Only the Essentials

It’s one of those absolutely lousy, dreary, chilly, rainy days today. And of course, I forgot to bring my sweater and can’t find my umbrella.

A little while ago I decided to go over to the campus bookstore to put the following essential items on my staff charge account:

1. Excedrin Extra-Strength or Excedrin Migraine
2. A big-ass Diet Pepsi (they don’t sell Diet Coke, bastards)
3. Peanut Butter M&Ms
4. A CD (nothing in particular, just whatever caught my eye)

I decided to drive over since it was drizzling and as I was making the drive, I noticed that there were millions of cars in the parking lots – odd since it’s summer. But then I remembered that it’s freshman orientation and I thought crap, I’m never gonna find a parking place at the bookstore. But, wonder of all wonders, as I drove up the hill I saw an open space, and I zipped around the corner and into the space far faster than was reasonable, and walked in the increasing drizzle into the store.

The place was packed, but I found all the stuff I desperately needed. Hint: Excedrin Migraine and Excedrin Extra-Strength have exactly the same ingredients. 250 mg aspirin, 250 mg acetaminophen, and 65 mg caffeine. Just FYI. Oh, and it packs one hell of a wallop. I can’t remember the last time I used the word “wallop.” I promise to excise it from my vocabulary immediately.

I buy CDs at the bookstore that I wouldn’t consider buying with actual money because payments on my staff charge account are deducted in very small increments from my paycheck, and I never even miss them. So I’m more willing to try stuff just on a whim. I was hoping they’d have the Bebel Gilberto CD, since I’ve been wanting to try it out, but they did not. So the two CDs that caught my eye were The Beta Band’s Heroes To Zeroes and the ridiculously well-advertised self-titled Franz Ferdinand album. I went with The Beta Band and it seems all right so far. I won’t know how I like it for sure until I give it a few spins in the car, which is my testing ground for all new music.

So I grabbed all of my emergency supplies and headed for the register, dodging four hundred thousand soon-to-be-freshmen in their varsity jackets and tees and stuff and their crazy weird-question-asking, trying-to-buy-books-for-the-fall-even-though-it’s-obvious-that-fall-books-aren’t-here-yet parents. Two things:

1. If the textbook section of the bookstore is completely empty, why would you go ask every employee in the bookstore how to figure out where your books for fall classes are? It’s freakin’ JUNE. Buy them when you get to campus for real or order them from Amazon.
2. It’s a rule, I think, that if you’re a high school varsity athlete, you have to constantly wear high school varsity athletic apparel of some sort until someone in your freshman year of college lets you know that it isn’t cool anymore. I admit, I did it too. And if you become a varsity athlete in college, especially at a Division I school, you don’t even have to buy clothes anymore. You can just walk around all day in the sweats and shoes and tees and bags and whatever else the corporate sponsors provide for you. All varsity athletes at my college were decked out in head-to-toe Adidas all day, every day. Anyway.

I paid for my stuff and left, dodging a couple of people trying to get me to buy extra-long bed linens and lofts (hi, I’ve been working here for three years, thanks) and went out to the parking lot. It was pouring rain at this point and this is the sight that greeted me when I got outside:

And as I walked to my car, yet another car was on its way in to park next to Stupid Girl, which would have blocked me in completely for who knows how long. Luckily, that woman saw me and backed out, but I still wasn’t entirely sure how in the hell I was going to get out of the lot to let her in.

But through some miracle, or deadly awesome driving skills, I managed to execute one absolutely hellacious four-point maneuver that got me out of the lot without hitting a single thing. Thank goodness for my Neon with its outstanding maneuverability – that’s gotten me out of a tight spot more than once, and that’s a main reason I bought another one when the old one started to fall apart.

I’m glad I was able to make it out of the lot, though, or else I’d have gone completely apeshit ballistic, probably yelling at the Holiday Inn driver who was sitting there in his van, and keying the truck and Stupid Girl’s car on sheer principle. I have a scale of moral relativity or something when it comes to illegal parking. I’m totally fine with parking in a student space, or in a no-parking zone, as long as I’m not blocking anyone in or out. I don’t park in handicapped spaces, though. And I never, ever, EVER double-park or block people in lots, and I hate when other people do it. It happened all the time on the street where I used to live in Evanston. People would blatantly park right in the damn middle of a functioning lane of traffic in rush hour and go into Starbucks to GET IN LINE for a mochalatte or whatever the hell they so desperately needed.

Bleargh. I hate those people.

Note to self: pills work a lot better when you put them in your mouth and swallow them. This is the third time in a week that I’ve gotten pills out of the packaging and put them on my desk, only to forget about them for a half-hour until I wonder why in the hell they aren’t working yet and turn to the left and see them still sitting there on the desk. Duh.

Ooh, yay. It’s almost lunch time.