EventsOccurInRealTime

Ever feel like you have stumbled into the Twilight Zone? Something inexplicable happens, and you find yourself in a stupor, desperately racking your brain for a reasonable explanation.  Given the governing “Allison Law” in my life, I’m usually not too surprised when events like this occur (in real time…natch).  I just shake my head in disbelief and move on, recognizing that some things will never have a reasonable explanation.  I have recently fallen victim to these bizarro events…none life-changing or astoundingly miraculous. Really just more …….weird.

Example #1: On the way to a friend’s wedding in Salt Lake (an hour away), I dropped my bluetooth headset into my bag, thinking I may make some calls during the drive, and then stashed that bag into the trunk of my Jeep.  I ended up zoning out and never actually made any calls during the trip.  I also never moved the bag from the trunk until I got home (I had a little handbag that went into the wedding with me).  The next morning I fished around in my bag for the headset, and it was gone.  Vanished.  Now I’m tormented by the fact that I (like that red ring of mine) own an item to which I am clueless of its location. 

Giving up the search of every nook and cranny, I succumbed to the fact that I had lost it for good, when one day, I open the door to my jeep’s backseat and there, in the floor, is the bluetooth headset.  Here’s the weird part: There is no nook or cranny between the back seat and the cargo space.  So how did this little electronic device migrate from inside my bag which was in my trunk where there is absolutely no path to the backseat and land in the floor board there?  I cheered for finding it, yes, but then sat for a moment in that stupor I mentioned earlier, unable to explain what happened.

Example #2 (and this one is a doozy):  Last weekend, I’m in California Pizza Kitchen with a friend.  We ordered, received our drinks , and then both proceeded to the bathroom, leaving the table briefly unattended (which granted, isn’t a bright idea, but it was late, the restaurant was quiet, and I figured our drinks weren’t in any real danger).  We come back to the table, and everything is a little bit…..off.  The glasses have moved, lost their straws, and the bread plate (which was previously stacked with slices of sourdough) is empty, leaving only a small trail of crumbs.  What exactly happened here?  The best explanations I could come up with were that either they started clearing the table thinking we left or some stranger at the next table thought it would be funny to make bread and straws disappear.  We sat in shock, unable to explain the bizarre occurrence, had the waiter replace the drinks, and polished off dessert. 

Once back in the car, we started freaking out about the sheer weirdness of that whole experience.  Did everyone else in the restaurant witness the straw/bread thiefs?  The worst part (even worse than becoming aware of a lost thing) is that we will never actually know what happened….

It’s all just…weird…..

**doo do doo do doo do doo do**

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Those of you who know me personally know that my life is governed by a little thing I call “Allison law.” It’s sorta like Murphy’s Law: anything bad that can happen, will happen. In my world, it’s more like “anything insanely frustrating, irritating, inconvenient, semi-gross, mind-numbing, or of the highest unlikelihood that can happen, will happen.” I have countless stories of evidence for this law, but my most recent I feel obliged to share.

I have a slightly unhealthy love for my Jeep. It’s royal blue and (I believe) so freakin’ cute. However, I had an incredibly strong desire last night to drive it into the lake. On a few occasions in the last few months, the car alarm on my Jeep has sounded off at random….usually only once or twice in a row and always in mid-afternoon. I usually just hit the alarm button on my remote and turn it off when this happens. However, this futile exercise was of no help as my typically-freakin’ cute Jeep proceeded to sound its alarm constantly for about two hours straight at 3am last night. No jeep thiefs, way-ward cats, or crazy people in sight….it just apparently decided to make a lot of commotion for no reason.

Ya know how everything is more intense at night? Like, hearing a little noise can have you convinced that the world’s worst serial killer is breaking into your house. Well, flashing headlights and a siren that would wake up people in Spain is a hundred times worse at night. I laid in my bed, remote in hand with finger poised on the only temporarily-silencing off button and pleaded with any available higher power to cease the insanity and allow me and everyone in my complex (whom I’m certain now hate me) to get some decent sleep.

There are two parts to the Allison Law that apply here: one, naturally my jeep’s alarm decides to become positively unstoppable in the middle of the night, when nothing can be done about it. (If someone else was here that could have given me a ride back, I would have at least driven it out to the lake and left it there to beep it’s freakin’ heart out til morning.) Two, of course this inexplicable error occurs just three months after my factory warranty expires. So it will now cost me some crazy amount of money to fix/disable/remove-and-crush this annoying part that essentially serves no other purpose than to drive everyone in earshot to the brink of their sanity.

Car alarms should be outlawed. I’m starting a petition…

I have decided that supermarkets and grocery stores are officially “no man’s land.” This is, apparently, the hangout of choice for the people that time forgot…when they are not, ya know, hanging out at the post office or the DMV.

During my last trip to the market, the dude in line behind me started interrogating me on “where the party was”…I bought 4 12-packs of coke (they were 4 for $10!) along with chips and a jar of salsa, which he kept inexplicably referring to as bean dip. “With all that bean dip (read: salsa) and coke, there must be a party going on…”, he kept insisting. I”m not sure if this guy was attempting to flirt with me or something, but all I wanted to do was remove myself immediately from the checkout line with the creepy bean-dip-and-party-obsessed dude.

While at Costco last night, I found myself in an aisle with two other sets of people. One on the left and one on the right…thus blocking my way through. I was always under the impression that at this impasse, someone must take intiative and shuffle to allow for a clearing. Now, the lady on my left is off the hook for being oblivious because she was simultaneously shuffling a two-year-old and a gigundo case of applesauce. But chick-on-the-right…her ability to speak in some unidentifiable foreign language to her hubby is not reason enough to be oblivious to my need to pass. Granted they were in a pretty heated debate over tomato juice, but how long should I be required to wait for her to move her shopping cart to allow usually-polite-me to pass before it’s acceptable for me to clock her with a nearby two-ton jar of pasta sauce?

While we are on the subject of shopping carts, I stumbled on this article on MSN the other day ( http://health.msn.com/dietfitness/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100165289). It states that the number one thing your grocery store doesn’t want you to know is that the shopping carts have cooties. More cooties than public bathrooms, public phones, and escalators. Yuck. And while I have been known to push elevator buttons with my elbow and use all means possible to avoid touching public bathroom door handles, there is apparently no way for me to avoid the goo on the necessary-for-gathering shopping cart.

Note to self: Must look into online grocery delivery services….

How is it that, in some situations, the prep time and the payoff are wholly incongruous? For example, you plan…and scheme…and organize…and conspire for….. a birthday surprise party, only for the moment of surprise to last exactly 1.2 seconds…… a marriage proposal, which hopefully turns out well in 1.2 seconds…a contest award winner announcement, that generates clapping in 1.2 seconds (or shameful silence, one of the two). It takes exactly 1.2 eons to plan for 1.2 seconds of excitement.

This phenomenon unfortunately works in more than one direction. It also only takes 1.2 seconds for you to realize how big of an idiot you are….and 1.2 *indefinite-measurement-of-time* to reap the suckiness of your second. 1.2 seconds is all it takes to slice your hand open with a paring knife while chopping veggies (yea, I’ve done that). It takes 1.2 seconds for you to walk in your house only to realize that you forgot the one thing you went out for (yea, always do this too…do I remember that I went out for dish soap while I’m in the store? No, only 1.2 seconds after I walk in my front door with seven other sacks of stuff I didn’t need).

And it only takes 1.2 seconds to slip on your front steps in your cute, if albeit uber-slick-bottomed, kitten heels. And bruise and cut both knees. And develop a baseball-sized lump on your ankle, minus one layer of skin, that requires a night of ice on your elevated foot. Yea, I did this. (I know, insert laugh-at-Al here.) So as I limped around today, and person after person asked me if I was sore from overdoing it at the gym, I had to admit my 1.2 seconds of idiotness. (And no, I don’t lie about it and make up grandiose stories of mountainbiking and encountering a cougar or something…) Although I still maintain it wasn’t my fault…damn those slick steps!

An article was published yesterday on msnbc.com ( Here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18805010/) about a study done at Miami University in Ohio which claims that it’s easier to learn a person’s name if his face matches it. Apparently we have built-in stereotypes of which facial features fit certain names.

All this time, I was a little worried that I was just insanely self-centered when I could not remember someone’s name, especially in cases where I could only remember the name I subconciously assigned to them in lieu of their real name. There was a guy in one of my classes in college who suffered this fate; I had to bite my tongue to keep from calling him “Ryan” every time he greeted me. (I think his name was actually “Todd”.) In my effort to avoid it, he usually only got “Hi…” from me. No potential name mix-ups there.

It’s not just me!! I’m not just insanely self-centered (ok, maybe a little…but not because of this!). I now have scientific evidence that I cannot be held responsible for remembering the name you don’t look like. Sucks to be you……

I can now officially say I shook my little tush on the catwalk. (10 points to whomever can name that tune! or the lyric in this post title!)

Last Thursday, I was a model in the fashion show at the North Utah County Women in Business Conference. No points to Macey’s for organization (they lost our clothes the night before!), but it was actually way fun to stroll out on the patio and twirl for 200 pairs of eyes. Every girl has an innate hip-sashaying supermodel inside, but most of us only showcase that side when we’re alone in front of our full-length mirror. (I would venture that a few guys do it too…c’mon admit it…you flex and fire the imaginary clicky-hand-guns at the mirror too.) But it’s not often we do it in public.

As my mom says, I’ve liked the spotlight since birth, so I thought it was super-fun to strut my stuff. I’m so glad I get such fun opportunities with my job. Plus now I can laugh at the memory of running across the gardens in between clothing changes in my heels trying to get my jacket buttoned. It’s a small miracle I didn’t trip and end up sprawled out across the stone fountain!

Check out the mention of me as magazine-rep-super-girl on my friend/client’s local business blog. (Sidenote: apparently he gets some pretty decent traffic from the link on my blog, so thanks for checking it out guys!)

http://utahvalleybusinessblog.com/?p=136