From The Catalog Of Five Million Useless Trivia Facts In My Head

In case you've ever wondered: The reason women's shirts button opposite of men's is because these clothing items were designed during a time when women often needed help to get dressed, whereas men dressed themselves. Women's corsets were so difficult to put on that they needed help from a maid to get them on. It was assumed by tailors that a righthanded person would prefer to push the button through the hole with their right hand. Men's shirts, designed for them to button up themselves, have the button on the right and the loop on the left. Women's blouses and gowns, which a maid would button up, have the buttons and loops on opposite sides for the convenience and efficiency of the maid. See, look:



This is a bridal pic, but it illustrates the process. Many brides still need help into their clothes because their dresses button up the back, and they often wear restricting corsets that prevent them from bending their arms around and fastening the buttons themselves. Before zippers were invented, maids had to do this every day. I feel so sad for Hill from Pride and Prejudice! (Incidentally, since Hill was called by her last name and not her Christian name, we know she was a lady's maid instead of, say, a scullery maid. It was higher up on the service food chain and deserving of the added respect of using her last name. She was still a servant, though, so she didn't get an honorary like Mrs.) Hill had to dress Mrs. Bennett, and maybe all of their five daughters as well. All. Those. Buttons.

Meanwhile, men's clothes were being made with all the closures in the front, so the men could fasten everything up themselves and ask their valet for help with the cufflinks.

He's the only Mr. Darcy I will acknowledge. This pic doesn't show the closures of his clothes very well, it's just gratuitous.

So...now you know.

The Tale Of The Baking Soda In The Neti Pot

Learn from my fail: I just irrigated my sinuses with a baking soda solution because I was out of salt and I didn't want to use to expensive gourmet sea salt I bought in Seattle long ago. I thought, baking soda tastes salty, so...here we go! The result: owieowieowieowieowieowieowie! Now that the searing pain is subsiding and death doesn't seem quite so imminent, I can only hope the infection felt the same way I did about the baking soda.

Side note: at least I didn't fail quite as hard as the roomie I had whose boyfriend convinced her to snort cayenne pepper when she had a cold. She actually lost her equilibrium and fell over. She was a fastidious girl, and we knew that if she was going to let her face touch that filthy kitchen floor, the grim reaper was standing over her even then.

Cute Blindness (Baby Specific)

I'm pretty sure I have a previously undiscovered vision problem that I will call cute blindness (baby specific), hereafter referred to as CB(BS). It works the same way as color blindness, but I lack the ability to see certain forms of cute. Just like some people are red/green colorblind, I can't see the cuteness of babies. Like, at all. AT ALL, at all.

Now that I'm at an age where my old college and high school acquaintances are building big Mormon families and posting lots of pics on facebook, I truly believe my cute blindness is becoming even more...acute. An old roommate posts a pic of her new offspring, and her friends all gather around to ooh and aah and proclaim this child to be the most adorable possible minihuman in the history of the universe. The baby looks like this:



But I'm unable to see the cuteness. Instead, the optic information that gets relayed to my brain is this:



Yeah. Not kidding. Really, I would love to understand what the fuss is about. I'd love to think it's just totes adorbs when a baby screws up its wrinkly old lady face and opens its toothless old lady mouth and starts screaming. Instead, I see Mama from that awesome movie entitled Throw Mama From The Train.

What makes it weird is that I'm not completely cute blind. I mean, I can totally dig some cuteness like this:



I mean, look at that. The kitten is wearing a scoodie! Can more cuteness possibly be infused into one picture? Here, let's try:



So, my point is that even though I know I'm supposed to coo over these baby pictures I see in my newsfeed, I just don't know how. And I could type the empty words, but false praise horrifies me. So the best I can do is to say nothing. Because I suspect that after spending thirty-six hours in grueling labor, no mom wants to hear me say, "Hey, your larva looks just like an unhappy old Jewish lady!"

And I think that's something we can all agree on.

Today My Life Reached Its Pinnacle

Work today was epic. This lady came in with a very whiny little girl who refused to sit down in the cart. The lady was working with her daughter and trying to convince her to behave, and she suddenly turned to me and said, "You'll take her, won't you?"

"Of course!" I replied, cause I knew it was a joke.

"See? She'll take you if you don't be good." The girl continued whining, so her mom stepped aside from the cart. "OK, take her." She told me.

I walked up to the cart as if to grab it and wheel it away, and the little girl recoiled in horror. "No? You don't want to go with me?" I asked. "Then you better be good." Yeah, that was me. I terrified a small child into behaving. When they left the store, the child was quiet and good.

Decisions: They Are More Complex Than You Might Think

Not too long ago, an elderly lady walked up to me at work while I was greeting. She told me that she had scheduled a pickup from a bus that stops right in front of the store, and she had written down the time she had scheduled, but she couldn't remember it and her macular degeneration prevented her from reading what she had written. She asked me if she could use a phone to call the company and see what time the bus would come.

This was a very reasonable request, and I did exactly what I would have done if I had run into this lady in the street -- I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and offered it to her. I didn't want to direct her to the other end of the store to use the payphone, I just wanted to help her, and this seemed like the best way.

"Oh, I don't know how to use those." The old lady dismissed my cell phone. No matter.

"Do you know the number?" I asked.

She read the number off, and I dialed it. When the operator came on, I asked about the schedule for the bus that stops right in front of the South Walmart. ("North!" the old lady corrected me. She didn't know where she was.)

"Oh, there isn't a bus that stops in front of the Walmart." The operator told me.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I must have been mistaken." I thanked the operator and hung up, thinking I would get more information from my customer and call back when I had my facts straight. But as I turned back to the old lady, it was as if someone had flipped the bitch switch. She laid into me, ripping me a new one before I could even explain what had happened or ask for more information. I stared at her with openmouthed shock. I was so thrown of balance that I had no idea how to respond. I eventually had to interrupt her tirade to suggest that we simply dial the number again.

"Yes, and let me talk to them this time, if you can't do it." She grumbled. She very politely spoke to the operator and got the information she needed (apparently my mistake had been asking about a bus instead of a scheduled pickup -- the difference is in wording) and gave me back my phone, but I was already shaking with anger. After all, I had pulled out my own phone, using my minutes, to help her. How dare she speak to me that way? Just because I work at Walmart, that doesn't make me any less human. I'm a college-educated member of the Logan community, and yelling at me is not OK. Not even a little bit.

I was angry for the rest of my shift that day. I wanted to get away from the customers. I went home growling about it, and I resolved that above all, I would never, ever, try to help a customer with my own phone again. I would send them down to the payphone no matter how decrepit they were.

Then, a couple of nights ago, a very old man came in from the frigid night. He was dressed in his Sunday best, with a gray suit and dress shoes. He had gotten a cart out in the parking lot and used it to steady himself as he walked inside,but that was his only concession to his age. I glanced at him from time to time as he slowly, carefully made his way toward me.

He said something in a voice so weak and quavering that I had to have him repeat himself three times before I understood he was asking about a phone. From the cold, dead, burned-out place where my heart should have been, I said, "There's a payphone over by the customer service area. It's along this front wall almost to the other door."

Then I helped and greeted other customers while he made his way. His progress was so agonizingly slow that I had plenty of chances to glimpse him. I watched how painfully and carefully he placed his right foot. I had lots and lots of time to ponder the value of compassion, as well as my belief that many of our elderly men are war veterans. In my defense, this fellow spoke so softly that I wouldn't have been able to dial the number for him, and if he couldn't have manipulated the small buttons on my phone we would have been at an impasse anyway. The payphone would have been technology he understood and the buttons would be big enough for him to push. But I wondered how he could possibly make his voice heard over the line, when I couldn't even hear him in person.

In time, I saw him come back my direction. He passed me on his way out, and I asked if he would like to take a scooter to get out to his car. He seemed exhausted from the long walk across our store, and I wondered how he would even get out safely, what with the icy pavement. He shook his head and said something I couldn't make out, in a voice so weak it manifested itself as a helpless wheeze. I wanted to walk him out to his car, and clock out and drive him home and make sure he got up the steps safely. But none of this was possible, and I sensed an air of pride about this old man that told me he didn't want that sort of attention anyway. He passed the scooters at a turtle's pace and pushed his cart out into the night.

Potpourri

Shayne and I left the house today to go meet Shayne's dad, and our leaving coincided with some sports game or another. Someone USU-related had blocked off the right side of the parking lot exit to set up a pay station where people could come in and park in our (residential) parking lot for $5. Which is usually fine, but on this occasion there was a line of cars down the street to park in our lot, and they were coming in and pausing to pay, and they were blocking our way out of the parking lot. Annoyance! One pickup truck stopped to chat with the fellow who was taking the money. The fellow kept pointing toward the stadium, so probably the old codger was asking for directions or instructions, but I wanted to believe they were merely shooting the breeze because that gave me the opportunity to hate them more. Shayne and I waited there for several minutes while the line of cars on the street grew longer and showed no sign of letting up. I told Shayne there was no use trying the other exit from our parking lot because it was probably the same thing, but he wanted to go anyway. Yeah, it was exactly the same. I played the role of Lady MacBeth, goading my gentle husband into using the aggressive driving tactics that I've found to be necessary in Utah. We basically muscled our way past the pay station in the gap between the truck they were using to block our way and the truck that was trying to come in and park. This is why you buy a small car, my friends. People must have seen the determination in my expression and the shape of my mouth as I was urging Shayne to "Go! Go!" and they got right out of the way.

So that was good.

*WARNING! RANT ALERT!*

In other news, I think I may be coming down with strep throat again, and I don't like it. If I went to jail, I would at least get medical care. Heck, prisoners of war get medical care. But gainfully employed Americans with college degrees just have to suck it up. If I were on Wall Street, I would be occupying too. Hey, instead of bailing out a corrupt bank that contributed to the housing crisis, why don't we fund health care? Donate it to free clinics so human beings can go to doctors. Oh yeah, I remember. America doesn't care about poor people. Poor people just didn't try hard enough. If they had worked harder, they wouldn't be poor at all.

*Rant concluded*

Some people at work gave Shayne a bunch of apples from their tree, and I made some stuff called Walnut Apple Dessert. We like it.

I also made soap today. It's very easy. Soapmaking manuals read like one of those survival shows, where the survival expert describes in detail everything that could go wrong during the process, then he does the horrifically dangerous thing, and...nothing. So a soap book will say something like, "Be extremely careful! Wear a hazmat suit! When adding lye to water, it can explode like a volcano!" They like to use the volcano imagery. When you're adding the lye solution to the oil, it can also explode like a volcano. Now I'm not denying that it could be dangerous if the lye solution splashed back into one's face, and that's why I carefully lean back when I'm adding lye to water or solution to oil. The first time I made soap I bought gloves and safety goggles and face masks, and I was actually kind of disappointed not to see an explosion. Now, I just casually lean back away from the mixture. In any case, enough soap to cleanse the Prussian army is now saponifying in my kitchen, and nothing interesting happened in the process. Lame.

The Days Of The Idiot Girl

I used to get really upset about the silly things I do -- like, I would hunker down and weep with embarrassment cause I would do something stupid. Like, one time I needed to call a dentist's office, and I nervously made the call, left my name on the answering machine and asked for a callback. After I hung up, my roomie pointed out that even though I had asked them to call me back, I hadn't left my number.

"It's OK, just call back and tell them you called a minute ago and leave your number." She told me.

So I brought out the business card with my dentist's phone number on it and called again. I told them I had called a minute before , gave them my name , and, for no good reason, I read the dentist's office's phone number off their business card. Yeah, that was a painful one. I tearfully called back a third time, to give both my name and actual phone number. I felt only relief when the office never called back. But when I went in a few weeks later and gave them my name, I think I noticed a flicker of recognition and a struggle to keep a straight face. I bet they laughed long and hard over my answering machine messages.

Well, the days of agonizing over my Idiot Girl moments are behind me. With the help of my guru, Laurie Notaro, I am learning to laugh at my absent-minded, scatterbrained schemes. Sometimes I even look at it as part of my service to humanity. I mean, the people around me probably feel a lot smarter and cooler by contrast with my pathetic flailing. So if you are someone who likes to think of yourself as being collected and competent, please enjoy this list of my Idiot Girl moments from the past two days.

• Yesterday I woke at 5:30 AM and by some miracle I managed to shower, dress, and do my hair without incident. I got my makeup on, but I forgot the mascara. Who in heck forgets to put on mascara? Isn't that, like, the most important part?
• I bribed myself to go to work by promising myself breakfast at McDonald's. Sometimes this is the only way I can stop myself from just crawling back into bed.
• At work, I brought out my car keys to open the combination padlock on my locker.
• At one point I noticed that my Telzon (scanning gun) had a dead battery, so I asked someone to get me a new battery, as I am not allowed to walk away from my door while working. They walked away with the dead battery, and about thirty seconds later a customer walked up with a return. Yeah, I tried to scan their item with the Telzon that had no battery in it.
• Today, I decided to unwrap a vitamin C lozenge and attempt to eat it, which proved more difficult than one might think. the lozenge dropped on the floor and shattered. I repeatedly tried to pick up the pieces, but they kept slipping out of my grasp and falling again. Butterfingers (not the good kind.)
• The store was dead slow on this snowy Sunday night, and I was bored. I wandered into the customer service area where two other bored employees were working, caught their attention and danced an impromptu jig. Now, I have worked with people in the past who get my dancing and understand that it is supposed to be funny, but these guys were not among them. My silly dance sank like a stone. I belatedly remembered my resolution to try to pretend to be normalsauce at Walmart, but since nobody has ever been able to clearly define to me what "normal" is, I'm left with trial and error.
• When the night finally ended, I went back to clock out and get my purse out of my locker, but my purse was not at all in my locker. Not even slightly. The last place I had it was in the break room, so I went in to check, and there it was 0n the table I had sat at during my lunch break. The break room at this time was full of overnighters who had gathered for their start-of-shift meeting, and they were not impressed with my absent-mindedness.
• I checked to see that money was still in my wallet, which it was -- whew. I thought I would fetch something for dinner tonight, like a butternut squash or...something. I didn't like the produce I found up front, so I made as if to leave the store. I got up to the checkstand and nearly pulled up before realizing that I hadn't actually put anything in my cart. I guess this is like the antithesis of shoplifting, where I try to pay even though I don't have any merchandise.

In the end, I made it home in one piece, miraculously. Now I get two days off to try to recharge my brain, but don't worry -- I will never really have it together. There will always be Idiot Girl days.