Crazy Thursday

It's a Thursday. This translates into "put Meesh on a register for four-plus hours straight and leave her there." I've finally come to understand that this, indeed, is just Thursday. So fine. New game plan.

Put hair in pigtails (note to old roommates: hair is now in pigtails). Tie a complimentary Trader Joe's balloon to each pigtail. Proceed with Thursday.

Result: it actually did help the day get along better. Granted, I did first rip a contact, then find that my car's battery died (my fault) and I couldn't get home until I borrowed a coworker's car, only to find that I'm out of contacts and thus had to wear my headache-inducing, away-with-the-peripheral-vision glasses. But I made grown men in suits laugh, and that's a hard thing to do.

But the best thing was the kids. Some were afraid to let me know that I had balloons on my head. So they whispered to their mommies. Some got up the guts to ask me why I had balloons on my head. Favorite answers:

"Because it's Thursday."
"Well, why don't you have balloons on your head?"
"Some days, you just need balloons on your head."

Note that answers one and three made the most sense to kids. With either answer, the response was a grin and a nod -- especially to number three. Number two resulted in some confusion. Why, indeed, were they not wearing balloons? Then we generally tried to remedy that omission.

"It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
-- Arthur Dent, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Name Explained (ouch, passive tense!)

One of the perks of my job is messing with customers. Since I work at a grocery store, many newbie customers assume (perhaps understandably, if not accurately) that I am barely capable of coherent speech. Now, I have a BA; I've aced a couple of graduate courses (not my major subject, thank you very much); I speak English, German, and can scrape along reading Dutch. I love Middle English. I also spent way too much of my undergrad years as a copyeditor for the college newspaper. I love red pens.

Result? I'm constantly correcting coworkers -- customers, too, if I know them. One day I had a feeling I'd corrected one coworker a few too many times, so after the last time I threw my fists in the air and cried, "Yes! It's Captain Semantics to the rescue!" to let everyone know that I do know when I'm being intolerable. Even if I still don't stop.

A few months later I threw my husband a birthday party where all the guests had to come as superheroes. I, of course, was Captain Semantics. I had a tiny Oxford American Minidictionary hooked up to an extendable janitor's keychain-beltclip. My superpower was to use the right word every time. Not the most exciting, but if you know me, it fits. At the same time weird, nerdy, and not a little bit silly.

Welcome to my blog! If you have any copyeditorial comments, please let me know! I'll probably completely disregard them and consider it character-building.