Bag of Poopy Snow

I may have mentioned in a previous post that my job as a vet assistant can range from scrubbing in to surgeries to literally being a pooper-scooper.

While I get the most excited about scrubbing in, all of my best stories are about the latter.

It was the winter of '12. Poop-scooping was turning out to be slightly more pleasant in the freezing cold. On a hot August day, there's nothing worse than dripping with sweat, wearing scrub pants and holding a bucket of steaming dog turds. The fact that all of the turds were now frozen and consequently less pungent was a big perk. Also, being a veterinary hospital, there was an unfortunate tendency for the dog feces not to be solid in above-freezing temperatures.

What I hadn't anticipated was how quickly my garbage bag would become heavy. The added weight of the snow surrounding each turd began to make the job increasingly difficult as the garbage bag and I both strained under the weight, but I didn't want to go inside to get a second bag because my glasses would fog up and I'd look like Chandler in that clip they always show of him wearing glasses in a sauna during the introduction to "Friends." (You know you know the clip I'm talking about.)

When I was satisfied with my clean-up job, I dragged the feces-and-snow-filled bag over to the dumpster.

The dumpster was really full. In fact, it was overflowing - I guess the garbage guys had missed a day or something, because the mound above the top rim of the dumpster was at least six inches high. The top rim of the dumpster itself was about 3 inches taller than me; almost six feet. I briefly considered leaving the garbage bag sitting on the asphalt next to the dumpster so that someone else would have to deal with it, but come on. That's a dick move. It was my bag of shit, and I was going to dispose of it properly.

After assessing the situation for a moment, I decided to just go with the first logical option - use my own brute force. (Cue laugh track.)

This is how my first attempt played out.

After scratching my head and casually looking up at the sky in case anyone was watching, I decided to give it another go, but this time to swing the bag back farther to get more momentum. (So basically the exact same thing but with feeling!)

I very badly wanted to be in a comical fury. I recall yelling "Balls!" a few times while shaking the poop-y snow-water out of my hair. In the end I couldn't really be angry and this is why:

The Harris Defense Mechanism

(Pioneered by the illustrious Joss Whedon, followed religiously by me.)

"I laugh in the face of danger! Then I hide until it goes away."
    -Xander Harris, Buffy the Vampire Slayer

"I've been in a fire fight! Well, I've been in a fire. Okay, I was fired... from a fry cook opportunity."
     -Hoban Washburne, Firefly

"I dismembered a guy with a trowel. What have you been up to?"
     -Marty, Cabin in the Woods


I've never been great at handling scary stuff. I can deal with gore and psychological thrillers - in fact, those are the best, but I cannot handle suspense peppered with sudden bursts of horror - Paranormal Activity and shit like that. It took me a while to recover from watching "Insidious."

Like a classic idiot, I chose to confront this fear by going to "Erebus," the record holder for world's largest haunted house from '05-'09. My very first haunted house (haunted anything, actually) and I decided to go all or nothing. One year I heard that they gave you a free t-shirt if you could make it all the way through the four-story haunted house without leaving out one of the emergency exits.

My friend Ella is one of the only people who can get me to do stuff like this, so we went together. She's curvy, Latina, has shorter hair than I do, and people often mistake us for a pair of lesbians. More on her later. Fast forward to the two of us, having just turned in our tickets and been directed to a large open hallway.

We stood at the entryway, only able to see red fog ahead of us. I immediately resorted to my opossum-like instinct to freeze and curl up like a dead body. I would have paid twenty more dollars not to have to go in there. Why? Why did I think this was a good idea? Fight-or-flight kicked in and it's only because of Ella that I didn't instantly "Nope" the fuck out of there.

"No. No. No. No."
"Grace, come on. Just walk forward."
"NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo."

Our compromise was that we would stay there, glued to the wall and clutching each other, and wait for the next group to enter so that we could casually follow them.

What happened instead was, a dad and his two pubescent sons appeared and Ella and I immediately latched onto them like two very high-pitched and profane barnacles. I'm talking head crabs from Half-Life here, I don't think I was at any point not clinging to a handful of a 14-year-old boy's shirt.

As we entered the first floor of the house, I was doing my best to be quiet. It was agonizing. The silence was slowly killing me, every scare was a tiny heart attack. We were about two minutes into it when my Harris Defense Mechanism kicked in - I started talking and did not shut up until we got to the gift shop half an hour later.

For example,

The gimmick this year was that we were traveling through time; we were put in these "time machines" that seemed to double as an elevator-phobic's worst nightmare, and it went pitch black as the door was closing. I totally knew an actor had slipped in with us, I knew it. (Like how I predict the entire plots of movies... see "Albatross Soup.")

"There's a dude in here. I know it. There's a dude. He's right over by the door. Hello? Hello? I know you're there - FUCK! SHIT! - I know there's a dude over there. He's going to scare us. He's - AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH SON OF A BITCH!" (I was right, of course.) "Okay, Hi. Thank you for scaring us. Nice to meet you. Have a nice day."

We scurried past an elaborate, gory operating room with a disemboweled nurse reaching towards us as we passed. "That's not very sanitary. This is how people get MRSA. Maybe you should mop before the next surgery."

To a mutant waving it's tentacles through a barred window at us, "I'm sorry they did this to you."

To my surprise and delight, some of the actors responded to my babbling. This crazy dinosaur noise came out of some guy who was on a scaffolding above us and I said, "How did he even make that noise?"
As we passed under him he hissed, "With my mouth."

Talking to and at everything that scared me, like the invaluable character in every Joss Whedon creation, was clearing my head and making the experience bearable. It began with Xander Harris, an essential member of the Scoobies despite his lack of obvious merit. The legacy was passed on to the beloved Wash, keeping the crew of Serenity grounded with his quips and nervous chatter. And then of course, Fran Kranz - who's basically every Whedonite-who-is-too-young-for-Nathan-Fillion's wet dream - graced the screen as Topher and then Marty, a champion for Xander Harris-es everywhere.

About a quarter of the way through Erebus, the employees began doing the classic haunted-house bit where they single out the most scared-looking person in the group and separate them from everyone else or make them go in the front of the group, et cetera. I naturally assumed it would be me, but to my surprise, I WAS WINNING AT THE HAUNTED HOUSE. Ella's silence and purposeful avoidance of eye contact must have been more notable than me vocalizing everything I thought, because time and time again, it was her. My stream of chatter must have come across as amused or deadpan, even though it occasionally crescendo-ed into hysterical screaming.

Also at one point one of the actors grabbed my ass, probably by accident because I'm pretty sure they aren't supposed to touch guests unless we touch them first.

Now I wish we had bought the picture taken of the five of us peeing our pants that they had on display in the gift shop. This would've been the perfect place to post it. Instead I flipped through the photos that were on the Erebus Facebook page and picked my favorite one.

Okay, one more.

"Aw, Honey, let's keep him."

God I love these.

The scariest part of the ordeal, of course, was driving through downtown Pontiac.

After years of meticulous research...

Rosie

A gift from my comrade to me
It's beautiful and it is free
Pungent and pink
Malodorous stink
She oozes self-satisfied glee.

She trots tip-of-toe and gives chase
Then presents herself right to my face
There's nothing heinous
About my cat's anus                                                            
Pride compliments her feminine grace.

G. S.

Ode to the Drunk Guy at the Two-Story McDonald's in East Lansing on St. Patrick's Day

I jumped when he yelled, "Where all the white girls at?"
It was expected, of course, but still crude
Frightened, I shrank down where I sat
Glad that from behind I look like a dude.

It was funny until he became asinine, 
Knocking trays off of tables and so on
I was terrified our table was next in line,
And I was winning at Settlers of Catan.

Now, looking back,
It was not because he was black,
Or inebriated, that was the norm.

Yet despite threatening oddities
I was flush with commodities
And took my opponents by storm.

G. S.

Albatross Soup

Yesterday I hung out with my best friend Anna and her boyfriend Miles all evening.

I had two incredible revelations while I was with them.

We were standing in the kitchen scavenging for food when Miles used "high-five" as a form of strictly-verbal positive feedback and I immediately decided to steal it from him because IT IS HILARIOUS.

Miles literally just says "High five!" like someone would say "Cool!" or "Good job!" and then when the other person holds up their hand for a high five, he has already moved on, having only meant to casually congratulate them, oblivious to the fact that his statement traditionally indicates a physical response. It's the new "Tits."

Revelation No. 1: Check.


Later that night I made the horrible discovery of the only way my boyfriend has been a bad influence on me. Here's the scenario.

We were in Anna's living room and Miles suggested a movie, an independent horror flick called "Hunger." He said it was about cannibalism, some guy puts six people in a cellar together with only water and leaves them to their own devices. (Caution - spoilers ahead.) That's all the information I had when the movie began.

It opened on a car wreck in the wilderness, and cut to the person in the passenger seat, a young kid. Being one of those people, I immediately started asking questions.

"Is that kid going to be one of the people in the cellar?"

"No, just watch."

Then we see the kid look slowly to his left, and the camera pans over to show a dead woman in the driver's seat, presumably his mother.


I sat in contemplative silence for about twenty seconds before shouting, "The kid grows up to be the guy who puts the six people in the cellar because he's crazy because when he was little he got in a car accident and had to eat his mom to survive!"


I knew that I was correct when Miles burst out with a "GodDAMMIT, Grace!" and started looking for something else for us to watch. (We ended up with Patton Oswalt stand-up instead, which is way better.)

I know it was a dick move on my part. It is absolutely my boyfriend Connor's fault that I did it. I swear, it's his fucking hobby to accurately predict the entire plot of a movie from the first sixty seconds. On the off-chance he isn't right, he usually consoles himself by pointing out gaping plot holes. I get so mad at him for this.

That being said, I was extremely proud of myself for guessing the entire movie in the first minute and saw the hypocrisy and did not care. Looking back, it's been creeping up on me for a while. Every Wednesday night when I watch "Modern Family" with my parents, I spend the whole episode calling out what's going to happen just before it does and then saying how I could totally be a television writer. It was only a matter of time before my journey to the dark side was complete. (Also my parents might kick me out.)

To all friends of myself and my boyfriend Connor, let this be a warning: We are ruthless, we are not afraid to ruin nostalgic old favorites or shatter fond memories, we take every opening title as a challenge, and one way or another, we will absolutely (and shamelessly) ruin the movie for you.

End Revelation No. 2.

How to Blergh.

I'm having trouble drawing pictures to go along with my posts. I had a really funny idea the other day for a doodle to go along with a draft titled "Poopy Snow Bag" (it's a gem) but it turns out, I'm not great at drawing people unless they're standing, facing forwards, hands at their sides. I'm working on it. IT'S THE CLIMB. 

Because this is only my fifth or sixth post and anyone who doesn't know me doesn't have a great idea of my sense of humor, that "IT'S THE CLIMB." was purely satirical. The impression that it leaves - that of a hockey mom in jeans with rhinestones on the back pockets and a key-chain with a breast cancer awareness ribbon on it sporting the above phrase, coined by some person I don't know, made worse by Miley Cyrus - being a departure from my actual persona, contrasts in a way that some would consider ironic humor. For all anyone on the internet knows, I am a hockey mom who goes tanning and buys all of my vehicles new even though it's a horrible financial decision because they decrease in value a huge amount as soon as you drive it off the lot. When in reality, I'm a swell young gal who just likes hanging out and cracking wise.

I promise I won't do that more than a few more times. I don't over-explain in real life in a condescending way, I over-explain using feigned condescension that is exaggerated just enough so that the explainee recognizes that I'm not over-explaining because I think they don't understand, I'm over-explaining to make fun of people who over-explain for real. 

Imagine I said all of that kind of deadpan and with sort of bad breath - I imagine that's what talking to me in person is like. 

Grace write funny someday.

It's the climb.