Life in the Fast Lane

I went downtown to see my daughter's Biology research teacher. My daughter goes to Superhero High School and
I often have to converse with the Superhero Mad Scientist Macroencephalacs that run her life and today was one of those days.

You ever see that original Star Trek episode with the big brainy aliens that communicated with ESP and has the big veins that moved when they were ESPeeing? Well, after they worked on Star Trek, they went into education and now they work at SHHS teaching my daughter how to boil frogs and eviscerate lemur spleens.

It started last night when I emailed her teacher to let her know that my daughter was finding her class hard to keep up with. She emailed me back we set up a time and I forgot to go. I remembered later today when I got an email from her saying she'd looked for me in the office and I emailed her back begging her to let me see her at 7th period. I had emailed her twice confirming the 4th period appointment already so I'm an idiot. AND when I missed the appoint I had so diligently reminder her of, I called her voice mail and told her I'd try to meet her later at 4TH PERIOD. I hung up and stabbed myself in the eye with a Number 2 pencil.

So I race down the Dan Ryan (which rhymes with Damn, Crying) at virtually 3 miles an hour, get to the school with a surprising 28 minutes to spare, make my way through the security phalanx of ex-cops and metal detectors to the office where I finally convince the woman running the steam powered tubular communications device to shout up for another person to shout through an entirely seperate tube to peer into the gallery of teachers to see if the one I wanted was there. She was not. She'd gone home for the Holidays. Yay.

So I'm stuck in Lincoln Park. Lincoln Park has a Paul Frank store for babies. They have two Starbucks within site of each other. Lincoln Park has private purse galleries. Lincoln Park has a photography studio that only does hip black and white shots that look like they belong some kind of high-end adoption catalogue. I was out of my milieu. Actually, the fact that I was in a milieu, period, should've been enough to prove to me that I was bound for a tidal wave of snoot. I decided to adapt, merge, to blend in with the natives.

I went to Argo Tea and got a vanilla tinged Earl Grey. I went to a Chinese tailor and got the button on my leather jacket--popped two years ago--fixed for 5 bucks. The lady that charged me had an abacus on her counter. I went into the Olde Towne School of Folk Music and told the guy behind the counter that I needed a Hurdy Gurdy--stat! And then I went into The Paper Source and spent a hundred bucks on wrapping paper. Wraaaaaping Paaaaper.

I give the worst gifts to My Attorney. Other people I can nail it and they never forget what I get them but for My Attorney, well, I just fail every time. Last year for christmas I got her huge scrapbooks and cool scrapbook stuff and a bunch of killer identical file boxes with little metal lable trays on them and found every roll of film in the house we hadn't processed since 1993 and had them processed. Then I filled those boxes. And I got her a labeller for it all. A laaaaabeler.

I'm an idiot. So today I'm there in this place that is so finely girl I want to goose the displays and I go crazy and for her birthday, I buy my wife four rolls of wrapping paper, seven big flats of specialty paper, and some cool, hip, cards for gifts. Then I had them wrap the wrapping paper. In wrapping paper.

I am an idiot.

Know that my wife loves wrapping presents. She also doesn't read my blog so I can post everything here.