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.