Justine!

I was excited. I was relieved. My chainmaille obsession had finally died. I went from three to four hours of chainmaille every single day for six months to giving my hands a nice, well-earned rest. But no. Justine (best, most frustrating friend ever) introduced me to the Game of Thrones, which I have been resisting watching with an iron will for months now, and because I can't really watch something without doing something with my hands, I wound up working on chainmaille at the same time.

I had to finish this piece eventually, but hell, she started me back up again, so I wound up doing more than the one piece. I will say that it was very nice to work with my german silver that's been sitting on my worktable untouched for weeks.

 (https://www.etsy.com/listing/152275815/serpentine-hp4-in-1-micromaille-in-fine?)

I also wound up finishing the Barrels piece I've been promising Justine for ages now. This piece, and the ease of its birth, is how I know that I'm at least mildly back in chainmaille again.... because for about a month now, I've been trying to force out the last half of the above piece, and it just flowed today. Damnit, Justine.

Damnit.

Why Trivializing Your Child Is a Worse Idea than Spinach Ice Cream

To the parents who trivialize their children's sexual orientations: I don't get it. No, seriously. I don't get it. What do you hope to accomplish there? It's truly sad that in my four months of being a high school's nurse (I was in an elementary school before that, and for two and a half months in the early part of this calendar year) I've had too many students in my clinic crying over parents' dismissiveness to count on two hands.

That's right. I saw that more often than I saw drug issues and STDs combined. That's just depressing, Parents. I'm not even a guidance counselor.

What do you think's going to happen? Oh, I snickered told my son that his being gay is just a phase, so he's going to see how silly he's being and suddenly like boobs. Yeah, that makes sense. Let's examine this piecemeal.

Assumption: Homosexuality/bisexuality/pansexuality/asexuality/what-have-you is bad, for some reason.

Option 1: Rebellious phase. Okay. Sounds good. Every teenager goes through phases, and some of them make more sense than others. As much as I'd like to say everyone knows for sure who they are at all times, it's not true. Teenagers really do occasionally go through sexual orientation phases. Here's the catch. If you say something nasty or derisive, you'll wind up pushing your teenager into rebellion mode. As soon as you make someone defend their points, it becomes harder to change their minds. This is true of children as often as of adults. You've seen it before. Leave it alone. If being gay/bisexual/pansexual/asexual/what-have-you is a phase, it will go away on it's own.

Option 2: Plain old confusion. I don't even know why I have to explain this. Giving someone an absolute answer with no real supporting evidence to a terribly confusing, multifaceted issue is the opposite of helpful.   Try an actual discussion. Your child may realize he or she isn't as confused as he or she thought.

Option 3: Not a phase. Which, believe it or not, is the case more often than not, I think. All you're going to accomplish by mocking your child is to cause massive psychological damage and self-esteem issues. As much as they want to think your opinion doesn't matter, it does. Parents have more power, even over older teenagers, than they know.

Now shape up. I would really prefer not to see any more crying children over something like this.

On a side note, I do not recommend writing blog posts after taking benadryl. In fact, it might be better to stay off of the internet altogether once you've taken benadryl. The Davis Drug Guide refers to it as a hypnotic for a reason.

I might come back and make this post more coherent tomorrow morning. Or I might just delete it. -shrugs-

Memories and Tea

Normally, my posts are pretty silly. I suppose it's to make up for the scant silliness my work affords me. After all, at THS I had the health of over a thousand students to worry about - though truthfully, probably half the students I saw came from a pool of maybe a hundred regulars. Today, I just don't have a lot of silliness in me. I guess I'm still pretty shell-shocked. 

Wednesday was my last day of work for the health department. School's out for summer, so they won't need me until August, if I'm still in Titusville, and truthfully, as much as I love my job, I don't think that I could stand not working for so long. 

So yesterday, after pre-employment testing that I sincerely hope will end in employment, because this would be a great place to work, I spent all day with my boyfriend, Shane, watching Doctor Who (he hadn't even seen all of the Eccleston episodes until yesterday, guys! I'm not sure this is going to work. :p) and hanging out, drinking his roommate's tea.

His roommate has some really extraordinary tea. 

Today he had to work, though, so I went home and I've basically been wandering around my apartment confused. What do I even do with myself without my clinic? How does that even work?

And I miss my kids. I miss simple things like bringing water and replacing ice packs for students with high fevers waiting to be picked up, and more complicated things like seizure care - which was needed surprisingly often, by the way, usually by one student. I miss the administrators, my one student who always comes in for ice because I can't prove she's coming in just to see me but she really needs to only do that during lunch, Eve-gwen. I miss my daily meds kids, the student resource officer, the library assistant. 

Aww, hell. This is day two. 

Fortunately, I've discovered something beautiful, which is really helping to keep my stress levels down, and is delicious besides - good, Teavana tea. 

Right now I'm drinking Phoenix Dragon Jasmine Pearls, which is a fairly bitter green tea with a nice floral overtone, probably from the Jasmine. Before that it was a blend of Samurai Chai Mate and Majaraja Chai Oolong. Mmmm. Amazing. 

I might have a problem, guys. 

PS: all of the teas in my cabinet are good, but you would do well to be cautious before trying matcha. I love it. It has a rich, briny (what does it say about me that autocorrect changed that to 'brony'? No, don't answer that) flavor and is very, very strong. See if you can get a sample before trying it, because Justine's face after drinking some suggests that my loving it might be one more way I'm a 'freak of nature,' as she lovingly puts it. 

Silly Names for Invisible Griffins

As I've said before, I work as a school nurse. I’m sure you can envision the kind of silliness I see. (For instance, I had one girl come in the other day with a bug bite, clutching at it and wailing that she was dying, and someone should call poison control, or maybe her grandmother. Truthfully, I’m not sure what she expected her grandmother to do.) Ironically, the part of my job that most taxes my ability to hold in my giggles is the names I see.

You get your usual myriad of misspelled nouns and adjectives, of course – I’ve seen every misspelling in the book of Jewel, Precious, Dove, Special, and Sky – but then I get some like Devon’cling Darknyss McSmee the 11^th (whose mother and father, of course, are named John and Rachel) or some such silliness, and you think I’m joking, but I’m not.

Of course, the above is not the name of one of my students, because that wouldn’t be nice, and I wouldn’t do that, Mom, but it is similar in many ways to the name of a student I sent to archiving today. That is to say, it was an ordinary name, apostrophe, verb, followed by a noun, and that was just the first name.

I’m actually a little worried, because I’m giggling a little less at stuff like this now than when I started. What if I’m becoming immune to the ridiculous? After all, familiarity breeds indifference. Isn’t that the theory behind vaccines and allergy shots and griffins?

A friend informs me that I have to explain what griffins have to do with familiarity and indifference. See, when I was a kid I was encouraged by a student in my class to introduce her to my pet griffin. Of course, I didn’t know I had a griffin at the time, and I suppose he was probably imaginary, but I did anyway, because what if he was real and I was the only one who couldn’t see him? So I named him Jaunita, speaking of silly names, and my imaginary griffin and my friend (whose name, I confess, I have forgotten) became good buddies. She spent so much time interacting with Jaunita that I convinced myself I could see him, too.

By the time I got to second grade, I realized, of course, that there wasn’t actually a pet griffin, and that was why all of the fruit I left out for him rotted and we had fruit flies. Please don’t tell my parents.  You know what, forget it, I don’t think that would actually surprise them.

I suspect, though, that Juanita was real, and familiarity just, you know, bred indifference. So eventually I became immune and stopped being able to see her. That’s why kids know that unicorns and fairies and dolphins exist, and adults insist they’re made-up. We can’t see them anymore because we were exposed so much we became indifferent. Hush. That is totally a correct way to use that word.

This is why I have to find work outside of the school system. I’m already immune to griffins. What if I stop giggling at silly names and then stop giggling at silly students and then stop being silly myself? How would I survive?

My cat would probably be happy, though.

PS: Not all of my students are silly-named alarmists. In fact, most of them either have perfectly ordinary names, or they have really epic unusual names. Yes, I do totally get to judge what’s epic and what’s just silly. This is my blog, thank you very much. As for being alarmists… Let’s just say I had a student come limping in last week with a massively swollen and bruised foot, asking for ice.

Some of my students should be more alarmable.

PPS: Don’t assume your students are fine just because they wail that they’re dying. I had a student do that once, and I made the mistake of figuring they were being melodramatic, and while I was going through my routine assessment (heart/lungs/pulse/PO2/BP) for chest pain, she started going gray, which is impressive for a particularly dark African American girl. This was right around when I noticed that her heart beat was doing some scary things, and called 911 and then the principal (which is only polite if you’re bringing an ambulance to their schools. They tend to get a little grumpy if EMTs show up and they weren’t informed) and tried to help her keep calm until they got there. I don’t know if I succeeded, or if she was just making good progress towards passing out. I’m leaning more towards passing out, personally.

PPPS: That student is fine.

PPPPS: Probably.

PPPPPS: I’ll be honest, I just wanted to see how many p’s I could get away with.

PPPPPPS: Six. The answer is six.

Much Ado About Mind Control

Every now and again, I go off on little tangents. The funny thing is that there’s rarely a logical reason for me to be having these tangents at all, and there’s almost never any logic to continuing them. For instance, I just finished Jenny Lawson’s, “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.” There’s a moment in the book where she’s gleefully realizing that she’s controlling your mind as you read what she’s written.

Or maybe that was in her blog. Whatever.

So I’m sitting there trying to figure out how I would word that realization if I was writing it, because I had a very awesome moment when I thought, wait a minute. I can do that now. I totally have a blog of my own now. Then I realized that unless I’m significantly funnier than I think I am, I’m probably only going to be briefly controlling the mind of Shane, who I recently started dating, and that made me sad for a minute.

But I’m pretty sure at some point the word, “actively” was in that little rewrite in my head. Does it count as active mind control if you’re doing it at one point and then the minds are actually being controlled later? Or is that passive mind control? How do you passively control someone’s mind?

This is all working off of the assumption that I’m not in a coma and you aren’t a figment of my imagination. Goodness, my imagination is complicated. Stop being so complicated, brain.

This was the point at which I started coming up with random scenarios and sorting them into active mind control, passive mind control, and unsure. Most of the scenarios wound up in the unsure bin, because I don’t actually know how passive mind control would work.

Someone should write a book about this...and I should really get a grip on my brain.

This Is Why I'll Never Be a Real Author

We all pretty much know that life moves in cycles. Right now, my life is cycling in several different ways. I'm trying to find a new job because right now, I work at a high school, and school is out for the summer on Wednesday, which is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. Oh, aye, I've put out applications, both in person and online, and I've followed up, but nothing has turned into more nothing, and now I'm getting seriously worried.

Ahem. Possibly more than just worried.

So there's that.

On top of that, I've cycled out of chainmaille (see picture below if you don't know what that is, said picture being what I was going to use for a business card before I realized my mailling was drying up)

and now I'm moving back into writing for the six millionth time. Surprisingly, it's the cycle back into writing that's frustrating me for right now, perhaps because it's the problem that I can do something about that I'm not already doing. Usually when I enter a period of time of writing, I start up an entirely new book idea, and then a quarter of the way through, or halfway through, or years ago, maybe even three quarts of the way through, suddenly the drive to write is entirely gone, and doesn't come back no matter how far I slog. It's just not worth it if you have to force more than three or four chapters, you know?

What I really need to do is find a way to make it possible to go back and pick up older projects when I cycle through drawing and then painting and then chainmaille and then something random like knitting and find myself back at writing. I'm at a bit of a loss.

I'm also very frustrated, because I have a few possibilities. I could start another brand new project, which is, at the moment, an unappealing option. There are three or four unfinished books on my hard-drive. One I've gotten thirty thousand words into, and I'm only maybe a fifth of the way through the story I had planned for book one, and the world, mythos, and magical systems are so ungodly complicated that I don't think I can pick it up again a year later. Another is much simpler, but is maybe ten years old, and is terribly written and bare-bones at best on details... but if I want to go through and reread it, I might be able to rewrite every chapter, and from there I only have five or six to go. This is the likeliest option, but I'm not sure how I feel about a vampire novel, even one that introduces new ideas (such as true vampires being created, not by being bitten, but by being chained in the river Styx for three days and nights, and wild magic, which is nigh uncontrollable) at this time. Then I have a fanfiction written for Yu Yu Hakusho, but I'm not certain I can untangle it from the anime and make it stand on its own, even though the main character is original. I have another story which gets into complicated sciences, and I'm not happy about the idea of writing science fiction because I know I'll get the physics wrong. Plus it's heavy on the politics of an imaginary society and I don't even like real world politics much.

I have a couple of other options, but so little progress has been made on them that I might as well start anew.

How frustrating. If anyone's reading this and feels inclined to weigh in, please do so.

Thi'ev the Magical Talking Squid Thing

When I was going up, I had a dangerously over active imagination. This really isn't too terribly unusual in and of itself. Every child is creative at ten years old to some degree. Unfortunately for my family, I was armed with two things that most unusually imaginitive child lacked. A large library of fantasy novels and a younger brother who was willing to go along with pretty much whatever I wanted to do. This is a very dangerous combination. 

One those very dangerous novels was called Water: Ascension. It was about a mermaid who finds out she's half human (I mean, half of the amount of human that mermaids normally are, I suppose) and goes on to bond with a Farworlder and become an Avatar, just in time for Atlantis  to sort of die. 

It's not a very far stretch from half human mermaid who looks like a mermaid to half mermaid human who looks like a human. Within the course of a morning, I managed to convince myself that I was actually adopted and one of my real parents was an Atlantean. If I found a magical-talking-squid-Farworlder of my very own, I could find my real family and go live in the sea.

My lack of gills never seemed like a big problem to me. Farworlders were magic, right? All I had to do was find a baby Farworlder. 

I also conveniently forgot how much I hated seafood. 

I don't really remember how I convinced James to help me in this quest. Possibly he was still grumpy about my fake Hogwarts letter and wanted me to drown. Or maybe not. He was a little young for revenge. I hadn't really gotten around to teaching him that yet. 

Between the two of us, we decided that pools were kind of like the sea, and maybe we'd find a Farworlder infant in our pool. I seized upon the idea with the same singleminded determination that had me trying to acquire our cockapoo, thats's a dog, you pervert, every night so that I could morph into her. There really is a fine line between creative and crazy. I would know. Probably. 

So that's how an eccentric ten year old and her six year old brother wound up scouring every inch of a kidney-shaped swimming pool looking for a magical squid.

We searched for hours. By the time we'd gone over the entire pool four times, I was convinced that I was Serai, a kidnapped mermaid princess from the Dolphin clan of Atlantis, and my brother (who really was adopted, and so could be anyone) was probably my best friend before we were kidnapped by these cruel, terrible humans. Shortly after deciding that I'd already bonded with a Farworlder (who totally had a name - Thi'ev) who had been stolen from me, and that I loved him more than pie and was totally a tragic heroine, we did actually find something. Or at least, James did.

Well, it had a whole bunch of legs, all right. Which is kind of what we were looking for. Unfortunately, the exact number of legs was eight. 

I don't have any memories before this of being afraid of spiders. Maybe this was the first. He was a whopper, all right. We call them Banana Spiders. God knows why, because they look nothing like fruit, science. They're about the size of a man's hand. This one was dead, which didn't make him significantly less frightening. He floated in a corner of the pool like a war casualty. I don't know where he came from. He wasn't there before. (Actually, it was probably a she, but I didn't know that at the time. All scary animals were male to me, god knows why.) 

My eyes bugged from my head, and I utilized my most terrible weapon against the evil spider. I screamed at the top of my lungs, and while it was recovering from my brutal attack, I swam for it. 

It was an epic battle for survival. In the end, I made it, a slightly baffled younger brother trailing behind me as I yanked open the sliding glass door and ran inside. I can't imagine my mother was thrilled about all of the water. I don't remember. 

The terror wore off pretty quickly, because honestly, fear was much less interesting than the pizza the cruel, terrible humans were offering, and by the time we'd both wolfed down three pieces of pepperoni-covered-glory, I'd forgotten all about Thi'ev.

Which just goes to show, really, that sometimes when you search for Atlantis you find magic, and sometimes you wind up running away from dead spiders in a swimming pool. Sometimes, if you have parents like mine, you have both. Or at least pizza. 

Pizza makes everything better. 

I've Joined the Mindless Masses

So I may have gotten a Twitter account (Look me up, I'm SarahEArmor) even though I have no idea how to use Twitter and it will probably languish. This gave me the opportunity to follow the world's most amazing people, like Amanda Palmer, the Bloggess, Allie Brosh, Tamora Pierce, Mercedes Lackey, and the Doctor. Shut up. It's totally the real Docter. He has a Twitter. I firmly believe it.

This lead to the odd realization that I have an actual list of people who are so epic that if they were aware that I existed, I would totally have a month-long fangasm. Seriously. How neat would it be if Felicia Day said hi to me?

I totally lost my mind one time a year or so ago and wrote fan letters to Amy Lee, Tamora Pierce, and for some reason, Kate Constable. Don't get me wrong, Kate Constable is a good author. She just didn't help to shape who I am the way Amy Lee and Tamora Pierce did. Sadly, I got form letter back from Tamora Pierce and Amy Lee (which is more than I expected anyway) but Kate Constable did actually reply. No, seriously. She's actually legitimately awesome.

I mean, this awesome author actually took the time to write a real, several-paragraphs letter in response to some girl who was sad that her books weren't available as ebooks in the USA. See, this is why I love authors.

Okay, tangent, much. So anyway, I got a Twitter account, and now I'm stalking epic people (and also my brother, who apparently uses the word "breh" all the time, even though it's not a real word, James. Breh is a misspelling of what a donkey does.) like Wil Wheaton, the totally epic, ridiculously sexy actor who plays the very douchey Fawkes on the Guild. Which you should be watching.

So yeah. I should probably be alarmed by the fact that I have an actual list, but I sincerely doubt I'll ever actually talk to any of them. So....

XD I'll settle for stalking them on Twitter.

PS: Yes, I do have an actual list:

Felicia Day
Tamora Pierce
Mercedes Lackey
JK Rowling
Wil Wheaton
Neil Patrick Harris
Allie Brosh
Jenny Lawson
Amanda Palmer
Amy Lee
ANYONE WHO HAS EVER PLAYED ANYONE OR ANYTHING IN DOCTOR WHO.

I should probably be ashamed of myself now.

PPS: In case you don't know who Amanda Palmer is, she's an extraordinary musician and an even more extraordinary woman who gives away her music. Bloggess linked one of her songs, and I listened to it and fell in love with it. The album the song is in is titled very appropriately, "Music To Change the World." The first time I heard it, I was all, "Huh, this sounds like the lead singer from the Dresden Dolls" because I'd been listening to Coin Operated Boy, and then I found out oh my gosh, that IS the singer from the Dresden Dolls. Epic.

Stockholmy Love!

I frequently tell people that I torture my cat. It's only fair, after all. She's so fluffy that it's physically painful. But I also adore my cat, Nala. Here she is:

Do you see that? Do you see how she taunts me? So my response, of course, is to do what any sane cat owner would do. I flip her upside down and kiss her furiously on the tail! 

I know you won't believe it of someone as sweet and gentle as me, so I totally acquired proof. Nala was not thrilled about this because normally I only hold her for a few seconds and it is surprisingly hard to get an iPhone picture with a fat, fluffy cat upside down in your arms. 

But here it is. 

See? It is proven. It is even more proven than the Loch Ness monster because my blurry photo is in color, so there. 

Just to prove how much like me she is, she followed my releasing her after like three solid minutes of complaints by purring and rubbing against my ankles. 

This cat has some serious stockholme syndrome, guys.

PS: This cat is just daring me to pick her up again.

PPS: I swear she is. I can see it in her little kitty eyes. She desperately needs to be picked up.

PPPS: Ow. 

Alpha Goose

A few years ago, I was dating someone named Michael. I swear I didn't trap him in carbonite. I wouldn't do that. Probably. Except maybe to Andy Warhol. I can't stand that guy. You are not an artist if someone else does the work. You're a concept guy. Jeesh. No, we broke up peacefully after three years together. Anyway. He went to a college in Jacksonville called UNF that has an impressive array of wildlife. It even has a nature walk.

It also sported quite a large herd of geese. 

I'm not sure how much experience you have with geese. You may be under the misapprehension that they waddle around cutely eating bread and wearing bonnets, quaking sweetly at passers-by. Let me assure you that that is not an accurate image of geese. These things are violent. 

You see? These things do not mess around. They have murder eyes. Seriously. Hide your children. 

So from time to time I would come visit him on his campus. Gorgeous scenery, fresh air, the bustle of the big city, not my parents' house, what's not to love? Geese, that's what. They strutted around the campus, knowing that the sight of their lowered heads could make proud D20 wielders and clever artisans alike run for cover. 

Or else, my boyfriend informed me, these things might charge you down and bite your knees. 

Well, this could not stand! I hatched a daring plan. In my head, I envisioned myself standing triumphant in the center of a circle of docile geese, tamed by my fearless wrath. 

So when, walking from lunch to his dorm, we passed a herd of geese, I could not resist. I picked out the nearest one, clearly the dominant goose, the alpha goose, if you please, and eyed him haughtily. With eyes and demeanor, I dared him to challenge me. Turning in his direction, my chin lifted and stance both menacing and masterful, I waited, bravely battling off my boyfriend's attempts to save me from the devil-geese. 

As I stared him down imperiously (the goose, not my boyfriend) he turned. And charged! 

The goose, used to people running away when he lowered his head and ran at them, stopped dead in his tracks as I charged forward, waving my arms and yelling. I was unstoppable! As he scrambled to run away, and the entire herd started edging away nervously, I was the kamikaze! 

Charged with power and energy, I screamed out my battle cry! I am ALPHA GOOSE! 

I ignored the sounds of alarm from the students around us. They were just jealous.

Why Bananas Don't Make Good Hiding Places

I'm starting a blog. I'm not entirely sure why I felt the need to announce this, because I'm pretty sure that you've figured this out by now, but just in case. I don't want to disappoint Whovians who may have thought they were stumbling upon a fansite, when really this is just a slightly neurotic nurse seeking an outlet that won't mind being notified at 3am that she's figured out why herbivore poop smells so much nicer than carnivore or omnivore poop.

So if you're still reading, especially if you're a Whovian, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I don't know whether overactive imaginations are contagious, but I'd better apologize just in case. Please let me know if you wake up in the middle of the night from a dream of being strangled by a pair of lungs in a dog house made of pancakes. The blueberry kind, of course. Then I'll know.

Unless that's normal for you. In which case, I apologize for assuming that we're odd.

So today was a fairly normal day for me. Wake up way later than I had planned to, go in to work, and on my lunch break read "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by Jenny Lawson, who is amazing and possibly more nervous than I am. 

Today's work consisted of helping a child through a panic attack (and discovering that my blood pressure cuff didn't want to work [it was inflating, but not reading an increase in pressure] but only when I actually needed it so that I had to run to the Patient Care classroom to borrow one only to discover that the patient had left and my blood pressure cuff was being nice now, and wow is this parenthetical insertion rambly) (I don't know if that's a phrase, but it sounds nice, so it is now) cleaning wounds, and dispensing tampons around calling the parents of probably sixty children to pick up meds by the last day of school.

That probably wouldn't actually be worth mentioning, except that I was going in to an allergy clinic to fill out an application in a suit jacket, no less later that afternoon, and so I was having occasional mini panic attacks myself. For me, that mostly consists of the world kind of getting distant and overwhelmingly noise-blendy-together-ish while my head turns in circles. Oh my god, I'm not going to get this job, I'm not going to get any job ever and then I'll be homeless or a bum living off the government, and with every ridiculously repetitive and melodramatic word my self-worth spiraled a little further down the drains until I wound up hiding in the closet pretending to fish tampons out a cardboard box. Since the only time someone came looking for me I was able to emerge more or less composed with an arm full of tampons, I'm pretty sure I got away with it.

I'm also pretty sure that doesn't count as a panic attack, but that's okay, no one's going to read this anyway.

Surprisingly, despite the fact that I'd managed to work myself up into a true freak-out by the time I got to my parents' house after work (because they live mid-way between my apartment in Titusville and the allergy clinic in Daytona Beach, and also because my mother owns suit-jackets) I feel like I did pretty well. At least, the receptionist who I chatted with for a few minutes after handing her my application was smiling. Unless it was sort of a pitying sort of smile, but I'm going to pretend I didn't think of that.

So we had Curry Chicken after, and now I'm significantly less nervous.

Afterwards, I brought my plate to the sink, and that's when I saw it. An entire bag of lifesaver mints (which is at least partially composed of crack cocaine, I firmly believe) hidden, of all places, in the fruit bowl beneath a bunch of partly-browning bananas.

I absolutely love those mints. On the other hand, I'd just stolen like four of them from the candy jar, so I probably would have left an unopened bag alone, except the sheer strangeness of putting candy in a fruit bowl underneath bananas made me gape in awe for a few seconds. My parents are really not strange people. So this was kind of beautiful. Like finding a flowering thistle on a barren rocky mountainside. A single beacon of weird to signal that maybe I do come by it honestly. (I'm convinced that thistles flower. Please don't tell me if I'm wrong. I would be very sad.)

So of course, my immediate thought was, I wonder how long it would take my parents to notice that these bananas are no longer a bizarre hat for a bag of mints.  So I snagged them and put the bananas back and tried not to snicker as I said my goodbyes and it totally had nothing to do with how delicious those mints are.

I think that probably my parents were just trying to hide the mints from me. Unless it was just my Mom trying to hide them from Dad, who has a bit of a sweet tooth. She would do that, but it would surprise me, because she's normally not that creative  more subtle about her hiding places. Which just goes to show, Mom, bananas don't make good hiding places. Unless you're trying to hide a Brazilian Wandering Spider, apparently.

PS: So apparently it didn't take Mom very long to notice. I'm kind of impressed, actually. When I got home from their house, I found a text from her. It read, "Sarah, did you take the bag of mints?" You have to admit, that was pretty fast. Well, you don't have to. But you totally should.

To which I responded, "...No. >.>"

It was very convincing, apparently, or else my mother is much more passive-aggressive than I thought, because her reply was, "I'm hoping you get the job with Dr. DiNicolo, but I know u will get a great job. Anyone would be blessed to have you."

Now I felt guilty, even though I was pretty sure she didn't believe me, so I had to say, "Thanks. <3" And then I had to sit there for a couple of seconds and come up with a good, non-impulsive reason for me to have stolen a bag of banana mints. Eventually I came up with the fairly weak, "And I did totally take the mints. They were shoved under bananas. I was curious to see how long it would take someone to notice." Then I added hopefully, just in case flattery would make an impression, "I'm kind of impressed."

Her response was not encouraging. "Where is our bag of mints?" "You mint thief. We want them back."

I tried distraction. "I am legitimately laughing so hard I'm crying at that. This is so going in my theoretical blog." Which is totally no longer theoretical, by the way. Awesome. It was almost true, too. I was giggling rather maniacally at the way she'd phrased that accusation.

"When do we get them back? Karen and I love them!!!!!!" Karen is my parents' tenant who moved into my bedroom when I moved out. Sort of. She's epic. You know, just clarifying in case you thought I had two moms. Not that there would be anything wrong with that. Karen would make an epic second mom. I just prefer having my Dad because he is also epic. I'm totally not homophobic. That would be weird.

So I told her she'd have to wait until this weekend, and that that was what she got for putting mints under bananas, because that was just plain weird and sounded more like something I would do. She was not entertained, and replied in what I imagined to be a tart tone, "We didn't put the mints under the bananas, we put the bananas over the mints so you wouldn't steal them!" I would like to point out that there's not a great deal of difference there. Then she added for good measure, "You mint thrift."

That was uncalled for. Still, I figured someone had to be rational and so I reminded her that I wouldn't have stolen them if they hadn't been in a fruit bowl. They were practically calling out to me, begging to be adopted. At which point she commented that she hated auto-correct, which was a relief, because I don't know if I could have handled a reputation as being thifty with mints. Just to drive the meaning home, she reminded me once again that I was a mint thief.

There's really only one response when someone becomes that degree of unreasonable.

"Yes, Mama."

PPS. I've just reread this rambly abomination of a blog, and I'm seriously considering hiding my name until I get hired. Would that be paranoid?