A blog about strange and usually embarrassing things that happen to me in Portland.
Things I think about when I’m washing my hands in a coffee shop bathroom and notice a $1,000,000 bill sitting next to the sink:
I bet it’s an ad for something.
Once at a street fair someone scattered ads shaped like $100 bills. They looked so realistic that I put four in my pockets. I'm not sure what I was planning on doing with them, but when I dropped one later a stranger ran through four lanes of busy traffic to return it. I pretended to be as happy as I would be if someone handed me $100 I'd dropped on the ground, instead of as happy as I would be if someone handed me an ad I'd dropped on the ground. I did a great job.
This bill looks way more realistic.
Is that what a million dollar bill really looks like?
If million dollar bills really existed, people wouldn’t carry suitcases full of money. Why would you carry a suitcase full of money when you could fold a million dollar bill into your wallet with your ice cream scoops punch card?
Maybe they carry suitcases full of money because there aren’t many million dollar bills in circulation.
I’m not touching it.
Maybe I should touch it. Just with a paper towel.
Maybe God left it here for me. Because I've been so good lately. It seems like a weird thing to do, but it seems like the sort of thing you’d expect from someone who invented scabs, bananas, sex, and those fish that just look like bummed-out piles of fat.
Or maybe it’s some sort of promotion the coffee shop is running, where if I turn it in to the front desk they’ll give me a year's supply of coffee and all the internet I want. What a strange promotion, and what a strange choice of bill to use. A twenty would have made a lot more sense.
Maybe a million dollar bill is normal. Maybe most people who come to this coffee shop are super rich, obscenely rich. Maybe they had this in their pocket to buy a Mazarati for the ride home. If they did they would have more than a suitcase worth of money left over.
I have been washing my hands for a really long time.
Here are pictures of a few things. A blobfish, a very strange photo of the cast of Ocean's 11 at an air base in Turkey, and the treehouse I would build if I had picked up the money. I'm not looking up if a million dollar bill exists because I want to it to stay a surprise.
Hey guess what it's 5 great things about not wearing makeup for 5 days:
1. You can rub your eyes in comic disbelief and you’re ready to go to a waterpark at a moment’s notice. I wrote that sentence in a way that makes it seem like those two things are related but the only connection is they’re both easier to do without eyeliner.
2. Everyone thinks you’re sick so they don’t make loud noises.
3. You look enough like a child to order from the kids menu, old enough to get senior discounts at movies, enough like a boy to use the men’s bathroom if the line's shorter, and bad enough to be completely invisible. I haven't tested any of these but I have a good feeling about all of them.
4. Beyonce sings about you. There's lots of language in this, the main language is English but there’s also swear words.
5. Now it’s time to think of something to not do next week. I think it’s going to be laundry.
It's pretty lame but the main reason I wear scarves is because when I'm wearing a scarf and I see my reflection, I think that I look like a photo my robot kids will see someday that will make them say "oh man my mom used to be cool."
Because one day I'll be really into chess, or whatever moms are into, and I'm sure I'll have gingivitis, and my kids will tease me about how bad I am at teleporting and they'll ask me what it was like to breathe oxygen growing up, but there will be photos to prove that once upon a time I was 26-going-on-35 and this is what a photo of those days would look like.
And then the second reason to wear them is look how messy my hair is here:
Just kidding, you can't tell how messy it is.
It's that time again!
The flowers are dead, the air smells like worms, and the newspaper someone left out on the sidewalk now looks like a four-foot pile of gray scrambled eggs. That's right: the rain season! Which means some of our seasonal favorites are back:
Bread Confusion
Do you remember putting this piece of bread in a ziplock bag in your backpack this morning? Or was it yesterday morning? Wait, do you own ziplock bags? How did it get this flat?
Sadness Mocha
Stir a packet of sugar-free Swiss Miss into a cup of cold coffee-tasting-water and microwave on the "popcorn" setting.
Twice-burnt toast
Burned your toast? No problem! Scrape off the burnt parts and toast it a little more! Burned it again? Now it's probably super gross and not worth eating and you just ruined a $1.75 slice of gluten-free bread.
Candy you found in your backpack
Halloween lasts all year long!
Mystery Shape Treats
I wrote this one down and had an idea, and now I went to the bathroom and can't remember what that thought was. The stale candy may be messing with my short-term memory.
