Life is the Ultimate Sitcom

At the grocery store last week, I beheld a wondrous sight.

You might recall, just a couple of months ago, how I lamented the fact that the price of limes had skyrocketed. This was due to a combination of factors including bad weather, a citrus blight and the influence of the Mexican cartel. Well, good news: the weather has improved, the rash has cleared up, and the cartel is back to selling drugs instead of poaching fruit. All is right with the world!

And the price of limes has fallen dramatically. During the height of this epidemic, a single lime cost 99 cents. Now, you can get five for the same price. Hallelujah! The lime shortage has ended. Things were looking pretty dire for awhile there, folks. Bartenders were leaving them out of drinks (or jacking up the prices of margaritas), and airlines were dropping them from their beverage services. For a gin and tonic lovin’ fool such as myself, this was terrible. I am glad this crisis has been averted and everything is back to normal.

First world problems, don’tcha know.

High on School

Audrey’s last day of school was Friday, which means she is now technically a freshman. Hard to believe my youngest will be starting high school in the fall! It seems like just yesterday she was down on all fours, getting into things she wasn’t supposed to and spitting up everywhere.

Wait. That was yesterday. But it was the cat.

Anyway. Audrey is mostly excited over the prospect of high school, but a little apprehensive, as might be expected. “Nobody likes freshmen,” she said the other day, looking to me for guidance and supportive words of wisdom.

“That’s for sure,” I said. “You are so going to get stuffed into a locker on your first day.”

Of course, I was jesting. For one thing, lockers are about the size of shoeboxes now – if they even exist at all. Unless she’s got some mad yoga skills I don’t know about, she has nothing to fear.

“Were you popular in high school?” she asked me.

Ha! Popularity was something I aspired to, but never quite reached. I came close by association a couple of times, but I was always more a Cameron than a Ferris. Turns out chicks dig the star quarterback more than the editor of the school newspaper. Scoring touchdowns is all well and good, I suppose, but how were Johnny Football Hero’s grammar skills? I might not have been able to complete a flea flicker pass to save my life, but I could conjugate the shit out of verbs. I will never understand why cheerleaders didn’t fawn over that, but hey – their loss! I may never have ascended the peak of Mount Popularity, but I didn’t belong to any of the other well-established high school cliques, either. I wasn’t a loser, a loner, a stoner, or a dweeb. I just kind of…was. And in high school, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

For the most part, I enjoyed my high school years. I regret never going to the prom, and wish I’d participated in more extracurricular activities, but overall it was a good experience. I’m sure Audrey will do just fine.

Dream a Little Dream of Me

Saturday morning when we woke up, Tara said she’d had a dream about me the night before.

“Ooh, yeah, baby!” I replied.
“I hate to burst your bubble, Fabio,” she said.* “But it wasn’t that kind of dream.”
“Oh? Anything interesting happen in it?”
“Yes. You died.”

It’s never a good thing when your wife dreams of becoming a widow. She “assured” me that I had “only been shot to death” in this dream. Huh. I wasn’t real assured, as a matter of fact, even when she pointed out that the smoking gun belonged to a neighbor. I was actually pretty shaken. I told Audrey about the dream, and she said, “That’s funny. I dreamed you were stabbed to death last night!”

What the hell?!

Normally I like it when people dream about me. It makes me feel popular (see above: was not popular in high school). But if they’re going to dream about my impending death, I’d rather not show up in their dreams, you know what I’m saying?

In the Interest of Full Disclosure

Regarding the asterisk (*) above…

Tara didn’t really call me Fabio. I might, on occasion, “creatively enhance” our conversations in order to make them more appealing to blog readers. It’s like in sitcoms, when people have really witty conversations filled with snappy dialogue. Real life isn’t like that! But how great would it be if we all had a room full of writers in our brains, dishing out amazing lines for us day and night? For that matter, what if whenever we walked into a room for the first time, people started applauding? And what if strangers laughed every time we said something funny?

Life. It’s the ultimate sitcom.

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