What Happens When Malibu Barbie Grows Up

Tao Quote of the Day:

If you show people exciting things,
you will make them covetous and greedy.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MALIBU BARBIE GROWS UP

I had a doctor appointment today and since I became semi-retired that's usually a reason to treat myself. Especially after I'm weighed in and receive all those praises from the resident nurses.

Nurse: "You don't LOOK like you weigh 200 pounds! You couldn't be bigger than a 14! Your very dense".

Me: "That was supposed to be a compliment ...right?"

Like being a 200 pound size 14 is a good thing. And that word, dense, that could be taken two ways but the blank gaze of admiration behind the remark makes me wonder if she was that stupid, or that smart. Either way I felt it would be in my best interest to digress. Pissing off the people that decide just how much of that regulated rat poison to prescribe could be very bad.
I went to my usual haunts and dropped loads of dough. The rest of the year my money slowly trickles from my grasp but in the winter...well, it's like I go through with drawls.

Me: "I haven't been in a store in two weeks! TWO WEEKS...take my money, PLEASE!"

Store Clerk: "Well, alright then. Two dozen Moon pies, green lipstick and a bag of rocks, that'll be...$2.345.09."

Me; "W-e-l-l, okay, but what cost nine cents?"

You see, in the Mid-West (I don't know why the need for the hyphen) this time of year, outings are greatly reduced if you're prone to chapping below the -145 degree mark. So when the weather is nice (the Twilight Zone theme song echoes in my brain at the suggestion), like today, I'm apt to dally all the way home. And since my doctors office sits on the infamous Battle of Carthage site and not here in Hog Waller behind the feed store like everybody else’s, I have many miles of possible detours I can take betwixt and between.

The irony of my "healer" doing business on a site of infamous carnage is quirky at best. I'm just glad that amputation is no longer considered a cure-all.

I then took myself out to eat at the Steak-O-Rama on the main drag and played table hockey with the medium-well puck I was served while I watched the buffet patrons artfully pile their plates with all the fatty-fried-carburetor foods some wiener named Atkins says will add fluff to your fluff.

It brought back memories of the college cafeteria where you were given custard cups for the food bar. We took it as a challenge, there were great pantheons of celery and egg slices, that held back an artfully piled bit of eye candy at the starving artist table. That was where you could find me, playing Jenga with my masterpiece of modern culinary cuisine (all the raw vegetables and pickles you could get into that custard cup). Eating it took as much ingenuity as building it did. Many times my Vesuvian mound would erupt and all would begin falling to the paper napkin I had opened up underneath it (just in case), the only thing holding some of it together was the volcanic flow of Catalina dressing.

The cruelty of offering an all-you-can-pile-in-a-custard-cup food bar at a college cafeteria most definitely made more than just I succumb to a covetous admiration of those architectural students and their erections.

Ah, those were the good old days. Now I remember why I was a size 5.

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2/7/2005 11:28 PM