Tag Archives: humor

A letter to Future Me

The Micro-USB interface is a new standard char...

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Dear Future Me,

Next time you go out of town for a few days, you really need to start packing more than half an hour before you leave.  Remember that time in November 2011 when you went out of town for your birthday, and you realized about a half an hour out that you forgot to pack your cell phone charger?  Yeah, you remembered long about the time your phone started beeping that it was low on battery.  Then you realized when you got to the hotel that you forgot to pack a USB outlet plug-in doodad so you could charge your ipad, and you had to go down to the front desk and borrow one from them?  Boy, it was fun explaining to the staff what it was you needed.  Oh, and then you realized you hadn’t packed any toothpaste when you got back to the room after dinner, and you realized you hadn’t packed your razor just after the hotel store closed for the night, and you realized you hadn’t packed the keyboard you use with your ipad when you decided you wanted to post to your blog?  Good times.  Yep, you sure had a good time posting from the hotel lobby right next to the cafe where that folk singer was covering songs from the sixties.  Man, those acoustics were good.  Just a note from your past self, because I’m looking out for you:  pack the night before.  Please.  There are only so many Carole King and James Taylor covers you’re going to be able to stand.  Oh, wait, he’s starting on Crosby, Stills, and Nash!  And the Eagles!  And who wrote “So Happy Together,” ’cause that’s what he’s singing now!  Oh, man, it’s a birthday hootenanny.  Please?  Oh, and next time, pack some ear plugs; they’re breaking out the banjos.

Sincerely,

Past Little Blind Girl

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Adventures in driving

custom car, shot at local car show/swap meet

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Once upon a time, my friends and family thought it would be a good idea if I learned how to drive.  I’d managed to do so many other things that no one thought a legally blind girl could do, why not this?  I’m not sure what they had planned for the vision test, but it never got that far.  When I got to the actual driving portion of the program, it went a little something like this:

Little blind girl:  (gripping the steering wheel) How do I turn this thing on?

Little blind girl’s friend:  Put the key in the ignition and turn it.

LBG:  OK.  Where’s the ignition?

LBGF:  Right here.  You put the key in like… no, not that key…the really big one…you put it in the ignition here, and you turn it–no, that’s not far enough, a little more…

LBG:  I think it’s stuck.

LBGF:  Here, let’s switch places and I’ll get you set up.

(Shuffle around, Chinese fire drill style)

LBG:  OK, so the car’s on, what do I…oh, my God, we’re moving, I’m not pushing any of the pedals, why are we moving if I’m not pushing any of the pedals??

LBGF:  It’s OK, the car rolls a bit.  Just steer where you want to go, we’ll get you comfortable with the steering wheel first–no, you put your hands at 10 and 2, just slide them over–how did you get your elbow around your neck like that?

LBG:  Which one’s the brake?  I really want to push the brake.

LBGF:  The one on the left.  No, the left, the left!  Don’t think about insurance rates, don’t think about  insurance rates…you’re doing great.  Just ease up off the brake, now.

LBG:  No.

LBGF:  Chris, it’s fine, you’re not going to do any damage to anyone at this speed.

LBG:  No.  I like the brake.  I feel we’ve become very close.

LBGF:  Chris, you can’t date the brake.  Take your foot off the brake.  Come on, just a little…there you go.  Now, just tap the gas, just to get used to it.

LBG:  Are you sure?

LBGF:  Yes, you’ll be fine.  Just tap the gas–holy crap, what was that noise?  Hang on, let me just get out of the car for a minute…Chris, you’ve got to hit the brake–no, the brake!  The brake!

(Screech, crash, cut to State Trooper arriving at the scene)

State Trooper:  So, whose idea was it to let the blind girl drive?

And thus concluded my adventures in driving.  I may have exaggerated a little bit, but not actually that much.  Really, I just added the State Trooper.  Discrimination against the blind in driving laws is a fantastically good idea.  I’m all about the discrimination.  Bring it on.

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When world leaders fall out

Does this sound familiar to anyone else?  As has been widely reported, President Obama and President Sarkozy of France had the following exchange regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu without realizing they were still audible to reporters:

President Sarkozy:  I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar

President Obama:  You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you!

I can just imagine the rest of the conversation, tactfully omitted by the french translators:

President Sarkozy:  Oh, I know!  You guys were, like, so tight, and then he totally went behind your back to UNESCO for Palestine.

President Obama:  Yeah, and I happen to know that Netanyahu had de-friended Palestine on Facebook and was all, no way, Obama, you and me are BFFs.  And now this?

President Sarkozy:  I know, right?  Cause he knows that you and me are full-on besties and always will be.  I bet he even texts Ahmadinejad and just doesn’t want you to know.

President Obama:  He’s all about being ‘the Peacemaker’, dude, he’s even posting status updates like “The Peacemaker does it again!” and “The Peacemaker at Euro-Disney.”  I mean, seriously?  Ain’t no peacemaker I know wears mouse ears.

President Sarkozy:  Whatever!  Everyone knows you’re the Peacemaker.  You can whip out the Nobel sh*t on his *ss.

President Obama:  You know, right?  I already got a peace prize, f*cker!  How do you like that, Benny?

I don’t know why they turned so foul at the end of it.  Maybe the teacher caught them passing notes.  I don’t know.  Am I the only one who thought they sounded like high school students?

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Bags of boxes and boxes of bags

This is a joke that my mother and I have with each other: Because I can’t drive to the store (no licenses for the legally blind) and I get tired of calling a taxi for every little thing, I order a lot of stuff on the internet.  Delivery has gotten super-fast and you can usually get free shipping if you try.  Even if you can’t, it’s still cheaper to ship than to pay for a taxi.  So the UPS guy knows me really well.  He actually saw me walking home from work one day, turned the truck around, and pulled over to give me a package that had just arrived.  If for some random reason he’s reading this blog, thanks UPS guy!  That was really cool.

Probably the most annoying part of all this, other than endlessly signing those “Please leave at the door” slips, is the number of boxes I end up with.  Our apartment building won’t let us throw boxes down the trash chute and we only have a dumpster outside the building on Monday evenings, and it’s a tiny dumpster.  So I inevitably end up with this big pile of boxes and no way to get rid of them.  Why not cut them up, put them in garbage bags, and put them down the trash chute that way, you ask?  All perfectly legal, all management-sanctioned, all a really bad idea.  I can’t cut up most of the boxes with scissors, so I would have to use a box-cutter, and after the incident where I accidentally stabbed myself in the wrist and had to spend a week explaining to the people I work with that I wasn’t attempting suicide, I decided that was not a viable option.

Hence my joke with my mother.  Every time she visits, I put her to work knocking down the boxes with a box-cutter and putting them in garbage bags so we can put them down the trash chute.  We end up with bags of boxes, and of course we get boxes of bags to put the boxes in, and after a while we started making up a song that goes, “Bags of boxes and boxes of bags.”  That’s it, really, lyrics-wise.  We think it’s hilarious.  We dance around while we sing it.  What brought this to mind was the unfortunate run-in I had with my current pile of boxes this morning.  My mother hasn’t visited in a while and there’s been a bit of a pile-up, so to speak.  I wasn’t paying enough attention to where I was going and knocked into the pile.  The boxes came crashing down around me–I thought I was being attacked at first, they all went for my head–and when they settled, the boxes literally came up almost waist-high.

Mom is coming to visit next weekend.  I think I may have to take her car keys before she sees the pile of boxes waiting to be put into bags.  But if they decide to attack her, at least she’ll have the box-cutter to defend herself with.

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