I went on a date the other night. We went to a Vietnamese restaurant. Since I'm culturally inept, he told me what to get, and whatever it was looked like this:(I think it's called Phu. Or Pho. Or something.)
And it had a thing called tripe in it.
"You don't know what tripe is?" he asked.
"Nope. Possibly a fish?"
He shook his head.
"Then I have no idea."
"Great. You're getting it."
Tripe looks like tiny little white tentacles complete with sucker bump things. It's not easy to chew and kind of reminds me of rubber bands. It has no flavor, aside from the flavor of the soup (which was ridiculously delicious.) But the bumps made me feel like my food was licking me.
"What is this?"
He smiled. "Do you like it?"
"It's weird, but not bad..."
"Will you finish eating if I tell you what it is?"
I promised I would.
"It's cow stomach."
Seriously. Which is pretty gross to think about, but also kind of exciting. And I finished my soup, as promised. (actually I brought some of it home in a doggy bucket and ate it for lunch the next day, since it was a HUGE portion.)
The End.
P.S (The rest of the date was good. We stayed at the restaurant until after it closed. We only left when I felt guilty because the employees were staring at us with those "I'm trying to hide how much I hate you for still being here" faces. (Hey, eating with chopsticks is sloow.)
We got Frozen Yogurt.
We went to a park and climbed rocks
We talked for who knows how long on top of rocks.
The cold surface made me lose feeling in my legs, so we climbed down and went home.)
You know when someone has something stuck in their teeth, but they don't know it? And you sit there and stare at it, feeling weird because you don't know them well enough to decide if you should tell them or not? You know when you are actually that other person? Well I do.
Today during my second break at work I went to the bathroom. While washing my hands, I smiled at a little girl who had just walked in. When I glanced back to the mirror, smile still on my face, I saw to my complete horror that there was something stuck in my teeth. Not a small something either, but a big, green, highly noticable something right in between my two top front teeth.
"Crap," I thought. "How long has it been since I ate lunch?"
Mentally I backtracked through my day.
I had started my lunch at 4:50 pm. I ended my lunch at 5:20 pm. I then took a break at 6:45. That means I had been walking around with something big and green and gross between my teeth for at least an hour and 25 minutes. Highly embarrased, I made a list of the people I smiled at.
The boy in the back office who was clocking in at the same time as me.
A manager
My coworkers Andrew (We even walked back to produce/bakery together and he didn't say anything??), Marie, John, John's cute friend, guy working the lanes, and the other Andrew
The lady who had the security things at the doors beep at her
The guy who works at Starbucks
At least four random customers
5 children asking for cookies
A lady who ordered a cake (we talked for at least 10 minutes and yet did she say anything? Not a word.)
Two ladies and their children in the bathroom
That means I communicated with at least 23 people over the course of that 80 minutes and not one of them bothered to point out the unsightly blemish in my mouth. That's not to mention the other people who could probably see the thing in my teeth from like 30 feet away. Have I mentioned that a significant number of the people I communicated with were highly attractive?
One of my favorite things of all time is driving with the windows down. Especially when my hair is blowing around, getting incredibly tangled and looking ridiculous. Something about it makes me actually giddy. A few days ago I was driving home and it was a beautiful day out so I rolled the windows down, turned the music up, and suddenly got sohappy that a giggle burst out of me. Seriously.
I usually don't giggle unless I'm super tired, but something about the conditions that day turned me into a giddy little girl. Maybe it was the sun, or the warm wind, or the Rockies looking incredible, but whatever caused it, that feeling was addicting.
It looked a lot like this: incredible. Plus it was like 68 degrees and I had great music and a belly full of Target Bakery treats... needless to say I was in heaven.
I decided to take a longer way home. And by that I mean, I was driving up my street, changed my mind, proceeded straight past my house, drove back to Littleton, and down through the entirety of Highlands Ranch (A good 30 minute ride). I was seriously contemplating going to Castle Rock when I became aware of the strange behavior of the car next to me. The driver was keeping pace with me. Deliberately. (And quite well).
My stomach did a little excited flip, because we all know what that means-- someone is checking me out while I giggle and laugh and sing along to the music all by myself-- and he's wanting to car flirt a bit, right? Smiling, I brush the hair out of my face and look over in a very coy manner, expecting to see this:
And what I actually see is a lot more like this:
A very old, very skinny old man, probably around 65. The old man smiled and looked at me rather expectantly. I sat there blinking, my shocked brain unable to process why he did not look like the shirtless boy in my mental picture. The man winked in what he probably thought was a charming manner, waved a bit, and proceeded to drive away, leaving me feeling incredibly creeped out as I watched his license plate get smaller and smaller. I was so confused/creeped out that I drove straight past the street I was supposed to turn on, and ended up having to drive another 3 miles before I was able to turn around, at which point I got lost for a good 15 minutes. The moral of the story: car flirting is bad news and will get you lost. The End.
At Super Target. Which to me, sounds kind of white trash, more trashy than just "Target," which is kind of funny because that's the opposite of what the term is supposed to imply. I think we could replace the word "Super" with other terms that would imply that our store is more than just your regular neighborhood Target -- unless of course, it is your regular neighborhood Target, in which case the name would imply that we also sell things like food, dairy, produce, cakes and freshly made sandwiches.
We could call it, for example: Target Plus. Or Target Ultra. Or Target 5.0. Or we could do like Apple does and use animal names for each new edition of the Target store: Regular Target would become Target Housecat, and Super Target would be Target Panther, or Target Mountain Lion or Target Liger.
(Sidenote: This is the actual store that I work at, and that rock in bottom of the picture? One hundred percent fake, which I find strange because if there were a real boulder in the middle of the sidewalk, we would probably have to get rid of it. But I forget that fake scenery has so much more charm than real nature when you live in the Suburbs. Probably because it comes with a price tag. Remind me later to blog about that fake tree statue by the mall. But I digress.)
What exactly do I do within the bowels of Target Liger, you ask? I work in two similar, but also inexplicably different departments, the Bakery and the Deli.
Contrary to what the pictures imply, we never use rolling pins in the Bakery, the Deli is in technicolor, and most of the employees have faces.
But we do get to wear aprons. And ridiculous bakery hats that ALWAYS make me think of bonnets. Basically we look awesome all the time. Danielle came by the other day and took this picture of me while I was working in the Bakery:
Notice the hat. Also notice that the neck straps on the apron are ridiculously long, so the apron actually does nothing to keep my red shirt clean. ALSO notice my coworker, Amanda, trying to hide behind me as she holds my arms back so I couldn't escape while Danielle took my picture.
I was originally hired as a Bakery employee and they said they would cross-train me to work in the Deli, to get me closer to 40 hours a week, but I have been working mostly in the Deli. Which I like, except for when i have to do to the rotisserie chickens, because raw chicken kind of freaks me out. They are slimy and cold and have goosebumps. And I keep half expecting something like this to happen --->
But don't worry, I'm pretty sure I could beat up a naked, decapitated chicken if I was forced to.
Other than daydreaming about reanimated chicken, I do lots of things in the Deli. I make sandwiches. Lots of sandwiches that I wrap up and stick in the cooler for our guests (never customers, always guests) to purchase. I ask the starbucks workers to make samples of whatever drink I'm craving. I also slice meat and cheese with one of these babies:
They're fun. And a little dangerous. But mostly fun. Sometimes a slice of meat or cheese will get caught in the blade and then fling across the room in random directions. My goal is to hit somebody. Think about it, how funny would it be if you were just walking around your friendly neighborhood Target and you get hit in the face with a slice of Swiss? Okay maybe not so funny if I hit a guest, but a fellow employee? I can't wait for that day to come, and believe me, it will come.
In the bakery I don't actually bake a lot. We have bakers that do that. Sometimes I bake cookies, and occasionally I "bake" artisan bread, but that bread actually comes to us already baked and frozen, and we do a second bake that heats it up and makes it fluffier...I think. Sometimes our cake decorator will let me decorate a cake. And sometimes people ask me to write on the cakes, which is fun. The great thing about the bakery is that it smells sooo good. Like freshly baked bread. Or freshly baked cookies. or both. And sometimes I come home and I smell like it for an hour or so and it's great.
We also get to give cookies to kids that come by, and that's my favorite part. That and when parents bring their kids by and let them choose their own birthday cake. When that happens the kids get SO excited about it.
The other day a little boy (probably about 6) was flipping through the book and yells, "A STAR WARS CAKE?!?!? That. Is. SO COOL! IAN, THEY HAVE A STAR WARS CAKE!" At which point a little boy about 3, who I'm going to assume is Ian, comes running over going "Star Wears! Star Wears! Star Wears!" In the most excited voice. It was stinking adorable.
And speaking of star wars, This video is awesome. Mostly because they're all dressed up in Star Wars costumes but they just sing the song like normal and don't make any sort of comment about it at all.
The other great thing about the bakery is the samples. We always have samples out, like cookies or cupcakes or bread or brownies, and the package that the samples came in (which contains the rest of the bownies/cupcakes/bread/cookies) sits behind the counter for us to eat at our leisure. I don't actually know if we're supposed to or not, but everybody does. (Rationalization at it's finest!) But seriously, even the store manager comes by and eats our samples, so I figure it's okay if I do every now and then. Yeah... working here is going to be GREAT for my figure.
Well there you have it. My whole life in one entirely too long blog post. In the end, between the little kids, the baking, the raw chicken handling/cooking, the slicing and especially the sandwich making, I am learning to become the perfect stereotypical housewife. Awesome.
