Green Olives/Cheaters

Green Olives and cheaters are alike in that they are both disgusting and make me want to vomit. That particular food is one that I hate. Olives are tangy and disgusting. Cheaters are scumbags.

Friends/Love

Friends are forever but sometimes love doesn’t last. I have had the same group of friends for many years and they will remain with me until the end. But you never know when you may fall out of love with a person; it happens all the time.

Health Care/Tonsillitis

Health care is like tonsillitis in that they both make me sick. Healthcare in this country is terrible; children live with disfiguring conditions and don’t get the care they need. Families and mothers go without medical insurance. This makes me ill. Tonsillitis occurs when your tonsils become swollen and infected with puss filled sores which leads to fevers and seriously painful sore throats.

List A

• Friends
• Love
• Reading
• Books
• Pleasure
• Family
• Animals
• Fudgie
• Scruffy
• Trudy
• Dogs
• Spay/Neuter
• Nature
• Weed
• Body By Victoria Bras
• Cooking
• Internet
• Food
• Traveling
• Movies
• Monogamy
• Sarah
• Forensics
• The Dog Park
• Hiking
• Kisses
• Intimacy
• Chocolate
• Coffee
• Healthcare
• Cookie the dog
• Touch
• Fog
• Dancing

List B

• Animal Cruelty
• Ignorant Fools
• Liars
• Waking up early
• Dwelling on the past
• Green Olives
• Cheaters
• Douchebags
• Braggers
• Cold Coffee
• Cockroaches
• Wearing socks to bed
• Control freaks
• Tonsillitis
• Homophobia
• Fleas and ticks
• Gas Prices
• Minimum Wage
• Haters

Reindeer Grub

My family has many rituals but one of my favorites occurred on Christmas Eve. I do not recall when this ritual began, but for as long as I can remember we completed it every year. The Christmas Holiday has always been a time to celebrate with your family, but for children it is mostly about Santa Clause. On the night before Christmas my whole family, Mom, Dad, Jack, Sarah, and myself, would go out back with handfuls of dog food and throw it on the roof. It sounded like little balls of hail smacking the shingles. The purpose of this misuse of dog food was to give Santa’s Reindeer a little snack too. We would stay outside for a bit watching the night sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of Santa’s sleigh. My parents later divorced and we children grew up, so that was the end of the family ritual. I remember it fondly, though, because we were still innocent kids then, still believing that Jolly Old Saint Nick would come down the chimney with a sack full of toys for everyone.

Good Clean Fun

I work at a dry cleaners in the Germantown area. I have been working there for about 2 years and it has proven to be a very simple job and one that works well with my school schedule. Easy money. I am a CSA. My duties include helping customers, writing up tickets (i.e. describing each article of clothing and pricing it), tagging clothes, and checking pockets. This proves to be the best part of the job because I often find that the lazy housewives and their careless husbands leave money, change, etc. that I happily put in my own pocket, a finder’s fee if you will. But money is not the only thing that our customers forget to remove. I have discovered a wide array of miscellaneous, disgusting, interesting, and disturbing paraphernalia left behind in the depths of this dirty laundry. Most of our clientele are middle aged/aging successful people so one of the most common items to discover in a pocket are drugs, legal and illegal. Viagra proves to be the most common pill, but I have found nitrates, valium, xanax, and hundreds of unidentifiable pills of varying shapes, colors, and sizes. We (my co-worker and I) can choose to save these pills in an envelope and return them to the customer when he or she returns to pick up their cleaning or just toss them. I have found narcotics like cocaine and even a little marijuana here and there. But drugs are only the tip of the iceberg. We find plenty of filthy things too: handfuls of cigarette butts, used snot rags, waxy ear plugs, combs with hair in them, condoms (unused thank god), random trash, chewed gum, bloody tissues, and dirty thongs. Needless to say I wash my hands many, many times during my shift. I have discovered bank statements, credit cards, drivers licenses, plane tickets, foreign money from all over the world, blank checks, golf tees, bullets, love letters, receipts, I.D. badges, pens, pencils, toothpicks, chapstick, chewing gum packets, candy, the list goes on forever. We do return important things like the credit cards and drivers licenses, but I am not going to put a customer’s dirty underwear and old concert stubs into an envelope and save it for them. No, I am just going to throw it away. This should serve as a lesson to anyone visiting their local dry cleaners: CHECK YOUR DAMN POCKETS!

Bath Time

One of the first memories I have as young child involves my twin sister, Sarah. We were probably four or five years old, and at this point we were still taking baths together. I recall this being a fun bath, one which included splashing and playing with the various toys which bath time requires. It was nearing the end of our aquatic playtime when, suddenly, shockingly, Sarah proceeded to take a dump in the tub with me still in it. This must have upset her as she began to cry, saying there was a monster in the tub with us. I am assuming at that age our baths were being supervised, but I do not really remember my mother or father being present. But I can recall that at that point my parents did appear and remove us from the bathtub. My father drained the water until all that remained was the brown mound of fecal matter which he promptly removed with his bare hand. That bath will forever be burned into my memory. It was actually quite comical thinking back on it.