot of backwards, not-quite-the-phrase, hilarious things like “six of one, twelve dozen of another” or “kill one bird with two stones”. I once told my parents, “If that house is worth that much, you guys are sitting on a LAND MINE!” I often mess up the commas in thousands, such as, “She bought him a seventy-five hundred dollar car!” (I was going for $75,000 there). At school, my favorite is to tell kids to “lip your zips” and to put their heads in their laps. If you talk with me for any amount of time, you’re pretty much guaranteed to catch at least one of my interesting phrases.
A lot of time, though, being blonde is what irritates me the most about myself. Like, where ARE my keys, or glasses, or shoes, or the papers I was just holding in my hand? I forget important conversations moments after they’ve occurred. I am perpetually late, because I have to run back into the house to grab something, or I just plain haven’t given myself enough time to get ready. One time, I painstakingly returned $18 worth of pop and beer cans, only to lose the paper slip in the store somewhere. My cellphone alarm goes off with reminders at all times of the day, desperately trying to keep my brain focused for one moment in time. I forget birthdays, can never quite finish a sentence, and I honestly have no idea what my husband would like for our anniversary.
A year ago Christmas, my wonderful husband painstakingly put together a huge jar of 365 slips of typed papers. The pink slips are “I love that you…” The purple slips are “Remember when?” The white slips are “We’re doing this!” (Fun little adventures which would never even occur to me!) It probably took him an entire year to put the thing together and all I had to do was... remember to take a slip out of the jar each day. Seriously, that’s it. Take a slip out and read it. Would you believe I couldn’t remember to do that? I’d go a few days, then see the jar and feel guilty. Eventually, around June, I gave up and decided I’d try again in 2017. Sadly, I’ve had to set an ALARM to remind myself each day. And, to be honest, every time it goes off, I think, “What the world is that?” Insert eyeroll.
In conclusion, being blonde can be a blessing or a pain, but… Wait. What were we talking about again?
No comments:
Post a Comment