Clareified

I had a couple of key items that I still needed to buy for my bridesmaid’s dress and time was running short. Plus, I’m super lazy, so when Karol suggested trying out a new mall in LI, I agreed. “You have to pick up a credit card from the I.C. for me though.”
“What? Do I look Mexican?”
“Yeah, a little actually.”
“But…uhm…yeah, I got nothing.”
I called him as I was coming off the bridge and he gave me instructions on how to get to his office. I think they went something like “Once you’re on the West Side highway, turn right on Bear street. Then make the first left. So that’s turn right on Bear and then the first left. Do you want to call when you get here or should I meet you downstairs.”
I said the latter and then he reiterated “Turn right on Bear street and then the first left.”
Dude, you get lost going to Woodbury one time and suddenly they are pinning directions to your lapel for all time.
Of course, as repetitiously repeated as his instructions were, there was only one flaw.
There is no Bear street. Well there is, it just doesn’t have any signs marking it as such, which one finds out after making several passes around the tunnel to New Jersey. Anyway, I finally found him standing on the street, he handed me the credit card and said “you girls have fun.”
Wow, nice!
I eagerly picked up Karol and informed her that dad said to have fun, which in my book involves the Wild Water kingdom!
“Hey, BTW, I don’t want you talking about how I’m the girl who gets a credit card from her boyfriend to go shopping. I’m not that girl!”
Well, duh.
She’s the girl who gets her Mexican to get the credit card from her boyfriend to go shopping.
Fair and accurate reporting folks!
We actually had a nice ride out to the Island of Long. We got to ride in the HOV lane, passing the bumper to bumper sucker traffic of losers with no friends. You know, the lane I was in when I went out there to get my massage school massage.
“Wow, I’m so glad I know you,” I said to Karol as we whizzed through the lane.
“Really,” she said all happy and touched.
“Yeah, otherwise, I’d be somewhere back there.”
“I hate you.”
“So I was asking the IC what the weather was and he gave me the hour by hour temperature for the day…he was all at 4 p.m. it’ll be 68 degrees, at 5 p.m. it’ll be 66 degrees, at 6 p.m. it’ll be 64 degrees, at 7 p.m. it’ll be 60 degrees, and at 8 p.m….well, if you’re not home by 8 p.m. don’t you bother coming home.”
He runs a tight ship that one.
Once at the mall, we headed to the food court, I don’t know what I was thinking but I decided to order from the Cajun seafood place – actually, I do know what I was thinking, I’m suddenly on a seafood kick these days. Crabs, shrimp, even fish…I’ve just lost my will to eat chicken or beef anymore. I don’t know. I’m starting to worry myself. I feel like this behavior is just a PETA advertising away from full blown vegetarianism. AND THEN WHAT WILL I DO?? Kill myself. That’s what.
Anyway, the meal was predictably horrible and I ended up eating candy and a Snapple. Which is much more like me.
The place was fairly huge, so we split up. I headed off to the Nike outlet and Karol headed off to “Store for googly-eyed nesting girls.”
I bought a couple of pairs of sneakers and almost bought a football. It was like $20 and thirty percent off. But as I stood on line, struggling with my shoe boxes and this oblong pigskin, it occurred to me that thirty percent off something you don’t need is a hundred percent waste of money.
So I put it back. Not that I don’t still imagine that if I had bought the football, I’d be outside playing touch football on the compound with all my cousins. Yes, in my head, if I buy that football, I become a Kennedy.
I then sucked it up and went about searching for what I really came for. Shoes. Stupid stupid shoes.
In particular strappy gold shoes. I tried on a pair.
And by “a pair” I mean a foot, and by tried I on, I mean slipped my foot in and then fell over trying to buckle them.

Who are these drone women walking around on stilts all day. Dude.
I gave up on my project when I got a text from Karol saying she was waiting at the car. She was on the phone when I got there, so I figured I’d be all stealthy and open the trunk using the remote keys while I hid behind the white van. That’d freak her out but good.
She didn’t even blink. The car trunk opened, she put her packages in, closed it and walked away.
Must be nice living in a world where trunks magically opening when you need them to, happens so frequently that you no longer even look around to see what’s doing it.
Frustrated I jumped from my hiding space and began to throw fireballs at her.
Well, the imaginary fireballs I had been juggling.
I am a phenomenal imaginary fireball juggler.
I heard her say into the phone “and now she’s throwing the balls at me.”
“Um…fireballs,” I corrected, but I don’t think she heard me.
“Hey, the guy in that store asked me for my email address and then he gave me this crazy discount for all the sheets and cookware I bought! You should go in there!”
“Um…let me tell you the lesson I learned by almost buying a football.”
“But the sheets are so soft!”
We then drove to the other side of the mall and split up again. Well, she offered to let me come with her, but by starting the sentence with “unless you want to come with me to juicy,” she pretty much knew I was going my own way.
I went in search of item number two for my bridesmaid dress. Karol texted me again to say that she had found a Pepperidge farm outlet.
“Ooh, nice!”
I meandered over there and was bitterly disappointed that the outlet store didn’t even have chessmen cookies, never mind the Bordeaux’s that I favor!! I proclaimed it the WORST cookie outlet store EVER imagined in the history of the world.
Which in retrospect was probably a bit hyperbolic, but I was understandably upset.
The sun had begun to set and Karol started sobbing about how she was going to be homeless.
“No, you cannot stay with me. I will happily drop you off at your mom’s house.”
She tried to trick me into going to more stores where googly-eyed girls who are nesting shop, but I would have none of it.
We ran out of gas on the way back and had to stop in Hicksville for a refill. We had been having one of our patented amusing conversations where Karol explains relationships to me. The earliest of these harkening back to when I was in tenth grade and learned how one could have a boyfriend for four days. Today’s lesson was about marriage was the most wonderful way to claim someone as your own.
“I just can’t wait to get married,” she gushed.
“So, why don’t you?” I asked, wiping the gush off my face.
“Waaa because he hasn’t asked me yet!! But I think there’s a ring…I think it’s in the apartment somewhere…I know it is.”
Hmm…excellent.
“Well, we should go look for it,” I said out loud “so that I can put that sucker for sale on eBay and go on vacation to Ireland,” I said in my head.
“No. I don’t want to ruin it. He’s actually managed to add some surprise to this thing and I didn’t think that would be possible.”
“I dunno…I think we should go look for it…you know, make sure it’s there!” You know, cause I don’t want to put it on eBay before I actually know it’s real, for years Karol told me she hid her poker winnings in a floorboard in her closet on the Upper East Side, but I spent many an afternoon digging and bubkis!
Of course, it’s not a Dawn and Karol go somewhere story unless we get lost. This time, we spent twenty minutes circling Greenpoint…which, while billed as a hippie hangout, is really just a rundown warehouse district. And why were we circling a hippie havened rundown warehouse district? Well, because Karol was trying to save five dollars on the toll that we would end up spending anyway.
Awesome.
Of course, since I’m all poor and underemployed, she offered to give me five dollars for the toll.
It was about ten to nine and I started whining about missing the Heroes premiere.
“I’m about to miss the Heroes premier,” I whined.
“Aren’t you Tivoing it,” she asked.
“Yes, but what it someone says something about it between here and home…I’m starving, so I have to stop and get something to eat too…”
“Sucks to be you.”
“I hate you….mmm…you know, what I could go for…a Gray’s Papaya hotdog!”
No sooner had the words come out of my mouth than I looked up and SAW A GRAY’S PAPAYA HOTDOG franchise right in front of me!!
“OH MY GOSH!! This is what it must be like to be YOU!!!” I squealed happily.
“You want me to get you one,” Karol asked.
“YES!!”
“Okay…um…can I borrow that five I just gave you?”
Awesome.
I ate my hotdog, happily assuming that this has pulled me back from the vegetarian brink and drove home.
It was getting later, dark had fully set in…ah, what the heck…it’s five dollars, I said pulling off the highway and heading for the tunnel instead.
I’ll soon be rolling in dough once I sell off that ring!

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.