So as I was zipping along I-80 at 6:00 this morning, I realized I’d applied only one of the two coats of mascara recommended for maximum flirtiness. And that just wouldn’t do. I mean, my feet are covered up all day having no chance to show some swag with their polished nails and cute little toe ring, so pretty much all I’ve got left to work with is my eyes. I had no choice but to do something I haven’t done since college, when I used to leave my boyfriend’s house at the crack of dawn hoping to cover 50 miles in 40 minutes and make it to an 8 AM class: I used the visor mirror to finish putting on makeup while driving.**
And that was a really, really stupid idea.
But you know what’s even stupider? Shaving your bikini line while driving. You read that right: a woman in Florida recently caused a two-car accident because she was attempting to shave her bikini line as she drove to a rendezvous. Those spots you see right now are from the coffee I just spit all over my monitor—the mental picture of Miss Landing Strip tidying up behind the wheel is just too much to handle. But, hey, I’m sure she thought it was a good idea at the time. Don’t the most bone-headed brain fails always start out as innocent what ifs? and why nots?
At this point, I’m reminded of my sophomore year at Penn State—the fondly-remembered-but-utterly-unproductive year I lived in a little apartment way out on Waupelani Drive. My roommate and I needed money (we were college students, after all), so we offered to do odd jobs for our landlady, a nice woman named Evelyn
who reminded me of Mrs. Roper and pretended she didn’t know about the kittens we kept in our tiny one bedroom deal. Even though our building had a perfectly good superintendent, Evelyn somehow thought it would work out for everyone involved if she hired us (two 19-year-old girls who had never so much as painted a closet door) to paint apartments. Why not? she must have innocently thought to herself. And thus a brain fail left the launch pad.
Instructed to find a five gallon bucket of white paint and some other supplies in the storage area, my roomie and I did so and prepared to paint the first apartment. And by prepared, I mean we dug out our cute painter pants, pulled our hair into ponytails, and laid in enough cold drinks and loud music to recreate Woodstock. We went through roller after roller trying our best to cover the walls smoothly, but there must have been something wrong with the paint. The thick, gummy, first coat was only made worse by applying a second coat. Ick.
We broke to Evelyn the awful news that her paint had gone bad (or whatever paint does), so she sent the super to check things out. That’s when we discovered that we’d just spent several days covering the apartment’s walls with highway paint. You know, the stuff our perfectly competent and seriously pissed-off superintendent had bought for replacing the lines in the parking lot.
Anyone care to guess how many more apartment painting gigs my roomie and I got? God bless Evelyn, she still paid us for our work. Perhaps she knew that the really, really stupid idea wasn’t mine or my roommate’s. The really, really stupid idea was hers: she trusted us. As for the superintendent? He earned his way to Heaven by repainting the apartment and not killing us in our sleep.
Which, though justified, would have been another really, really stupid idea.
Next entry: MORE REALLY, REALLY STUPID IDEAS
** Mom, I never did that. Honest. You believe me, right?
Cheaper Than Therapy... 