Types of customers

I've worked in many different bakeries over the years, and, generally speaking, there are very few rude customers at bakeries. Something about being surrounded by sugar and chocolate tends to put people in a good mood, I guess. However, there are still several types or really annoying customers I've come across over the years. They come in when you're ridiculously busy, and stand in the middle of the bakery, dumbstruck by the sheer variety of food on display. All logic and reason escapes them. They become customers like these:









When I come across customers like these, I always vow to never become one myself. I assume that surely, when I go into a store, I will manage to keep my wits about me. Surely I will be able to grasp basic concepts of math, reading, and visual observation. Sadly, this is not so. Being a customer is like having a disease. No matter how witty, bright, intelligent, and helpful I was before I entered the store, as soon as I pass through the front doors of a shop, I am reduced to a useless, slobbering mass of confusion and indecision.

Christmas Cards Frenzy!!

For the first 21 years of my life, I didn't really get cards. Don't get me wrong, I received them. I received a lot of them. But I didn't understand the point of them. Or at least, I didn't understand why some people couldn't conceive of an occasion when they would give someone a gift without including a card. Cards are something you read, take the money out of, and then throw away--or, if they're pretty, you put them on your dresser and then they eventually fall behind it and you find them three years later and THEN you throw them away*. Alright, so maybe I put them in a box somewhere and look at them every once in a while and they make me happy. Point is, I was not a card-giver until recently. I blame The Paper Umbrella (if ever you're in Regina, you should go). There were some pretty amazing cards there. There was a card there for when you want to invite your secret lover for a weekend getaway to a charming village somewhere. It was great. I began to see the merit of cards. Cards are actually kind of awesome.

This is how I ended up in Desart, being seduced by anything with gold sparkles on it. I ended up purchasing a box of the most bizarre Christmas cards I had ever seen. You know, the sort of cards that have 8-foot-tall winged reindeer on them, in an unironic, totally in earnest, very whimsical sort of way. Their designer had clearly been on an acid trip when he/she was creating these cards. I took them home and began excitedly filling them out. Then I realized that I still don't understand how to do cards. For Christmas cards, a normal person would probably write something like this: "Merry Christmas! Wish you were here! I'll be spending Christmas getting drunk while wearing a funny hat! Love, Alex." See? Something to do with the holidays. But when I fill out a card, I can't seem to write about anything except the card. So my cards look more like this: "Hi Alex! You may be wondering why I sent you this weird Christmas card. Don't worry, I'm being ironic! I couldn't resist purchasing something so warped! The person who made it was clearly on drugs! Love, Amy."** What a lovely Christmas card.

After I filled out each card with a variation of the above drug-trip message, I suddenly got really paranoid that the recipients were going to compare cards. What if they all realized that I wrote the same un-christmassy thing inside of each of their cards? The card would lose what few shreds of meaning it had. I was mass-producing my endearing quirkiness! (This dilemma remains unresolved. But anyway.)

I've been bit by the card-giving bug, now. I plan on getting more (and less drug-induced, Christmas-hallucination-themed) cards this very evening. Maybe I'll get generic ones this time, though, to save myself some writing. They will say things like "Look! There's a snowflake on this card!" or "Ironically, this card is made of a tree and ALSO has a tree on it!" or "SPARKLES!!!". Maybe if I write enough of them I'll eventually get the hang of writing "Merry Christmas! All the best! Love Amy" instead.

*unless of course it's an awesome card that contains, say, a comic strip explaining why I don't have a backbone, in which case I cherish it always. Or if it has a heartfelt message written inside. Or if the card is complementing me on that time I looked fabulous while getting the mail, and has rhinestones on it.

**I do this with postcards, too. If I send you a card with a picture of a sheep on the front of it, it's far more likely that my card will be telling you about the sheep in the picture than that it will be telling you about my adventures in Ireland.

CellPhone: The Triumphant Return

For those of you who are wondering what happened to my cellphone, it is in good hands: namely, my own. Apparently it fell out of my jeans pocket when I was lugging 20-kg bags of icing sugar from point A (the pile of sugar bags) to point B (the mixing bowl). It slid beneath a prep table. It was set to vibrate. It had landed in a pile of icing sugar, which muffled the already-subtle sounds of a vibrating cellphone. Every time I tried to phone it to pinpoint its location, it vibrated itself a bit further under the table. I spent 2 days cellphoneless, during which I discovered that payphones cost 50 cents per call, and no one in the mall will give you change for a Toonie. One of my wonderful co-workers found the phone, and it was eventually returned to me.

While we're on the subject of cellphones, remember that time I started a private war with Virgin Mobile? And how in the end they promise my cheque was in the mail and would be on my doorstep by the end of September? Yeah, it's still not here. Erg. I dread calling them again.

Aspirations: An Evolution

When I was very young, my career aspirations changed on a weekly basis. One week I wanted to be a horsetrainer, the next I wanted to be a ballet dancer, and then I wanted to be a horse-trainer by day and a ballet dancer by night. As I grew older, though, my goals became much more specific.

When I was 11, my dream was to be a veterinarian. But not just any veterinarian. I would be a veterinarian who lived on an abandoned schoolbus in a Walmart parking lot. My reasoning here was that I would save so much money on living costs that I would be ridiculously rich. I didn't have any plans on what to do with this money. I supposed I would eventually set up my own vet clinic ON the bus.

When I was 12, I yearned for adventure. My dream was to drive away some day without telling anyone where I was going. No one would ever be able to find me! I could do whatever I wanted! I could become a vet and live secretly on a bus and then take all the money I saved and go rock climbing in Colorado during the summers like in Vertical Limit (but, since I would be climbing alone, I wouldn't have to risk being devastated by watching members of my family fall to their dooms). I don't know why being untraceable was such an important part of my plan, but for some reason it was. I didn't realize that this plan could possibly be upsetting to any of my loved ones until the day I waxed poetic about my Disappearing off the Face of the Earth plan to my sister and she became inexplicably upset by this and told me to please warn her before I vanished. In fact, she didn't want me to vanish at all! I was confused, but sincerely promised (with my fingers crosed behind my back) to not disappear as soon as I graduated from highschool. Clearly she did not understand the point of that adventure. I'm not sure I understand the point of it anymore either, actually.

When I was 17, my plans took a turn for the plain and fairly normative. I found out that Yale, Harvard, and Princeton are all needs-blind schools. This means that if your family makes under a certain income, they cover the costs of your schooling. In some cases they even pay for you to fly down to visit your family every few months. I wanted in on this sweet all-expenses-paid action. So my dream became to attend an Ivy League. We all know how THAT turned out*.

When I went to Dal, my goal was to become a cultured, contributing member of society, who went out to art shows and attended protests all the time. I would become a member of the vibrant Halifax music scene. I was even going to be part of a hypothetical underground band called the 50% Off Toasters***. I spent the next two years eating low-quality, high-starch foods, fighting over whose responsibility it was to recycle the tuna cans, and procrastinating from writing essays on Romantic Poetry. My greatest aspiration became to stay out of the rain as much as possible.

Now, my career goals are much more realistic. All I want is to be an award-winning children's book author who owns a farm that is part dog-sanctuary and part cupcake-war grounds (you know, like a paintball range, except with cupcakes). You know that myth that parents are supposed to tell their children when they have to have the dog put down, the one where the dog is actually being sent to a great big farm somewhere where the dog will be far happier and will be able to spend the rest of his days running around chasing rabbits and having his belly scratched by the farmers' loving children? My farm will make that a reality (the belly-scratching children are optional)! And I will support my dog sanctuary with a combination of my book sales and admission sales to the cupcake-war shooting range. It's gonna be great.****

*interesting side-story: after I was rejected by all three universities, had gotten over my disappointment and stopped caring, I met a particularly heinous breed of aspiring Ivy-Leaguer at a birthday party. I did not like that man. He flirted with me until he found out I had applied to, been rejected by, and then given up on the Ivy Leagues. Butwhy? Why would you give up on your goal? He wondered, to which I shrugged. Meh. He immediately turned his attention to the girl sitting next to me (who was, unfortunately, a good friend of mine), and ended up dating her for an excessively long amount of time instead. By the time he ran off to Harvard, I was in the middle of constructing some sort of liquification-ray gun in order to dispose of him with ease**. If my target hadn't transferred countries, I could have submitted my new (and proven to be fully working) invention to Harvard (or maybe MIT). I would have been a shoo-in! But then I would have ended up being stuck in a class with an even more excessive amount of similar Ivy League snobs. Dodged a major bullet on that one.

**I kid, I kid. Disposing of a liquified human being is surprisingly difficult, actually.

***The posters for our shows would look like fliers for kitchen appliance sales. Only our loyal fans would be able to interpret these posters and actually track us down. We were gonna be so underground.

****I actually know someone whose sister has a cow sanctuary. No joke. She adopts old cows and takes care of them so they can die a peaceful, natural death on her farm. And she supports her endeavour by selling miniature houses called Possum Huts and Cowches: Couches in the shapes of cows (and with each Cowch is included a free hand-made rat!!!). If she can support cows through the sales of $500 life-sized cow pillows, I can support adandoned dogs through cupcake war sales.

Apocalypse? Now?

I have officially lost my cellphone*. I am very concerned.

I am concerned for several reasons. The first reason is that I spent most of my very frustrating Friday doing my best to sign away my soul to the holiday retail industry, and on every application form, my preferred form of contact is 'by phone'. While the chances that someone would hire me at this late date are fairly slim, so long as my phone is gone I will be convinced that there are messages on it from Toys R Us, HMV, and Walmart, all offering me unrealistically high wages to help them stack boxes into colourful pyramids for the month of December (that's what happens in the retail industry, right?).

The second reason I am worried about my cellphone disappearing is that, as I now live in a place where there is no landline, I really have few options when it comes to phoning people, or having people phone me, and I am sure that this week will be a vitally important phone-call week for me, for some reason**.

Third is the very perplexing circumstances under which my cellphone disappeared. I know I had it on the way to work. I was in Shoppers Drugmart buying a variety of items meant to keep the bakery bleach water from peeling the skin off my hands, and I took my phone out to check the time and it said 6:54 on it. So I know that at 6:54 this morning, I still had my phone. Then, things get hazy. Somewhere between paying for hand lotion and turning on the oven at work, my phone just disappeared.

What is even more confusing is that I have reason to believe I was sleep-text-message-reading last night. The details of this are far too long and confusing to get into here***, but I am convinced that my subconscious mind was playing some fun tricks on me last night. Ergo, I cannot trust my early-morning memory, meaning I'm not actually entirely certain if I checked the time on my phone this morning. I could have hallucinated it. Maybe my brain already knew my phone was gone and was so concerned about it that I day-dreamed that I still had it! And checked the time! And also read a few text-messages that were new but had somehow already been mysteriously opened.

Seeing as how I no longer trust my own brain, I can't rule out the possibility that I left my phone under my bed (checked) in the fridge (checked), in a snowbank (like in Fargo. Did not check, unlike that confused lady who thought Fargo was real), in the oven (please, no), in a cupcake (I would like to thank my roommate for that suggestion), in the hands of a greedy Shoppers employee (checked. twice. should have looked more closely for shifty eyes), hidden amongst the packages of rubber gloves in Shoppers' Aisle 2, or really anywhere else in Winnipeg by now. Now I'm not going to get a job over the holidays. Instead I will be forced to sit in an armchair inventing bizarre Christmas-themed drinks using ingredients my roommate left lying around carelessly--like vanilla or diet coke or organic shampoo--and watching pirated Christmas movies on my laptop. All because of this stupid phone. Oh dear what shall I do?

*as opposed to three days ago when I 'lost my phone' and it was hiding in a fold of my duvet the entire time.

**Wow. That's all one sentence.

***really, it involves an argument that I thought was with one person but was actually with another, an apology text-message, a cat, and a dream about me being an award-winning poet with a collection of 2-foot-tall Disney Princess dolls.

Winter sweats.

Winter has finally struck Winnipeg. I view winter as generally a nice thing, provided that I am inside admiring it and not outside trudging through it to get from point A to point B. From afar it's beautiful. When I'm walking through it, it causes a body-centred paradox, in which I feel both freezing and too warm at the same time. My body reacts to this by shaking and sweating profusely as I walk (also my airways close up but that's besides the point). When I arrive at work, I am drenched in icy sweat. I feel like I am standing in an igloo. An igloo that happens to contain an industrial sized oven in it. After an hour I change from being frigidly cold to steamily hot, and I spend the rest of the day in a sauna steam suit of my salty sweat*.

When I'm at winter-school**, I attempt to fix the sweat-soaked dilemma by stuffing toilet paper into my armpits. The idea is that the toilet paper will be a nice, dry, protective barrier between my skin and the worst of the sweat, and sometimes it even works, but then it begins to travel. At the end of the day I end up with interestingly shaved toilet-paper lumps that have lodged themselves somewhere between my abdomen and my hips, like very papery misplaced lovehandles. I often consider inventing some sort of sweat-absorbing device***, something like an inverted cotton shoulderpad that I could stuff down my sleeves and snap in place to keep me relatively comfortable at all times of the school day.

Anyway. My point is that it's been snowing all weekend and it's beautiful!


*alliteration!
**as in, school that is taking place in the winter. The properties of winter-school are rather different from normal-school. The abrupt and bizarre temperature changes that occur as I travel from room to room make for a very odd learning environment.
***Like a change of clothes? Of course not!

sugary sweet back pain relief since 1986

A man comes into the bakery and stands in the middle of it, dumbstruck. He admires the rows of colourful cakes. He studies the racks of wedding food magazines. He admires the posters of cupcakes on the walls. He says "I think I'm in the wrong place?"
I ask him what place he is looking for. "The chiropractor. Is this the chiropractor?"
No, sir. No it is not.

Your Saltines Are MINE!!!!

For several months, there has been a package of saltine crackers sitting in the fridge at my place of work. Why anyone would put crackers in the fridge is beyond me. I mean, how could anyone leave a package of saltine crackers uneaten for so long that they would need to be refridgerated to keep them from going bad?

Generally, when there are strange things in the fridge, I assume that my boss put them there. For instance, there's a pre-packaged salad, still in its vacuum-sealed wrapping, slowly liquifying in the corner; there is one random beer that's been sitting in the back of the fridge for over a year now; and there's a thing that I can only assume is pea soup. I assume that all of these items are Rodney's, and he has decided to add it to his fun study in food decay, and that I should leave it there until it turns all sorts of fun colours. For some reason, though, this package of crackers struck me as an un-Rodneyish item to put in the fridge. He just doesn't seem like the saltine type of guy. I had also on several occasions seen my manager, Melissa, eating saltines, so I always assumed they were hers. And so these saltines stayed in the back of the fridge. And I lusted after them.

Then, the most magnificent thing happened. Melissa quit*. Melissa quit, and she left her crackers behind. This being the first day I worked at the store since Melissa quit, I was very excited to see those saltines were still sitting in the fridge. I managed to restrain myself for the first 9 hours of my shift. Eventually, the need to secretly consume my ex-manager's food overcame my desire to maintain my professional bearing in the workplace. I devoured half of the package, just like that.

As soon as I began eating the crackers, I was overcome with fear that these hadn't actually been Melissa's crackers. What if they had been Rodney's crackers? Would he ever actually notice they were missing? What if they were Sierra's? Or Alex's? I was stealing someone else's food. That is a major work-place sin! How would the owner of the saltines retalliate? Would this result in a workplace war? I was afraid. Would this war involve an all-out cupcake-flinging fight**? My fear was quickly replaced with excitement. How many of these crackers would I have to eat in order to provoke their owner into starting a bakery food fight with me? I finished the package. And then, just as I placed the last delicious saltine cracker in my mouth, I noticed some felt-pen writing on the bottom of the package. It said "Melissa". And just like that, my sudden intense dream of having a cupcake war had to be downsized to the original, smaller dream of eating all of Melissa's saltine crackers.



*Understand that Melissa was the glue that held this store together. One of her most impressive feats was the way she transformed the bakery office from something resembling the space beneath your average fratboy's couch cushions, to something actually resembling an office. There is only one reason why Melissa quitting would be exciting, and that is the reason outlined in this post.

**If I am allowed to go on a multi-topic monologue for long enough, I will always eventually end it with my dream of having a cupcake war. For some reason, I have never been able to articulate the idea of the cupcake war well enough to get my listeners anywhere near as interested in it as I am. It's like the time I was allowed to play with the 100-pound box of sparkles and could only talk about sparkles for days afterwards and no one cared. Who doesn't get excited about sparkles? Who doesn't get excited about having tiny balls of cake coated in colourful icings flung at them? Picture La Tomatina, except with cupcakes instead of tomatoes: a blur of beautiful, rainbow icings and chunks of chocolate cake. People coated head to foot in cocoa powder and sprinkles. People swimming in puddles of melting vanilla icing. Why are you not excited about this?

Easter: God's Greatest Comedy

"Jesus is a comic hero. I mean, no offense." my professor is standing at the head of the class, looking slightly worried. She really and truly is afraid of offending someone, unlike the guy last week who made references to "Christian Mythology" and I frowned at him, in that moment forgetting the countless times I've made reference to "Cree mythology" and "Greek mythology" and "Hindu mythology", and then I wasn't sure who to be angry with, me or him or both or whoever created the word 'mythology' and started tacking it on to peoples' belief systems in the first place.

But this is interesting. Jesus is a comic hero.
Last week I had reflected a lot on the idea of book-writing. If, according to our mythology, God created everything, then he must've written all the books too. So why do we go around thinking the Bible is the only book God is trying to communicate with us through? Or maybe that's just me. It's fun to picture it, though. Like, what was God thinking when he got together with Chuck Palahniuk* and wrote Fight Club?

We often split literature into two main genres: the tragic and the comic. Tragedy is not just about people sleeping with their mothers and killing themselves, and comedy is not just a string of jokes about various bodily functions. Anything that begins happily and ends badly is tragic; anything that starts badly and ends well is comedic.

Take the creation myth: now that's a tragedy. It begins with God cheerfully shaping a world out of blank space and putting all sorts of beautiful creatures upon it. Then he fumbles it all and creates humans. A tragedy for God. And for us, what begins as a (presumably) happy marriage between Adam and Eve ends with them being booted out of paradise and sentenced to a lifetime of quarreling, painful births, and the general frustration of being stuck with the same person for all eternity (there weren't many places to find new friends back then). The birth of our ancestors was a great tragedy.

Take the Easter myth: The land lies in ruins. The ancient laws have been completely misconstrued. People in power are using God's word to abuse their lesser beings. There is only one man who can set it all right. He can comfort grieving widows, he has the power to protect adulteresses, and he really knows how to stretch meals. And then he is killed in an extremely brutal fashion. Tragic? But death is only the beginning. Three days later, the man is walking around again and making fun of everyone who had thought he was dead. There it is: Jesus is a comic figure, transcending death at the last minute. Easter: God's greatest comedy.


*You know I spelled his name correctly on the first try? Five points for Amy!

Inexplicable and Pointless Daily Trends

There is always a strange and inexplicable daily trend 'rhythm' to the bakery*. I mean, customer-wise. I can usually pick up on the rhythm an hour or two into my shift. There will be a day when everyone is really excited about vanilla cupcakes with mocha icing. Each person who comes in will buy at least two vanilla-mocha cupcakes, which is weird, because they're generally not that popular. Or it will be Chocolate Lemon day, which is even weirder. Call me crazy, but chocolate and lemon have never really struck me as a winning combination**. Or it will be the day when everyone wants to place an order for mini cupcakes with blue icing. Today is 'customers asking for 6 cupcakes and then only ordering 5 and not being able to count and then being surprised when I tell them they have to choose a sixth one, and then making me choose it for them' day.

The most annoying daily trend was a couple weeks ago, when every other customer who phoned us asked me point-blank if our cake was made from a mix. Maybe non-bakery people don't realize how rude that question is. It's like asking someone if their breasts are fake. Even if you think there's no possible way that anything that full and perfectly round could be natural, you don't just come right out and ask if they're fake. You give the person the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they were just blessed with a better leavening agent than you! Then you get to experience a sad feeling of inadequacy because your sad little cakes will never compare to ours.

I do wonder what causes these trends, though. It must be some sort of sinister conspiracy. But who is behind this mistifying criminal plan?


*Blah blah blah if you want to find a pattern, you'll always find one blah blah blah I know.

**though the Espresso-Lemon Roulades at my old bakery job were even stranger. Lemon and coffee. Lemon and coffee? I never tried one, so I guess I can't judge. But I think I will anyway. Lemon and coffee. Really?

Regina, The Sequel: Bermuda Triangle Solved

After about two hours alone in the Vortex Bed and Breakfast, I solved the mystery. It turns out they were all in the hot-tub. The husband thought his wife had let me in, the wife thought her husband had let me in, and so they both decided to give me some privacy and let me settle in on my own. When they found out I'd been wandering around, lost in their enchanting little home, they were very apologetic and gave me an extensive tour of the premises (and free chocolate).

It really is a lovely bed and breakfast; if any of you are ever in Regina, I would definitely recommend it. Their Artichoke and Asiago Omelettes are delicious.

Regina: The Bermuda's Triangle of the Prairies

At 1 am on Friday morning I discovered that I was going to Regina for the weekend. I slept fitfully that night, thinking of all the wonderful, magical things that I could do in Regina, like sit in my car and cry, or drive around and around in circles, or yell choice expletives at traffic lights. I was pretty excited. I packed my suitcase with far more clothes than I could possibly need for a weekend in the prairies, stocked up my food stores with food from my mother’s kitchen, and was on the road by 1 pm.

The first 7 hours of the journey went fine. They went brilliantly, in fact. Driving in a straight line on flat, open land is surprisingly easy, even if you did have the misguided notion of doing it in high-heel suede boots. I reached the city in surprisingly good time: two hours before the appointed time. I got all excited because this meant I could shave my legs and take a nap and stretch and do my make-up, and then I would look calm and cool and sophisticated when my friend showed up looking all frazzled after her 8-hour drive in from Alberta, and then she would be jealous.**

It was a classic case of counting my eggs before they hatched. I spent the next hour and half searching for the bed and breakfast we had booked*. The map had been simple enough when I memorized it off of my computer screen that morning. However, construction had created a slight detour that turned this city into a swirling vortex of random crossroads and disappearing intersections. After the third time retracing my steps and the fourth wrong turn, I was ready to cross Regina off of my mental roadmap and drive back to Winnipeg claiming that I couldnt stay there because the whole city had been bulldozed.

At last, I found the street the B&B was on. Or so I thought. Turns out I was on the crescent of the street of my B&B. I went in a lovely spiral that spat me out onto a highway that took me to the edge of town and told me I was going back to Winnipeg. This had been exactly what I’d wanted 5 minutes earlier, but now I was indignant that Regina thought it could get rid of me so easily. At this point I was sullenly glaring at any driver who was not driving at the same speed as me, and loudly cursing any streetlight that misbehaved, and I was absolutely done with anything that was called an Avenue.

Finally, I stumbled upon the Dragon’s Nest Bed and Breakfast. A charming place. Serena had told them to expect us at 8. It was 7:30. I knocked on the door. No answer. I saw that there was a number posted on the door, that I should call to gain access to the building. I phoned. No answer. I looked up the other number to the building, which I had written on my wrist that morning, for convenience sake. I called it. After 10 rings, one of the guests answered, assured me that the Dragon’s Nest was a lovely place to stay, and bid me adieu. I knocked again. Then, I just walked in.

It really was a lovely place, especially for anyone who is a fan of dragons (like me). There were charming little dragons everywhere. Dragons on the lampshades, dragons hanging out on the coffee table, dragons dangling from the hanging plants, dragons on the bookshelves. However, there were no Bed and Breakfast owners, as far as I could tell. Perhaps they had been sucked into the swirling black hole of Regina’s street system. I called ‘hello?’ in a half-hearted, hoarse* voice. No answer. Serena had told me we were in the ‘Wisdom’ room. So, feeling more than a bit like a cat burglar, I took my bags and went off in search of my room.

Found it I did. And it was a thoroughly enchanting room. There was only one dragon here, but there was a large painting of a horse on my wall. Up until the age of 13 or so, my two main obsessions had been dragons and horses. I was standing in a very classy version of my pre-teen self’s dream room.

I explored. There were fluffy, waffle-weave bathrobes for two, some packets of Ruffles All-Dressed Chips and bottled water, and a desk stocked with wisdom-enhancing paraphernalia. There were candles. There was what I believed to be a Taoist statue of some sort. There was a book by the Dalai Lama. There was a wall-hanging that said ‘Vision’ on it. There was a prayer bowl. There were no people.

It was one of the more awkward situations I had ever been in***. I considered becoming a burglar right then and there. Maybe I would just swipe The Dalai Lama’s Book of Inner Peace and a dragon or two and leave.

I have been here for 40 minutes now. I can hear muffled voices coming from above me (presumably from the upstairs, and not from the mystical nether-realm), but there is no discernible way for me to gain access to these voices. Every 5 minutes or so, the phone rings, and no one answers it. I’ve stepped into the twilight zone. Will I survive? Who knows...


*alliteration!

**Or, at least, I would look half as good as she did. Serena looks effortlessly sophisticated at all times--even when we wrap her up in brightly coloured party streamers at the end of dorm-room birthday parties.

***Oh, that is a lie. I have at least one encounter this awkward every week. Last week I had 5. And no, you don’t get to hear about them.