Shopping for my brother’s birthday gifts, I over heard a conversation between a little boy and his father.

The Little Boy:  “Germs are fluffy.”

Father: “No they aren’t.”

The Little Boy:  “Oh, yeah, that’s right.  They are little black bugs that live in your body.”

It made me smile.

While waiting in line at Shoney’s breakfast buffet, I overheard this conversation between two waitresses.

Waitress 1: “You know what?  Never mind.  I’ll wipe down your tables for you.”

Waitress 2: “I just love working with assholes.”

~~~

While walking out of Spencer’s, I overheard this conversation between two young men.

Young Man 1: “Don’t hit my burn.  What the fuck were you thinking?”

Young Man 2:  “. . .  . . .”

~~~

Waiting for my mom in the food court of the mall, two girls walked past me.

Girl 1:  “Well, your such a fugly bitch!”

Girl 2: “laugh laugh laugh”

~~~

I just love listening to what people have to say.

It happened last night.  I dreamed in Chinese again.

For some reason, it sounds like something that I would say to a shrink.  And no, for the record, I do not have one.  Although, I am sure there are countless people out there who think I need one.  🙂  I’ll leave that discussion for another day.

The dream itself is rather fuzzy, but the little I can remember may amuse you.  I always ponder who all the yous are.  The stat counter Phil built says 50 some odd people come every day, some longer than others, but other than the few that leave comments on any sort of regular basis, I have no idea who they are, and if they care a wink about me.  I guess I never really will.  Oh, well.

So, yeah, I dreamed again in Chinese.  In this particular dream, I was at a big celebratory venue.  I am not sure if it was the New Year or if I was reliving a piece of the Olympics that I never witnessed in person, but it was big.  And there were lots and lots of fireworks.

The only reason I can remember that I was in this stadium like place was because it was also the start of new school year, and I was in charge of the freshman class.  I had to speak to them once the celebration came to a close – about what to expect and all that jazz.  This made me nervous in my dream just like it would have in real life.  I hate speaking in front of people.  How I managed to teach 30 some students nearly every day for a year is beyond me.  I guess I just got used to bull shitting on a regular basis.  🙂  (Yes, Mom, I just used the BS word!!)

As soon as the event was over, everyone started heading for the exits, all except for me.  Something distracted me and kept me back.  Well, before I knew it, everyone had left and I didn’t know which door to take.  I called up the stair wells, but no one could hear me.  I was too afraid of getting lost that I stayed there hoping I would figure out where to go, but my dream said I had to stay. Slowly, I noticed that my surrounding were changing.  It was getting darker, and the walls were turning into stone.  Lights on the walls turned into torches, and bars with electricity came down by the doors, keeping me from trying to run away.

I looked around and started noticing that there were some Americans chained up along the passage ways.  I ran over to them and begged them to tell me how to get out, but they wouldn’t unless I would unchain them.  One even handed me a key, but I told him I didn’t want to get in trouble.  I have no idea why a prisoner with a key would still be chained, but he was.  What can I say?  My dreams are weird.

At about that point, I heard some noise behind me.  The prisoner told me that I should hide, but I didn’t listen.  I ran to see who it was in hopes that they could help me.  The noise ended up being a line of freakish monsters.  The one in front looked like Skeletor from He-Man.  Behind him were some wickedly evil creatures that only my mind could create.  Insert you own creepy guys and you’ll know what I mean.

He looked almost exactly like this!

Well, since my dream was in China, the creepy guys had to speak Chinese.  This made everything super frustrating.  It is times like this I wish I had studied my Chinese a little more because I have no idea what they said to me.  It was all comptlete gibberish to me.  I’m sure they were saying something like, “How did you find our secret dungeon?” And, “We must kill you now.”  I just kept saying over in over in Chinese, “I am American.  I am a teacher.”  I added some “help me” in English, but they didn’t seem to care that much about my presence.

I was feeling pretty helpless, but for some reason I did not run.  I just kept standing there pleading with them hoping we’d finally be able to understand each other.

And then Phil’s snoring woke me up.

Part of me was greatful that I didn’t have to deal with Skeletor anymore, but I was mad that I wasn’t going to be able to find out what was going on.  I quickly closed my eyes and hoped that I’d be able to go back to the same dream like I am sometimes able to.

Fortunately, I was, but the interesting part of my dream was gone.  The little man operating my dream center hit the fast forward button.   I entered the dream looking over a lot of paperwork – all of the stuff I had missed while being stuck in a secret Chinese prison.   Hey, at least I didn’t have to speak to the freshman class.

I was reading through some of the Yahoo! news yesterday and came upon something very amusing.  Apparently, pranksters have been hacking into electronic road signs and replacing the real warnings with things like “Daily lane closure due to zombies”, “Raptors ahead – caution”, and “Zombies in area. Run!”.  So far it has happened in Collinsville, Illinois, Austin, Texas, and a county in Indiana.

Photo by Chris Nakashima Brown

Had I been an actual witness to any of these signs, I probably would have crashed my car laughing hysterically.  I would so pay money to see something like that on my way to work.  It would so break up the monotony of my day.  You can read the rest of the article here.

Finding out Michael Phleps’ smoked up at the University I graduated from just isn’t good enough.

Phil called me up last weekend and exclaimed that he had just made the world’s ugliest birthday cake and was glad to know that his mother’s love would over look it.  I was curious what the cake looked like, so I made him take a short video of it.   In my mind, I had expected it to look a lot worse.    I think Phil is right, though, he should definitely stick to computers because cakes sure aren’t his thing – even if they taste really good.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcJatHW2cAM[/youtube]

For those of you who don’t know me too well, I absolutely love Cookie Monster.  And it is not because we share a birthday or anything.  I didn’t even know we did until I wrote a paper on him in high school.  Yes, I wrote a paper on Cookie Monster.  The teacher said I could write about anyone famous.  She didn’t say the famous person had to be of the flesh!

Several years ago, my mom got me a Cookie Monster cookie cake for my birthday.  It was so pretty, I had a hard time eating it.  Well, that and the icing was super sweet. I think it was the most awesome cake I have ever had.  I’ve got a picture of it on my other computer.  I’ll try to post a picture of it later.

If anyone wants to make my year though, just send me a dozen of these cupcakes on November 2nd.  It would be the sweetest birthday present ever!  I’ll be waiting patiently for your delivery.  🙂

The Noms say it all.

And just to let you know, for those of you who are curious, the table is not finished.  In fact, it is still sitting in pieces on the floor. I have a strange feeling that I will never eat at that table again.

In case you were wondering, this is how I felt this morning at 6:20.

I love Lolcats.  They get me through the day.

I was driving down Elmwood a few weeks ago(yeah, I am such a slacker when it comes to blogging now-a-days), when I looked up at a banner stretching across the road.  What I read made me laugh out loud.  If you recall from other Some Things Just Sound Wrong posts, my mind lives in the gutter 24/7.  I am sure that the hundreds of other people driving underneath the banner didn’t think twice about it, but it sure made me question the marketing/advertising department of one of the two entities associated with the banner.  I’ll let you decided.  The banner read as follows:

TACOS FOR SISTERCARE

The banner also indicated the wheres and whens, but I can’t remember and I am sure you don’t care.  Sistercare for those of you who don’t know is a great organization that helps women who are in abusive relationships.  They give them food, clothes, and a place to live so that they don’t have to go home to their crazy boyfriend or husband.  I wonder if their is a BrotherCare?  Hrm.  Never thought of that.

If you don’t get the humor in the banner, no worries, you are probably better off.  If you do though, have a good laugh and a good rest of the day. 🙂

Last night Phil and I went to Wal-Mart to just walk around.  We do that sometimes, if we have nothing else better to do.  Yeah, we live such exciting lives.  🙂  Well, when we got there, I had to run to the bathroom.  I had just had like 6 glasses of sweet tea at Pho Viet, a Vietnamese restaurant.

I hate public bathrooms.  More often than not, they are pretty dirty because no one ever bothers to clean them on any sort of semi basis, but when you have to go, you have to go.  Stall one was occupied, stall two wasn’t the prettiest, stall three was a disaster, and stall four was occupied, as well. I decided to go back to stall two, it seemed like the safest bet.  Everything about stall two was normal except for one thing.  Sitting on top of the sanitary napkin trash can was an EPT pregnancy test.  I let out a good laugh. I am sure the people in stall one and four thought I had just lost my mind.

I could visualize some oversexed teenager walking into Wal-Mart, buying the test hoping she didn’t run into anyone who may recognize her, taking her purchased good into the bathroom and hoping for the absolute best.  I’m sure the test was in there somewhere, but I wasn’t about to go looking around for it.  I hope the results are what she wanted.  I can’t imagine that she came to the Wal-Mart bathroom hoping that the symbol on the stick said positive, but who knows, we live in a strange world.

A part of my soul hopes I will never ever have to use one of these things.

Okay, we all know that I am a bumbling idiot, so what is new you ask?  Well, nothing much really, except I need to much a correction.  A few days ago I posted a little story about how Holy, a friend who we had met in Fuyang, China, had come to visit us during his fall break. In that post I said that his name was pronounced like Holly.  While he was here though, and after I had made that post, I found out it, after nearly two years of knowing Holy, that is name is indeed pronounced Holy – as in holy shit, your kidding me! 🙂

You can imagine how stupid I felt.  I then tried to figure out how the confusion started.  Some point when he Holy met Phil, he told him his name and showed Phil how to spell it.  I am pretty sure Phil double checked and made sure it was what he meant, but I guess our English minds wanted to hear Holly, and so that is what we called him.  I asked Holy why he never corrected us and he said he didn’t know.   Perhaps it is was the same reason I never made the scores of Chinese people say my name correctly.  I knew calling me Gabrielle would be difficult, so I opted for Gabe.  To most people in China that year, I was known as Gabe-a.  I should have simplified it even more and gone by G.

I told Holy how hard it was going to be to retrain myself to actually say his name correctly.  The last few days he was here, I had to catch myself mid-name so many times.  Hopefully, it won’t take too long to learn.