#ostriching

Brain, five minutes later: THINGS NEED DOING! LET'S DO ALL THE THINGS!

It’s been an hour and I’m still sitting here staring at the screen like

There’s a posting at work where there’s a position directly above mine that has opened up at another store. It would jump me from part time to full time. 40 hours instead of 25 hours. Healthcare. Paid vacation days. 

On the one hand, I’m really comfortable at my current store, I get along with everyone and it’s an awesome environment that I already know the other store doesn’t have that kind of enthusiasm. I know exactly where everything is and what to do and I’m making decent money. My manager is absolutely fantastic. I feel like I’d be abandoning the store and everyone in it. Whenever there’s a big change I get really anxious and dip into depression. 

On the other hand, that’s a shitload more money + hours PLUS my health insurance runs out in September (under dad’s military stuff, so it’s not like I can reapply), it would be a good opportunity to learn how to do more stuff. Obvious answer is to at least apply for the position. 

      Remember that time when regret started to settle in while you were actively doing something you would instantly regret? I am sitting at Republic Coffee in a puddle of that moment, latte in hand, headphones on head, hoping the conversation I’ve chosen to overhear instead of listening to music will offer me some confirmation that other people are also stupid.

      For the record, I recognize that tonight’s events have been but a minor social hiccup, and I ask that you excuse the melodramatic flourish. I don’t embarrass myself very often (which is not to say I don’t do embarrassing things very often). When I do, it sends me on a brief but occasionally productive spiral of self-doubt.

      The setting? Walgreens. 9:00pm. Enter, Lizz, the young-and-perpetually-exhausted administrative support specialist in search of a retractable kabuki brush and a last-minute birthday card. She exchanges a polite hello with an extraordinarily tall stranger as she thumbs through the spectrum of Covergirl’s Lip Perfection Jumbo Gloss Balms, eventually selecting two (3) to add to her collection.

      The stranger is handsome. Not devastatingly so, but handsome enough to note. I suppose the average person registers a thought similar to “that person is reasonably attractive,” at least a dozen times every day as long as they leave their house. Reasonably attractive people are everywhere. They have to be at work at the same time as you every morning; they ride around in cars; they buy groceries; they walk their dogs. They exchange polite hellos with you at Walgreens as you try not to drop the armful of small items you didn’t intend to buy.

      So you can imagine my surprise when this reasonably attractive stranger asked me to go out with him as we fumbled about with our keys in the parking lot, our cars parked right across from one another.

      In case you’re thinking “Stranger danger! Forget your keys, woman! Get your pepper spray!” allow me to clarify. It was fine. Stranger appeared to have all of his original teeth. He was probably a few years older than me, but still comfortably in his twenties. He didn’t stare or wolf-whistle. He didn’t even walk toward me when he started to speak.

      In fact, the only alarming thing about him was his confidence. It caught me off guard, and I handled it with the composure of a distressed ostrich.

      While my head was in the ground, I managed to ignore the well-meaning charm, the handsome face, the refreshing directness, and the complete novelty of a potential date with someone I don’t already know. Out came the flood of rehearsed responses I keep underneath my tongue for the uglies. Stranger was visibly disappointed; I was a giant flightless bird with bonky knees.

      I got in my car and drove away, half hoping Stranger would turn up here, at Republic, where I could redeem myself or at least apologize; the other half very glad to know there is almost no chance I will run into this person again.

      Of course, the moral of this story is that I wish I had agreed to go out, or exchanged numbers, or something other than what I did. I could have just rejected someone really great. I could have made a new friend, or started a grand adventure. He could become rich and famous. At worst, I could have had a nightmarish first date – the first of hopefully not very many such dates in my life. All possibilities considerably better than the unadventurous nothing I will be doing instead.

      It was Schrödinger’s first date, except that I decided to never open the bunker. That poor cat is forever suspended in a superposition because of my terrible ostriching and now it’ll have to starve to death, even if the bomb didn’t go off (watch this).