"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but I’m gonna repeatedly kick you in the balls." - Stepbrothers

I have decided to go out on a limb and donate my time to a local Hospice organization. It is only for one hour a week, and I really want to be able to tell everyone that “I see dead people.” Plus, my ultimate goal is to meet a rich man with a heart condition and I figure this will help me get a foot in the door.

ANYWAY…One of the things I need in order to be ‘cleared’ is to pass two rounds of TB testing. I hate needles, but hey, it’s for a good cause. I went for test # 1 today during my lunch hour. All I can say is, God is a prankster.

I walked into the room for my test. The nurse turns around to introduce herself and she’s as cockeyed as the day is long. Like, BIG time. At first I thought I had something on my shirt, or maybe she was looking at my shoes? Or the wall behind me? I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I even tried to figure out if she had one good eye (because sometimes they do, and it’s just the other goofy eye that throws it all off). No luck, I’m fairly certain they were both fricked. And here she came with her alcohol swab and needle. Jesus Christ. Is this because I didn’t go to mass on Palm Sunday?!

As she looked simultaneously at the ceiling and at the “Eat Healthy!” poster behind me, she explained that I wouldn’t feel much more than a pinch. In all honesty, I didn’t feel anything when she did it. Turns out, she stuck the needle into my leather watch band. I didn’t say a word and got the hell out of there. Negative TB test # 1, here I come!

That's it for today's blog. Just a little blurb from my life before I forget it even happened. I'll let you know how Test # 2 goes.

I think I'll end with some sage-like advice: Never do anything you wouldn’t want to explain to the paramedics.

Stop [trying].

There is a stop sign in a shopping center down the street from my house where someone spray painted “trying” under the word Stop. I love it. I laugh every time I see it. I need to get a picture sometime.

This particular morning, I needed to hit an ATM machine so I ended up driving past my favorite STOP sign and over to my bank. After snagging some cash, I jumped back in my car and pulled away…and saw a duck standing in the middle of the parking lot. A mallard. He was just hanging out; I assume waiting for one of the shops to open.

But it got me thinking. Some days you wake up and you are ready to take on the world. And then other days, you’re just a random duck, bored and loitering in a parking lot, waiting for Subway to open.

Socrates I am not.

Take the company where I work, for example. There is a guy in the office who has been talking to me for the past 4 months, and I’m not quite sure who he is, what he does, or where he sits. Yet, I saw him this morning and he not only knew my name, he knew I was in California last week. How did he do that?

Then I went to the corporate Snack Shack for a drink. The woman who runs it is named Judy. She is known throughout the company for remembering every-single-employee’s name (there are close to 900 of us here)…except mine. I’ve told her my name at least a dozen times. About 2 weeks after I started, she called me Michelle. Then, four months ago she called me Katie for about 3 weeks. Now she doesn’t call me anything, which is just as well. Now come on. How hard is it to remember my name? I’m a white girl who doesn’t strip for a living, named Crystal. The oxymoron of it should be enough to burn my freakin’ name into her memory.

There's a lot I don't understand.

Like why the term “colored” is considered derogatory when referring to black people. The “C” in NAACP stands for Colored. If it’s good enough for them, then why can’t the rest of us use it? I might try bringing it back.

And then there are the traffic signs at intersections that read, “Wait for Green.” I get confused - can we turn right on red or not? Is this like the “partly cloudy/partly sunny” debacle of the traffic sign world? Wait for Green vs. No Turn on Red? Do they both basically mean, "Keep your fat ass parked until we say it's safe to go?"

And what about the time frame in between serving sizes? I love Oreos. But, a serving size is only 3 cookies. So how long do I have to wait between eating my first three and my next three for the servings to be considered two snacks independent of each other? Thirty minutes? An hour? If they can tell me the daily value of dietary fiber in each cookie, then Goddamn it they can tell me the time frame in between servings.

Jesus, that’s a lot of questions. Sorry about that. Here I am, tossing all sorts of highly intellectual thoughts your way without any answers. In order to balance that out, here are some bits of random information you can use the next time you’re stuck waiting in line at the Port-O-Potty at the next Prince concert:

Ants cannot walk backwards, only forwards.
The king of hearts is the only king without a mustache.
Elephants cannot jump.

Now get back to work.

If you still have Christmas decorations up, you also probably think acid washed jeans are still in style.

They're not. Throw those jeans away and take your decorations down. Immediately. You know who you are, and I know you live on Morris Road in Ambler, PA.

Let me apologize to all of my loyal readers for the lack of blogging. I have no excuse, except that I'm kind of a big deal. Okay, I'm not. I just sorta scrapped the blog thing (unintentionally).

I got back from crashing my sister's family vacation last week. We hit up Disneyland. It was pretty fantastic. The only thing that blew my mind was the hotel room. We stayed at a nice little place that was one block from the park. Our room was right across across from the hotel pool, which was conventiently located in the middle of the parking lot.

Our first night there we kept hearing a loud banging sound. Not knowing what it was, I started guessing. "I bet the pool has a diving board. Yeah, that's gotta be it." I walked over to the window and started parting the curtains so I could confirm my thoughts. "Totally a diving board..." (shuffle shuffle shuffle) "That's what it sounds like every time they jump off." (shuffle shuffle shuffle)

Several minutes into it, I'm still not looking out the window and still fighting with the curtains. They were the never-ending! I looked at my Brother-in-Law. "How the hell many curtains does this window have?!?!" (shuffle shuffle shuffle) I was totally frustrated. He and my sister started laughing, and my BIL opened the room door for me to look out.

Super long story short...it wasn't the damn diving board. It was the stupid fireworks from the park. My village called, they're missing their idiot. But in my defense, that sound really could have passed for people bouncing off a diving board. Plus, that window had at least 25 layers of curtain.

Thankfully, the rest of the vacation was uneventful. The only thing I want to mention is about the exceptionally large amount (no pun intended) of morbidly obese people I noticed in the park. I mean, I'm not one to judge (ha ha ha, I crack myself up), but I think the only reason it was so warm in Disney was because of the friction from all those thighs rubbing together. I saw more fat ass cracks hanging out than I ever care to see ever again. And to think most people thought the Tower of Terror was scary - as far as I was concerned, the general public in the park was HORRIFYING. If they weren't so moist and sweet-smelling, I would've shaken them and told them to pull their pants up or at least tuck their ass cheeks in. It helps that I'm not a toucher, either.

Seriously though, good times were had. And even if Disney in California can kind of be the equivalent of a dry Sea World, I'm cool with that.

Live and let live, right? As far as I'm concerned, curtains are the work of the Devil himself.