It's not easy being green

I've found out something about myself this weekend. And it's not good. Sometimes a journey of self discovery can be a positive thing, but you know what? That ain't the case this time.

I suck at house painting.

See, the better part of my room had been painted a lovely, deep, rich green color, but the corner section still needed paint where the desk had been. We didn't have enough of that green to do the two coats that would be required, but we did have most of a gallon of a lighter green. Jess decided that would be a good undercoat, then we could use the dark green over the top. So we slapped on the light green, waited for it to dry, then tested a little swatch of the dark green over top. Once that dried, you couldn't tell that spot from the rest of the wall that had been painted with two coats of the darker paint. Sweet! So I took the high road, she took the low road, and while neither one of us got to Scotland, the wall did get a second coat.

Somehow, though, I just didn't feel like my paint job was covering as well as hers. She finished before I did, and I continued on until I had the upper half of the wall covered. It was late at night, and I started to wonder if my eyes were just fucking with me, as they are wont to do when I attempt to distinguish between colors that are anywhere near each other on the spectrum, especially when I'm tired (and sober). It just seemed like a good idea to go to sleep and then everything would look better in the morning.

Only it didn't. In fact, the sunlight was an especially harsh critic. You could tell exactly where Jess' paint job stopped and mine started. It looked like I had been huffing household products while working. We sent Nick in to look and he came out, shaking his head, chuckling, and said, "It looks like some crazy camouflage shit in there!"

So Jess and I went out today to get another quart of the dark green for touch up. And she teased my bad-painting ass all over Lowe's, through the paint department, then over into kitchens and bathrooms, and all up and down the storage and organization aisle. When we picked up our paint, I asked her if she thought I could be trusted to touch up the wall.

The sentence hadn't even finished leaving my lips when she interjected, "I'll do it." No room for ifs, ands, or buts in that statement. It wasn't a question, it wasn't an offer, it was a flat statement of fact, a slightly nicer way of saying, "You are not allowed to brush anything on the walls in this house unless it is primer, because you are obviously even more mentally challenged than I had previously been led to believe."

She's not wrong.


Really, could it have looked any worse if I'd gotten drunk, put the brush between my ass cheeks, and painted it blindfolded? Jeez!

I also found out something else about myself earlier this week, and that's the fact that I am an incredible baby when I'm having my eyebrows tweezed. The way I sat there and yowled and bitched, you'd have thought Jess was ripping my eyeballs out while she was at it. My brows look a lot better for it, I'll admit, but Jesus parasailing Christ, I'd rather have the hair ripped out of my monkey any day!


A smooth monkey is a happy monkey. Is that a monkey smoothie?

And yet, though I am paintbrush challenged and a huge sissy about facial tweezing, I am still better off than the dumb fucker I saw in the grocery store earlier this week.

I'd gone in the store to buy some Vernors, because there is civilization in Illinois after all, and after I put it in the car, I rembered that I'd meant to buy a bottle of wine. When I came back in, I heard the most unsettling noise coming from the general area of the cash registers, like some wild animal had gotten its leg stuck in the dairy case. Of course, I had to look. Rounding the corner, I was rewarded with the vision of about half a dozen male store employees sitting on top of a particularly quarrelsome man, who turned out to be the source of the wild-animal bellowing. I don't know what he did to attract their attention in the first place, but he definitely wasn't reacting well to being detained. He struggled and tried to squirm and flop around, but the employees had him pinned down pretty well. The entire time this was going on, he alternated between his anally surprised elephant noises and screaming, loudly enough to be heard in the next section of the store that was separated by a lobby, "YOU'RE HURTING MEEEEE!!! I CAN'T BREEEEEEATHE!!!"

Um, no. I believe when one can't breathe, one cannot bleat and scream and make foolish noises that can be heard in the next store. And I have no doubt that it probably does hurt to be squashed under six men (no, smartass, I don't know from experience), but I was pretty sure it wasn't being done without reason. The dumb fuck continued his little demonstration the entire time I was in the liquor store, which was not a short wait, as there were about 20 customers checking out and only one register open, and when I left, there were four police cars waiting to escort Mr. Congeniality away.

I'll bet he cries when he gets his eyebrows tweezed to become someone's pretty bitch in the clink. And he probably can't paint a wall any better than I can.