I REMEMBERED!

Ha!  I remembered the last thing I was going to write about earlier, and while it's not a big deal, the fact that I remembered without, like, a week going by makes me happy and I'm going to write about it anyway!  YAY!

Ok, so I've been having the weirdest dreams lately. Most of them are what I think of as "Stress Dreams" which I would categorize as the kind of dreams that are fairly common where people dream they show up to class and realize they have a test and they haven't studied for it, or they have a presentation at work and realize they are unprepared.  I don't remember all of them, but the one that sticks out is that I was taken on one of those TV reality baking shows and was told I had to decorate a cake, and I'd be judged on it, but I had no idea how to decorate a cake.  Looking back, it's actually kind of funny, because I was standing behind a big white cake and completely panicking because I had no idea what to do.  I remember my last thought before waking up was

"Sprinkles! I'll put some f*cking sprinkles on it and nobody will know the difference!"

I'm such a problem solver.

Last night, though, was something else.  In my "second sleep" or the time I went back to sleep after being awake for a few hours, I dreamed I was in my bedroom, still in bed (and it was so realistic, which is what made the dream so upsetting) and my sister ran into the room and pointed at the covers and said "OH MY GOD, IT'S GOT A TAIL!" and a lump in the covers started moving towards me and I jumped on it, thinking there was a mouse under it and I didn't want it to bite me.  So I'm holding this big, wiggling lump of sheets, pinning it underneath me and trying not to let whatever is under there get away, and then she starts yelling at me because of something to do with mom. I don't remember what it was, but I know I had forgotten to do something for her, or I had failed to realize something that had to do with her, and the whole time I'm holding down this...thing...under the covers and so I couldn't move or get away.  I felt so bad for whatever it was I'd done (or not done) and I was panicking because the wiggling vermin under the covers was thrashing around, and it has somehow gotten inside my shirt, but I knew that if I took my hand off of it, it would start running around and I'd lose my mind.  I finally got the thing to stop wiggling and I took my hand off of it, and a cockroack the size of an athletic shoe started climbing out of my pajama top, and that's when I woke up in a blind panic, slapping at the front of my shirt and spitting because the dream roach's antenna had gotten into my mouth. 

It was awful and took almost a minute before my awake brain took over and I realized I wasn't being infested.  I honestly can't understand why I didn't remember this dream earlier to write about it, but in a way I'm glad I didn't because now I've got the heebies pretty badly.

Now, would anyone like to analyze these dreams for me?  I'm not sure why I'm having stress dreams, as I don't think I'm particularly stressed, or why I'm dreaming of roaches bigger than my foot!  Send help!

OH, Y'ALL.

Today I went to my first monthly maintenance meeting for the weight loss program we've been doing.

I. Hated. It. Exclamation Point.

I hated it so much that it's hilarious.  I mean that, I was on the verge of cracking up the entire time I was in the room, and the fact that I didn't do so is proof that I have some semblance of self control deep down.  This was how I felt about 15 minutes in:

via GIPHY

Don't get me wrong, I know it's important for us to continue going to these meetings. We need to be held accountable, we need encouragement and guidelines and all of that, and we need the resources to continue with the work we started, but geez.  The worst part of trying to lose weight, and I mean this universally and I'm guilty of it as well, is doing nothing but talking about what you're eating and how you're exercising, and how you aren't doing what you're supposed to be doing. That kind of thing bores me into an itching fit.

That was literally what we did the whole time.  THE. WHOLE. TIME.

Granted, this was an entirely new class of people and we had to do the "go around the room and tell a little bit about ourselves."

via GIPHY

But honestly, I thought we'd been there for an hour and when I looked at the clock, we'd only been there for 20 minutes.  It was brutal.  We had to listen to this man describe every vegetable that he put in a salad.  I'm not exaggerating.  Instead of just saying "I eat salads with no meat" he listed off the entire produce inventory for Whole Foods. He also didn't know how to pronounce "cruciferous." One lady had to explain, in painstaking detail, her day and what she does in it and how she militantly doesn't allow herself to eat except on a schedule and that she asks to take home food from parties just so she can throw it away.  At least two women spent their time berating themselves, like, almost to the point of pulling out a cat-o-nine-tails (not the fun kind) and scourging their own flesh because they'd gained weight.  Steve, one other lady, and I gave a fairly abbreviated description of how we'd been doing since we left the main part of the program and the rest was just some weird self flagellation or grocery list recitation.  It was so uncomfortable that I came very close to getting laugh-in-church syndrome.  I kept trying to catch Steve's eye, but he wouldn't look at me because he was feeling the same way.  Oh, and the topper of the whole thing is that the lady just interrupted me while I was talking and then moved on, which really endeared her to me for life!  Haha.

I know that what we are in is basically a support group, and I know that these people need to talk, and I'm hoping that now that we know one another we don't have to do that part of it again and we can get to talking about nutrition and exercise and more helpful stuff instead of a group misery session.  If we don't, I'm not sure I'll survive . 

via GIPHY

By the way, in case you haven't noticed, I like gifs! 

BLOGGED ALONG THE WAY: JERSEY GIRL EDITION - MAY 18, 2017

I had one job.

Ok, I had more than one job, but I had one important job and I screwed it up. I am worthless.

When Steve invited me to go on this trip, he basically left it up to me to figure out what we were going to do when we went to New York City. I'm not good at that sort of thing, because I am always worried I'll pick things to do that he won't enjoy, but I was determined to do it this time to prove I was at least capable of it and so that we could have a fun day.  I got some advice from a friend who'd beenhere before, and although I didn't schedule everything down to the minute (that kind of thing isn't any fun) I did have a list of what we'd do when we got there.  I also asked Steve to pick one thing he'd like to do, and he managed to get us tickets to see Phantom if the Opera at the Majestic Theater on Broadway, so all we had to do was work around our 2:00 curtain time for whatever else we did. Easy peasy!

Well...

As I've said, where we are staying isn't a big city or even a big town.  It's a bit of an extended suburb with businesses and homes, but not much else that I could find. The one thing that seemed to be perfect (and I mentioned it earlier) was that it had a train station with a direct train that would go straight into the city.  It was less than a 10 minute drive away from our hotel and should make getting to where we needed to go simple.  That was the cornerstone of my plan and we set off with the expectation that we'd be getting into NYC by 9:45 am.  

After a tiny GPS hiccup, we found the station nestled in the middle of a neighborhood full of houses. It was a lovely, clean, landscaped place and set me to ease at once about the NJ transit system. However, we figured out pretty darn quick that the town of Short Hills, NJ (or whatever this place calls itself) didn't want us, or seemingly anyone who didn't live there, riding on their train. There was no place for us to park. Every single parking lot we found was only for residents. You had to have a sticker to park there. On the street the parking was only for an hour or two hours, and although we parked illegally for a few minutes to look at our phones to figure out what to do, we couldn't find clue of what a visitor was supposed to do or where to go.  To be fair, and I'm determined to be fair, maybe we missed something obvious, but from where we sat, it was pretty clear we weren't going to be able to get on that train. Had we known this situation before hand, we could have called a cab, or an Uber to have brought us out there, but we didn't and time was by now slipping past quickly. We just sat there trying to figure out what to do. I felt terrible and wanted to cry because I hadn't made a contingency plan. I'd screwed up! The day hadn't even started, and I had already put us in a bad spot. Sigh.

Steve saved the day by finding that we could take a ferry into the city, but we had to drive through New Jersey to get to the port. Granted, there might have been an easier way, but for two people as unaware of public transportation and such as we are, we couldn't find it.  So we set off.  We figured if the muppets can take Manhattan, so could we!  ONWARD!!!!

Driving through New Jersey is a little like driving in Atlanta, if Atlanta were full of angry vikings that have a grudge against you, all driving SUV's like they are in a demolition derby, and if Atlanta was on fire and located in an unused corner of hell. WTF, people? I've been in traffic before, bad traffic even, but this was a different animal all together. Lanes would merge without warning, people just edge in front of you at ridiculous speeds, and sometimes they'd ride next to you in a single lane just to get in front of you. All I can say is that the people up here drive like assholes. A middle finger to them all! Also, WTF are toll lanes supposed to be?!  You go through the gate, and there are no lines past that, so everyone is just in one FUBAR knot of vehicles trying to weave into lines that barely exist!  Seriously, W. T. F?  That is NOT an efficient way to do things!  Steve was the real hero that day. I'm honestly surprised that he didn't get fed up with me twitching and squeaking in abject fear the whole time and just kick me out of the car and into moving traffic, but thankfully he didn't and after what seemed to be an eternity in some gothic netherworld of punishment for past traffic violations, we made it to Port Imperial. Whew.

I like riding on boats. :)

We finally made it into the midtown area on the ferry and started walking. It was hot, but not terrible, and we figured out where we were and where we were going pretty quickly. There was so much to see, and so many people.  It was a constant stream of sensory input coming from very side. I'm not sure where we started out, but we made our way through the streets and headed to Times Square. I'd never seen anything like it! There was so much going on, and unfortunately, although I try hard not to, I apparently stand out very clearly as a tourist. I mean, it isn't like I'm waving a selfie stick around and I'm not wearing a t-shirt that says where I'm from. I assume it's because of my wide eyed, mouth open stare as I looked around me.  Steve doesn't have this problem.  Steve looks mean and intimidating. Me? I look like a sucker, I guess.  Sigh.  We were approached many times by people who wanted to "give" us things...for a donation. We lied and said we weren't carrying cash, and those people snatched back their things and disappeared, thank goodness.  I didn't want their CDs anyway.  There were a lot of  "characters" on Times Square that you can take your pictures with if you want to pay. Two topless girls wearing body paint, a kind-of Mickey Mouse, a kind-of Elmo and the like. No thank you, please! I just want to be left alone to stare at things with my mouth open, if you don't mind!  At some point we apparently offended a local guy who was trying to talk to us. I was called rude by a New Yorker! I'm not sure if I should be ashamed or proud! Haha.

We walked across Broadway and we made our way to Rockefeller Center! I got to see the weird gold guy (Prometheus, apparently)  in person! I also learned that Steve doesn't like to take selfie pictures with me because it is "too hard'" so...well, ok, then. Nice. We went into the Comcast Building and looked around for a bit. We got tickets to Top of the Rock, another recommendation by someone in the know.  It's easier to get tickets to that than the Empire State Building and the view is just as good! We didn't actually have to wait that long to go up, thank goodness, and it was totally worth it!  I usually don't like heights, even in buildings, but I was fascinated at the view! There was so much to see and I took lots of pictures. A nice man offered to take some pictures of me since he saw me struggling to take a selfie with the buildings in the background.  I also managed to get in a couple of pictures with Steve, so maybe years from now people won't assume I was in New York by myself. Screw not wanting to take pictures with me!  I'd climb on his back and shanghai his damn phone if I had to. >:(  We stood up there for some time and I was duly impressed! New York is pretty freaking neato.

When we descended from the top, we decided get something to eat, and I'm pretty sure that saved us from being in a very bad place later on. I wasn't that hungry, and had it been up to me we would have just grabbed something quick so we could go back outside, but Steve was determined we should eat in a sit down place instead of just grabbing a snack. We found a burger place in the basement of the Comcast Building and had lunch. When we were done, We stopped and took some pictures of the Atlas statue and St. Peter's Cathedral, and started to notice a lot of sirens and emergency vehicles going by. At that point, we were walking towards the theater where we had tickets to see the show. We knew we would be a little early, but didn't want to run the risk of missing anything. However, when we were trying to walk towards 7th avenue we kept getting blocked by police.  No explanation, just that we couldn't walk that way. We wound up at an intersection where a crowd of people were standing and a veritable tangle of emergency vehicles, black SUVs and police were gathered, but we couldn't tell what was going on. We we were just told we couldn't go any further. Time was getting close for us to be at the theater, but we were told that the entire street was closed. We practically ran down every street and kept getting blocked, but I was determined to get Steve to the theater to do the one thing that he'd shown interest in! We finally found a place to cross over, which was several blocks from where we needed to be, but we made it just in the nick of time to pick up our tickets. It wasn't until we were waiting in line to get into the theater that we found out about the terrible accident that had happened in Times Square. It was then that I realized that had we not stopped to eat, there was a very good chance we would have been where that guy plowed through the pedestrians. I'm not saying we would have been hurt, but we probably would gave seen it happen, so thank goodness for Steve being hungry! I feel terrible about those people who got hurt, and the girl who was killed.  I hope none of the people who were hit were the people trying to give us stuff this morning.  I'm also glad, as much as you can say glad in a situation like this, that the guy wasn't a terrorist. We realized that might have been why the FBI (Steve recognized the black SUVs) had been called in, because cars running into crowds of pedestrians has been the MO of a lot of terrorist situations around the world.  Ugh. So far I managed to screw up the transportation and almost made us witness, if not an actual part, to a horrible accident.  Maybe I'm not the greatest travel director in the world.

We had very nice seats in the theater and the play was really amazing. I'd seen Phantom performed in Nashville by a touring company years ago, but seeing it again in a much more intimate setting was great! I'm very familiar with the story, but I have to say that this was the first time that the Phantom really creeped me out. I have also realized that now I am more fascinated with the props, costumes and stage "magic" than I am with the acting (although it was great, but my eye for technical and practical effects was much more keen.)  It was late afternoon when we got out, and we were going to take a Circle Line Tour, but we'd just missed the last boat before the night cruises began, and since we were exhausted, filthy (seriously, that city is very dirty), and still had to drive back to Short Hills, we ended up leaving. I would love to go back sometime when we didn't have anything planned and just wander the city. Find some good hole in the wall places to eat and see the museums, but you have to have a whole lot more time to do it than one day! It was a fun adventure of a day, except for the drunk driver situation.  I do like New York, but I'll need to get to know it better before I know if I heart it!

UGH. MORE FEELINGS

Today I woke up out of a dead sleep in a complete panic. 

I've been waking up this way, every day, for going on almost three months now.  I wrote a post about this a bit ago and I'd hoped that things would ease up, but they haven't.  It's not just a brief feeling of panic that goes away quickly, but something that starts almost the minute that I open my eyes and just gets worse until I manage to climb out of bed and force myself to think of other things while I'm getting ready for work. Even then, it follows me around.  I HATE IT.

I decided to try and figure this out when it had been going on for a few weeks.  If I could understand what is bothering me enough to cause the panic attack, maybe I could fix that and make it stop.  So I started to keep a mental log every morning when it happened to try and get a better understanding of it. But it isn't that cut and dry. When I first wake up, I'm not thinking of anything in particular, especially not anything that would be worrying me. Almost immediately my hands and chest start to tingle, my heart starts to race, I can't breathe, I get hot all over and my skin starts to crawl.  There is literally no thought in my head causing it, it just starts for no reason. However, apparently the way my brain works is like it's thinking "Ok, I'm panicking, and I can't panic without a reason! Here is a reason!" and then the things that bother me come crashing in on me.  And the stuff I am suddenly anxious about, like: I worry about my brother's surgery and if it will be successful and how my mom is going to handle it, or the fact that I have a close friendship that seems to have changed in some fundamental way that I don't understand with zero explanation and that concerns me, or that I have another very good friend who is sick and  may not get better, not to mention my general job situation.  All of those things are certainly things that are concerning, but none of them should be waking me up in a blind panic in the morning and following me around all day.

Look, I know I sound crazy.  I know this.  Thing is, I don't really think this is a thing that is all in my head.  The fact that I'm waking up tabula rasa and still in a panic, before the thought of the day crashes in on me, must mean that something physical is going on, right?  Some kind of weird chemical thing?  I don't know. I should probably see a doctor, but what do I say?  If something hurts, that's easy to explain, but when you say "constant panic attacks" all they want to do is drug the personality out of you.  I hope that doesn't happen. 

Sigh.  Anyway, sorry to complain.  I just hate feeling like this.  I'd like to feel normal again and not worry beyond what a normal person does.  I know people who don't give a damn about anything, or if they do, they don't let it get to them too badly.  I wish I could be like that.  I stopped trying to avoid feeling stuff and look what happened!  Feelings are bullshit.  I was right.  People don't have patience with your feelings.  They don't want to hear about them and they certainly don't want to get involved. They just avoid you til you feel better, or at least until you stop talking about them.  I don't want to bother people.  I know I'm bothering you right now, gentle reader, but I'd like to think that if you are here, you care a little bit. Heh. 

Thank you for listening.  I hope this goes away soon.

DANG NATURE, YOU SCARY

This isn't a real entry.

Well, it is, but not a normal one.  I just came across this video on YouTube and developed a brand new phobia!  Please join me!



All together now:  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWTFAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!

STUPID NATURE

Do you want to know what happened to us this weekend?

Yellow-jackets! That's what happened to us. 

Stupid, evil, vindictive yellow-jackets.

Do you remember a couple of entries ago, I mentioned that I got stung by a bee while mowing the lawn?  Well, it turned out it wasn't a bee.  Unknown to us, a very large colony of yellow-jackets had built a ground nest near the edge of our property.  It's right up against the property line with our neighbors, so it isn't a place we spend a whole lot of time hanging out and we had no idea  it was there.  The last time I mowed, I guess I just barely disturbed them because I was only stung once, and because Steve said there were some bees hanging around the crepe myrtle, that's what we thought got me.  This time, though, I apparently did more than disturb them.  I must have disturbed them and said something horrible about their mother, if their reaction was any indication!

Since getting stung last time, I was careful to wear blue-jeans when I mowed.  I should have worn tennis shoes, too, but I didn't.  I thought that jeans would be enough, because really, statistically, how often can expect to get stung while mowing your lawn if it's only happened once in 14 years?

So I'm working on the last section of our yard, which is the big part in the front.  I usually start by going around the entire perimeter, and then sectioning it off.  This time, I was doing that, but decided that I needed to go over the same ground since I missed a spot, which was apparently the wrong thing to do.  I hit the nest twice, and as I went over it the second time, they came after me.  The first one got me in the ear!  THE MOTHER-EFFING EAR!  As I sat there, holding my ear, I got stung on my foot, my hand and my calf.  I panicked.  I literally couldn't figure out how to get away.  I realized, way too late that I was on a riding lawnmower, which I then managed to drive into the center of the lawn.  I was still in a panic, so I couldn't figure out how to turn it off, so I just jumped off and ran into the house.  For all I knew at that point, they were still following me.  I ran through the house, stripped off my clothes and I jumped into the shower to drown anything that was still on me.  Poor Steve had no idea what was going on, so he walked over to where I had been and he got swarmed.  While I was in the shower, I heard him running through the house and getting into the other shower.  He'd been stung 11 times on his legs.  He'd still managed to get the lawnmower inside and the garage closed, so points go to Steve in this instance.  We are so lucky that neither one of us is allergic, but we still popped Benadryl just in case.

Y'all, I'd like to say I was stoic and able to deal with the pain with no problem, but I'd be lying.  I always believed I had a pretty high tolerance for pain, but I was proven very, very wrong.  I'd only been stung 4 times, and I think the three on my hand/foot/leg weren't that bad, but it was the one in my ear that nearly drove me insane.  Imagine someone stabbing a needle into your ear and wiggling it around for hours without stopping.  The pain wouldn't back off.  The longer I sat there, the worse it got.  Steve said that his stings hurt, but they weren't that bad.  Me, I just laid down and cried.  I did everything I could think of to help them: we put Neosporin on the stings, we crushed up aspirin applied that, baking soda paste, cortisone cream, but nothing helped.  I finally decided that if I could just go to sleep, I could get away from it.  But I couldn't go to sleep.  My muscles were twitching so bad that I couldn't even doze off.  I tried icing my ear and applying heat to it, but nothing helped.  I even kept trying to take Tylenol and stuff like that, but nothing touched it.  We finally had to go to Target and buy some kind of after sting stuff (that did nothing) and I bought some Z-quil because I figured that if I couldn't go to sleep on my own, I'd drug myself into it.  By the time we got home, my ear was hurting a tiny bit less, but my hand and foot had begun swelling up like balloons.  I did fall asleep, which was a blessing, but I didn't stay asleep for long.  I finally just got up, took the sleeping stuff, and went to sleep for real.  I was going to avoid the pain as much as possible.  That probably doesn't speak well about my coping skills!  Steve said his stings had stopped hurting, but had started to itch like crazy, so he stayed in the living-room all night so that he wouldn't wake me up while he scratched. 

I woke up at around 4:00 that morning, and took more Benadryl, which was not smart on top of all of the other stuff I'd been taking, which made me too drunk to go to church!  Steve was not hurtinganymore, his bites were itchy but he was ok, so he went ahead to church and had to run the sound for me.  I slept for a long, long time.  When I finally woke up, I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, and...you guys, my ear was 3 times bigger than an ear should be!  It was so gross!  I had a cauliflower ear, for real! It was so swollen that I couldn't even bend my earlobe!  My foot and hand were also swollen up so badly that they didn't look like they belonged on my body.  You know how babies have those little fat, boneless looking hands and feet?  That is what I had on one side of my body.  When I'd walk, my foot looked like a water balloon being compressed.  YUCK! So much yuck!  I WAS A MUTANT! 

 

Artist's Rendition 

I hid in the house for the rest of the day like I was the Elephant Man or something.  I probably could have gone to church that night, the pain was all but gone, but I was afraid everyone would be staring at my ear.  Seriously, it was like freak-show big.  It was still really swollen when I went to bed, but it did go down a lot during the night so I was able to come to work today. Besides, I can stand three people looking at my ear, but not dozens and dozens of them looking.  

At any rate, now we are mainly just very itchy.  My hand a foot are still swollen, but that is getting better.  I'll be glad when I can wear a normal shoe again, though.  We'll be lucky if Steve has legs left after he finishes scratching them. He really did get stung a lot, but he was able to stand the pain much better than me.  I felt like such a weenie.  

So, that was my weekend!  I hope yours was much better! :)

OOPS

I'm a terrible person.

I mean, I'm not a terrible person on purpose (at least not normally) but I did something recently that makes me feel like a terrible person.

I think I may have mentioned this before, but one of the members of our church is a severely autistic man.  Since I don't know know enough about autism and it's different forms, I don't know how to explain his issues, but he's very childlike and he has the amazing ability to know what day a certain date fell on, and he can remember birthdays and dates with freaky accuracy.  In fact, that's kind of his jam.  When he meets you for the first time, he'll ask your birthday and even if he sees you once every three years, he'll remember when it is.

OK, so one of the things I do in my job is update and print the bulletins (you know, the little programs that tell you the order of service and when the next potluck will be.)  We have a new one every week, so I have to change the date on the outside each time.  I've put the wrong day on them a time or two, which is great fun when everyone and their mom let's you know you've screwed it up, but I'm human and it happens.  At any rate, I'm usually pretty faithful to remember to change the month and day, if for no other reason than I don't want 10 old ladies and 40 engineers telling me the date on the front is wrong!

/Exposition

When the year changed over, I forgot to change the year on the front of the bulletin.  It's an honest mistake, since I'm usually so focused on getting the month and day right AND since it's the thing I change least often, but still, every date in the bulletin still said 2013 up until about the third week in January. I'm guessing it's not something other people look at very often, either, since it took that long for someone to point it out to me. However, by the time they said something, I'd already printed the bulletins for that week and couldn't justify wasting the paper just for a date misprint, so I fixed the digital file so that the year would be right for the next week on.  Well, apparently that week was the one where someone must have pointed out the mistake to the poor autistic man, because as soon as he could, he came over and said "It's 2014, right? Not 2013?"  He looked really concerned and so I said "You're right, it's 2014, I messed it up."  At that point, I didn't feel bad, just dumb, but then he said "It's not my fault is it? It's not my fault?"  I told him that it was all my fault, and he walked away.

Look, I know I didn't do this on purpose and I know that I don't need to feel bad about forgetting to change the date. Intellectually, I know this.  But here is this man, who apparently thinks that he controls the correct flow of time by remembering the date, and because I accidentally forgot to change a number, I threw a cog in his universe. I temporarily disturbed his personal space-time continuum to the point where he thought it was his fault that the date was wrong and I feel awful about it.  Seriously, it's been two weeks and it still nags at me!

This is probably a dumb thing to worry about, but geez.  I've never been responsible for throwing someone's world into chaos before.  Maybe this is going to be my super villain origin story.  Ugh, what if I become this man's personal nemesis?

Great, now I feel terrible AND drunk with power.

UGH

I feel kind of icky about something I did the other day.  It was actually about 3 weeks ago and I'm still uncomfortable with myself for it.  It wasn't anything bad, per se, but still, I did something I can't stand when other people do and it made me not like myself very much.

There is a store nearby that sells artisan jewelry.  You can tell it's artisan because some of it is gorgeous, some of it is frightfully ugly, and it's all way overpriced.  That being said, Sara and I were perusing the shelves one day a while back and the sales girl was doing her salesperson thing hardcore.  Instead of letting us look on our own, she basically followed us around the entire store and told us about the stuff we were looking at.  Sometimes that can be a good thing, but when you're really just looking, it can get old fast.  Still, she was just doing her job, and she was annoying me.

I'd stopped at one of the cases to look at something and she launched into a spiel about how the designer is "so talented" and had won an Emmy award for costume design by designing jewelry for the Showtime/HBO show, The Tudors.  She went on to tell me "She had to design each piece separately. You couldn't just go an get stuff like that, you had to make it individually!"

OK, first off...the history of Tudor England is kind of my jam.  It's one of the only historical time frames that I've purposefully researched on my own, without having to do it for a class or anything.  I enjoy the whole sordid mess and I'm fairly knowledgeable about it, especially the reign of Henry VIII.  Second off, as someone who studied art history, I've done a LOT of looking at portraits of the time, and I've studied them as closely as I can without being able to actually stand near them with my nose pressed against the frames. Third off (thirdly?) I love jewelry. Not just wearing it and making it, but I love knowing about it, especially historical pieces of significance, and the dynastic portraits of the Tudor line have a lot of wonderful, beautiful pieces included.   I guess what I'm saying is that I'm quite familiar with what she was talking about.

I don't know why what she said rubbed me the wrong way, and I don't know what possessed me to do it, but I went into smug mode and proceeded to pretentiously tell her that of course each costume piece had to be specifically made, because the real pieces would have been made specifically for the people and blah blah, Holbein, blah blah...smug.  She was kind of taken aback, I think.  I used my education to be a know it all bitch, and I am really uncomfortable with that!  I hate when other people use what they know to try and sound smarter-than-thou, especially when they're talking to someone who would have no reason to know the things they're talking about.  The only thing that accomplishes is making them sound like a pretentious ass, and I don't want to be like that.

So, I'm publicly calling myself out for being an art-snobby, know-it-all beastie.  I'm sorry the universe had to see me like that!