Why Your Luck Will Always Be Better Than Mine or, Anna makes another bad judgment call.

I have the worst luck ever. Seriously, I went on a gambling trip to Atlantic City with 10 other people and I was the ONLY joker on the trip to actually lose money and not break even. The only one. Your luck will always be orders of magnitude greater than mine even if a live bird manages to shit in your agape mouth whilst flying by. It's that bad.

Tonight, I'm tired. I'm recording my show about the coral reefs narrated by David Attenborough, the greatest nature show narrator EVER, and I'm looking forward to climbing into my bed and catching up on some reading.

I climb into my bed and get comfortable and what do I discover? A wet spot. If only the cat had snuck into my room and peed on my bed. If only. Cat urine would have been easier to deal with than what it actually was.

Last week when I rushed my mother to the ER I left my lunch box in my office where it stayed at room temperature for exactly one week. In my lunchbox I had a freezer pack, which melted, half a container of hummus and a pyrex dish of some leftover green beans that I did not eat for lunch last Tuesday. When I got home this evening after volunteering at the homeless shelter I haphazardly tossed my lunchbox onto my bed and called my mother and dicked around for about an hour before I picked it up and dealt with the nasty green bean sludge it became. Guess what the cold, wet spot on my bed is?

Yes, rank green bean detritus. Gross green bean offal that leaked out of the pyrex dish and through the velcro and onto and into my bed. My lunchbox is leaky. Sounds like a personal problem, right?

So what do I have to do? Get out of bed strip all the linen off the bed, lysol the fuck out of the mattress and pray it quits smelling. Then I have to put down a towel and put new linen on the bed. Do you know the last time I had to put down a towel? Actually, now that I think about it, I do remember. It was shortly after I used my big girls words to tell England I liked him; it ended up being a fortuitous decision, as you can probably interpret.

Can you imagine how hard it is to sleep when your bed smells of rotten green beans? It's not easy. I should have thought about that and made the wise decision to carefully place the lunchbox with old, moldy green beans on the floor instead of tossing it onto the bed with the patented MJ jump shot.

Chalk it up to yet another poor judgment call from Anna Gray.

Walmart: Some thoughts, and a lengthy aside about zebras.

Today I was the person I hate at the Walmart. You know, the ones who wear grimy, ill-fitting, baggy pants and a holey t-shirt while their hair is mussed and un-done. Yup, that was me. The odd thing being is that I still managed to turn heads. Apparently the men who hang out at Walmart are not discerning in their choice of females.

You know who I have exactly zero respect for? People with nasty kids. It's one thing if their clothes are tattered and ill-fitting because you cannot afford to buy new ones but wash their damn face. There is no reason what so ever why your child should roam into the public arena with lunch all over their face. God, I remember being drug, by the ear mind you, to the bathroom to have whatever it was I had last eaten scrubbed with vigorous force off of my face along with three layers of skin. All the while being berated for embarrassing whichever female (Mom or Mamaw) I was with because me being dirty was a sign of how cleanly they were and cleaniness being next to Godliness yada yada yada. And something about bad parenting thrown in for good measure.

Also I believe that Walmart has breached the carrying capacity for memory stores in your brain. I never can either find what I'm looking for (Today it was chewing gum and pedialyte.) or remember between visits where anything is. The Walmart is too damn big and the human brain cannot process all that information; even if we do have a parallel processing system. The employees at Walmart cannot do this either. Why else do they not know where anything is when you ask them?

I have concerns for the welfare of the fish at Walmart.

I have concerns for the welfare of old people at Walmart too. The poor things just wander around helpless like zebra's that have lost the herd. I wonder if people just drop them off at Walmart so they can run their errands unencumbered.

(That's true about zebra's though. They're stupid as fuck. That's probably why there's a blue million of them because they're too dumb to run away from the lions, that regularly eat members of their herd. That and they recognize each other by the patterns of their stripes but if those stripes are occluded, by maybe some mud from crossing the river, they have no clue who the members of their herd are. It's just 'This random little zebra is making zebra noises at me, do I know this zebra?' Seriously, I watched a wildlife special where a baby zebra spent all damn day trying to get milk from his momma but she didn't recognize him because he was covered in mud. Then he finally got smart, for the first time ever in the history of zebras, and washed off the mud. Then momma zebra is all like 'Where the fuck have you been all day?' Stu-pid. Imagine if they were to all get muddy at once. There would be mass zebra hysteria until it happened to rain next and then they'd all congregate again like it was a fucking herd reunion. I imagine there would be lots of paranoid ignoring going on. You know something like: 'Why is that zebra I don't know standing so close to me? I don't know him! I'll just turn my back to him and actively ignore him.' Bam, it rains. 'Oh, hi Steve. Where've you been all this time?')

Lastly, did you know you can purchase guns from Walmart? In the same place you can buy lube, hemorrhoid cream and alcohol. Is this a good idea? It seems to me that maybe it isn't.

The Emergency Room, Dumb Blonde Bitches and Raping Hamsters

Do you know how long I've been in this little room in the emergency room with my mother? 8 hours now. 8 whole hours. We reached our 'together time' threshold 2 hours ago. After which we argued for an hour and I began to think of ways to entertain her while her heart waffles back and forth between deciding to pump the blood around her body or not. Apparently she's super dehydrated and her blood pressure tanked. She passed out today at the gym as a result of this and off to the emergency room we went.

Let me tell you what. These bastards almost caught a full fledged Anna Gray hissy fit. Let me enumerate what happened.

I pull up at the emergency room doors and oh, I don't know...I except them to act like someone in my party is having oh, I don't know...A MEDICAL EMERGENCY. Maybe because it is THE EMERGENCY ROOM! It probably isn't me as I'm the one driving and running around the car to get my mother out. Do they come out and get her? No. Is there a wheelchair outside to put her in? No. Is anyone mildly concerned that I'm forcibly dragging a semi-elderly woman into the emergency department? No. Do any of three bitches at patient check-in drop what they're doing because there is clearly one harried young woman hauling in one out of breath older woman? No. Does the stupid doe-eyed-dumb-cunt-bitch look at me funny when I screech 'Can you help us here?' Yes, actually she does. (I'm sorry for using the C-word but she totally deserves it. I almost killed her. I'm not even kidding. She should've seen her life flash before her eyes but that'd be assuming she has an IQ greater than 14 and a loaf of bread. And guess who's in training? Award yourself 5 bonus points if you guessed Bambi.)

Thank God the triage nurse had enough of a clue to admit her immediately otherwise I was going to start maiming CNA bitches until I got the results I wanted. In we go, which brings us to now. Onward to raping hamsters we go.

It took us at least 6 hours to figure out how to make the sound on the TV in the room to work so we watched 5 episodes of Law & Order: SVU with no sound. In order to bring some brevity to the situation I began to improvise a dialogue between Christopher Meloni and Ice-T. This dialogue began with them bitching about the DA's dumb hair. Mom says something along the lines of 'No, they have to be talking about sex crimes. Someone had to have raped something.'

'Someone raped something? Something? Not someone?'

'Well this show has some grade-A freaks.'

'Something like, a hamster?'

'A hamster?'

'Yeah, a hamster is a something. People could rape hamsters.'

'I suppose they could but it'd be a bad day for the hamster.'

'Gross. Thanks for that visual.'

'You're the one that came up people raping hamsters. What does that say about you?'

'No, I came up with hamsters. You came up with the rape all on your own.'

'I'll take half credit if you take the other half.'

'Okay. I can do that.' (I was trying to placate the woman. She's lying on a hospital bed.)

Thank goodness the lab girl stopped trying to draw blood from my mom because she almost had to pop a squat in the corner over the bedpan from laughing so hard. That kept us entertained for at least 5 minutes.

What the hell are we going to do for the rest of the 8 hours we'll probably be here?

* Because I'm not totally heartless here's an update: she's doing okay. They're going to keep her overnight to pump some fluids in her but they say she should be good to go in a couple of days.

How much better off you'd be if I was your drug pusher.

I try really hard to be a grown up. Really I do. But like everything else I come up short and to make a long story short, I suck at life and cannot seem to make a decent living in a fulfilling career that I actually want.

I know, I know. I'm employed and I should be grateful blah blah blah. I am. Really. Can't you tell? I even appreciate being told I'm doing a good job accompanying the occaisional (I have no idea how to spell this word) cupcake.

I've been exploring possible career changes and/or supplements to my career because I am b-r-o-k-e.

I can't be a hooker because I'm too bitchy and people who smell creep me out. I can't be a stripper because they're all dumb cokeheads; I'm not dumb nor am I a cokehead so that rules that out. So I was thinking I could sell drugs. People make decent money doing that right?

Do you realize how freaking awesome I would be at selling drugs? Seriously! I've got access to the right clientele, example: I'm at the bus station twice a day. Clearly I'm easy to talk to because I cannot pay people to ignore me. Obviously I'm attractive enough. Do people buy drugs from ugly people? (My experience buying illicit substances is limited. I've only ever bought a quart of moonshine off a guy that I used to work with at that packaging plant and I'm reasonably sure I could have gotten away with murder with him.) I've got a good education and I can communicate effectively. I could totally set up a brilliant website about my drug-offloading buisness. (If you weren't aware I'm kind of a web czar. Well at least in my own mind. I'd link to what I can do but I don't think 'they' want to be affiliated with blogs who talk about crack, diarrhea and tampons on a regular basis. It's not really proper seeing as how they're a government entity and all.) I believe all of these to be adequate requirements to be successful in the drug pushing buisness.

You'd call me up and be all like:

'Yo Anna Gray, can I get some pot?' (Because when buy drugs you always start out with yo. This is the way it happens on Breaking Bad so it's got to be true.)

And I'd be all like:

'Totes, I can get you some pot! How much you need? I'm running a special this week, buy 2 pills get one free. They'll help take the edge off.'

Then you'd say:

'No, no, I'm good. I'm good. Just hook me up with some weed.' (I imagine that there is a lot of repeating of statements in drug pushing. That way everyone's expectations are clear as to what is expected of both parties. This is all speculation as I dont really know.)

Then I'd thank you for using my drug selling service and ask you to fill out a questionnaire outlining your experiences that day. What? I've got to maintain good customer service.

So instead of buying your drugs from 22 yr old Jimmy with meth acne you'd get to see my bright smiling face. Think of how much more pleasurable the experience would be.

Plus I don't own a gun, so I couldn't tweak out and kill you in a fit of hysterical paranoia.

No one wants to be the lone tampon in the jar.

Ya'll. Shit is getting real up in this biatch.

You remember when Captain Cynical was mortally wounded and came back from the brink of death to recover her cynicism and reclaim her bitch card?

Well, she may have been dealt the death blow today. We all know she's not getting any younger and she spends the majority of her time in whiny uterus mode so it's only natural that she looks forward to building something with someone. You remember how she's flying across an ocean to have relations? Well yeah, that's actually going to happen. Lord help us all if it doesn't. Lord help us all if it does. Europe will never be the same. We're just waiting on the federal government to quit cock-blocking and on global warming to kick in in England and we're there. Say you what you will but I'm still not willing to freeze my nads off for anyone. Not that I have an actual set of nads but if I did I'd wait until it was warm. Because I'm a wimp. Hopefully he can deal with that. Hopefully he isn't reading this and if he is...I'm totally talking about Prince Harry. I'm gonna be his date to the royal nuptials. Miss you! Mean it! Hugs and kisses! Hide the whiskey and cookies, company's coming over!

Anywho, this bar that I go to always leaves tampons in a jar in the girls bathroom and I always feel sorry for the lone tampon left. It always seems so sad to me. Because at home, any sane woman buys tampons when she's down to her last three; you never really have one lone tampon unless it's in your desk drawer but it's cold and dark in there and that tampon probably deserved that punishment. The point being is that people are like tampons; no one wants to be the odd man out when everyone else has found a warm, dank place to hide for a few hours.

Does crack-cocaine actually give you diarrhea?

I've recently started watching old episodes of Six Feet Under, Michael C Hall's old television show where he plays a homo-gay funeral director on HBO. Not to digress, but said funeral home isn't nearly as fabulous as it could be with a gay director. There has to be a market for it.

Anyways, what's-his-face's boyfriend Keith runs away on business and dude is all sad and stuff because his boo left and is totally having a bad day. He then pulls over to pick up a seemingly nice guy who needs a ride. Dude ends up being kidnapped and forced to do crack with this cray-cray white kid who seemed nice but is a total crackpot, literally.

Then Michael C Hall gets diarrhea and crazy white kid says something along the lines of 'Yeah, crack does that.'

This may come as a surprise to you but I've never done crack-cocaine so I cannot personally verify the validity of this statement. I tried googling 'Does crack give you diarrhea?' and all I really got were websites about drug addiction, blah, blah, blah, and no real answers to my inquiry. (Granted I had googled 'Is Bev Purdue related to chickens?' right before so it could be possible that I broke the Google. In case you were wondering, she isn't.) I did the next best thing. I texted my mom.

She was a teenager in the 60's. There isn't a whole lot she doesn't know at least a little bit about. Her reponse to my inquiry was this: 'I suppose it depends on what they cut it with. Why? Do you have diarrhea? Please tell me you aren't doing crack Anna.'

I should have been thinking ahead because now I'll spend the next 3 weeks convincing my mother that I am indeed not a crackhead. One of my high school best friend's nickname was Crackhead (God only knows why?) and I was questioned heavily on several occasions if she was indeed an actual crackhead addicted to crack. She wasn't. We were just assholes I guess. But the point is that now I need to convince my mom that I was really just trying to be a smart ass and that my sudden avoidances of her calls are just because I'm busy or that I don't need to talk to my mom 6 times a day and not because I'm blitzed out of my mind on crack-cocaine. Any suggestions as to how I could do this would be helpful.

And if you know the answer to this question I'd really appreciate it if you could fill me in. Only because I'm curious about these sorts of things.

Do you have the phone number for that creepy little woman from the Poltergeist?

Do you have any idea why my woo-woo smells faintly of goat curry and tumeric? (I can't determine if it's red or yellow curry.)

We have a poltergeist. A smelly poltergeist at that. For some unkown reason my apartment, specifically my closet, smells like the kitchen of your local Indian buffet. Which makes everything in my closet smell of Indian food which makes my underthings smell like curry which in turn makes my woo-woo smell like cooked goat. Which depending on your point of view I suppose, could be a good thing. But probably isn't. I personally do not like Indian food. Hence I'm rather upset. (If it was Mac and Cheese..that I'd totally sign on to.)

I imagine people like to keep their food and sex separate. I mean, there are those wierdos that enjoy smathering each other in syrup, whipped cream and garlic butter or what not, but not me. Mostly because I loathe being sticky. When I was a kid I used to have to eat jelly on toast and it made me cry because it made the corners of my mouth sticky. This combined with my completely irrational fear of the United States Postal Service is a pretty reasonable explanation as to why yours truly is single.

Shrug.

Anywho, we've got a problem. My apartment smells like a food that I do not like, and all of my clothes smell of food that I do not like and that makes my person smell like sub-equatorial Asia. Not that there is anything wrong with that. If you get randy from Indian food, (I was going to use another Indian food ingredient but because I don't like it I've pretty much strapped my gustatorial knowledge of the contents of Indian cuisine with curry and goat and turmeric.) then I'm your woman. But seeing as I usually like to avoid those men with unusual fetishes, (Not that this ever works for me. I'll share the 'foot guy' stories later.) smelling of goat, not a good look. Seriously, we need someone to come and exorcise the Poltergeist.

I was going to make a joke about the poltergeist being a 'Ghandi ghost' because it's funny and alliterative but then I remembered Ghandi didn't eat and that's probably pretty insensitive. You know, insinuating that Ghandi's ghost would smell of food when the man made political statements by refusing to eat; that and my shameful lack of knowledge of Indian cultural figures. Sometimes I try. I really do. I guess it's not funny if I have to explain it.

If it was a normal poltergeist I'd totally let it stay. That shit doesn't really flummox me; I figure if there is an angry Native American ghost (Damn, there's another insensitive joke I could make.) then it's generally a good idea to just let it fucking be. That or move. As long as it didn't fuck with the TV during my weekly bonding with Don Draper/Jon Hamm. Otherwise it'd be totally free to come out of the TV and steal my roomate. He's been pretty busy at work lately; He could probably stand a vacation.

My ex boyfriend 'Joel'

Lately I've found myself slipping into whiny uterus mode and in fear of being flogged by my best friend and roomate I find that it's easiest to combat this trauma with tragic stories of exes, in efforts to slay my thirst for babies and companionship.

Today I thought I'd share about 'Joel.' His name isn't really 'Joel' but that's the name I've picked and we're running with that.

I've always found Joel to be super cute even though he's not the normal blond hair, blue eyed, hunk of man I normally go for. He's waaaaay to skinny. And brunette. And has facial hair. And wears his hair long. Only one man can get away with that and he dresses as a pirate. Yum Johnny Depp! But every time I ever saw him, Joel, and even when I run into him now, I have to catch my breath. Something about him I find super physically attractive! And then he opens his mouth. (Then again I wasn't really in it for the titillating conversation. He was dragging me out of a shit relationship into a fun and fancy free existence of perpetual singlehood for which I'll be forever grateful.)

Nevermind that on our first real date he showed up in his duck hunting camo (I'm surprised he took off the waders.) and essentially proposed to me in the middle of a mexican restaurant, I still gave him a shot. (I've never been an ace at good judgment.) Joel, the sweetheart that he was, was in kind of a rough spot too. He wanted that 'picket fence idyllic life' and I wanted to shotgun whisky shots until I forgot about my most recent foray into romantic partnership or blacked out into oblivion, whichever came first. We should have been ships that passed in the night, but we gave it the college try.

I almost killed Joel one night. I wasn't drunk, high, discombobulated, unhinged, crazy with rage. I was completely and totally with it. Had I gone through with it, it would have been pre-meditated. I would have done serious time in the slammer.

You see, my dear, dear Joel snored like a banshee. Omg you can never grasp the magnitude with which his deviated septum interrupted my sleep schedule. I struggle to find words to describe the sheer volume at which he was able to project his snoring. It was like there was a fucking John Deere tractor in my bed. And of course the asshat fell asleep in 0.2 seconds so I never had a chance to get to sleep first and just sleep through it. You remember my plan to shotgun whisky into oblivion? This was the only way I ever got any rest around that man. Who knew that a person so skinny could have such a serious case of sleep apnea?

I'm a compassionate person, I didn't immediately resort to fantasies of asphyxiation. I rolled him over time and time again. Bought breathe right strips, slathered him up in vapo rub and made him sleep practically sitting up. Nothing worked. Still I suffered. He slept like an angel, a mouth-agape-tractor-shaming angel but an angel no less. He slept the sleep of the dead, almost literally. I used to finally just give up and go sleep on the couch in the living room. Oddly enough me getting out of bed was enough disturbance to wake him the fuck up! Into the living room he'd saunter and go 'What's wrong?' I punched him in the jaw once out of sheer frustration.

The thoughts of suffication came fleetingly at first. Just hints at the back of my mind that went away upon immediate dismissal. Glimpses really. Then they began to linger. I started to just sit upright in the bed and stare at him hoping that he'd wake up from the creepy 'someone is staring at me' feeling. He didn't and the next night we'd repeat this whole exercise over again, all the while these hints became malignant and began to consume my thoughts.

I distinctly remember sitting upright in my own bed, staring at the back of Joel's head (He slept on his stomach.) and thinking to myself: 'I could take the pillow and put it over his head just long enough for him to stop breathing.' I kind of muttered it out loud after thinking it because I needed to see how it sounded. It wasn't that I wanted him to die; I needed some fucking sleep. I needed him to stop snoring or to wake the fuck up or to have the bed open up and swallow him like in that Freddy Krueger movie, but I could not spend one more night on that damn futon in the living room. I simply could not do it.

So, I broke down into histrionics and sobbed and wailed and gave his god-forsaken snoring a run for it's money. Still he did not wake up.

Joel is the only man I've ever broken up with at 6:30 in the morning before he's even had time to brush his teeth. That day, I slept the sleep of the dead. And it was glorius.

I realized that night, that if I was seriously considering suffocating him then we were never going to work out. We could never be together because eventually I'd talk myself into it and the sane part of me that said 'Omg you just considered killing this grown man, in Your bed, which would make it a pretty open and shut case of pre-meditated homicide.' would eventually lose the argument.

I've given up pants.

Sometimes I have difficulty in making up my mind. Like any other woman.

Also like any other woman on the planet I have difficulty deciding to what to wear. Some days I could wear a burlap sack and be the sexiest thing to happen to burlap since potatoes or well, anything really. Other days I feel like I could wear Chanel and still the opossum/aardvark/armadillo roadkill would be more attractive than I.

And then there are days whence a girl just cannot make up her mind. No matter what she puts on, it just doesn't work. It's not hideous but it's not attractive. It just isn't 'it', it's not what you want nor is it going to be unless there is a shift in planetary motion or another violent mood swing. These are the days when I decide to just wear pants and clap my hands over my breasts and be done with it. I just drink all my beverages through a straw. It may seem tiring to you, standing there, elbows akimbo, all night covering your breasts but really it's not a problem. Actually it's quite comfortable. If you could ditch the pants you'd really...

This is what I've decided. No more. I'm throwing in the metaphorical towel and not wearing pants anymore either. But don't really throw away that towel. I'm going to need it to fashion a loincloth type skirt thing.

You know how I feel about bitches and their snatches hanging out. It's innappropriate.