Just A Day In The Life

Monday was the start of a whole two week vacation for Rigel - yipeeee! Of course, people ask us, "Are you going on a trip?" and we get those incredulous stares from everyone when we say "No, mostly we're just hanging around home." Everyone, that is, except other people with small children who can fully realize the orgasmic glory in being in the heavenly silence that is your home when your kids are away at school for a WHOLE SIX HOURS, or being able to go out to lunch together to a restaurant whose menu boasts not a single CHICKEN NUGGET.

Yesterday we decided to have our sitter, who usually picks the girls up on Wednesdays, stay an extra few hours so we could get out and get crazy and not only have lunch but schedule in a couple of other adult activities, none of which involved peep shows or illegal parking on secluded roads so Get. Your Minds. Out of The Gutter.

Okay, it did involve massages, but the legal kind, given by strong, strapping Japanese women from the old country. We had decided to book sessions for the two of us at our favorite place in Little Tokyo, preceded by lunch and then some shopping. By the time we were making these plans it was already close to 12:30, so I booked our massages for 4:30 in the hopes that we could grab a quick bite and get to the real business at hand, finding some nice new crop jeans and a cute top for me. Rigel had more ambitious plans in mind, however, that involved a relaxed, lingering lunch at the Getty and then shopping, which seemed a little narcissistic of him, I mean, what about MY PANTS, but hey, since he was paying, I went along.

Lunch at the Getty proved to be a good idea as it was a gorgeous day. We were having a great time just hanging out and being together and, of course, talking about the kids which is what parents mostly do when they go out even though they like to pretend they talk about books, politics and other lofty subjects. After lunch we sat outside in the sun and I was trying not to think about the dwindling day and the dimming prospects of any new clothes acquisitions and at around three o'clock Rigel says, "So, let's head on over to the mall and do some shopping and then get our massages." This is when I started looking around for my little time travel pod, since, how were we supposed to get from the Westside to downtown in an hour and a half, AND fit in a shopping trip? He assured me with his usual, "Oh ye of little faith" speech which I countered with my "Oh ye of little time sense" speech and which escalated to him trying to emphasize his point by some erratic driving and then me punching him in the arm.

Well I guess HE SHOWED ME cause he got us into Westwood by 3:15 and we started looking for a place to dump his hard-earned money. I wanted some unique, one-of-a-kind items not crafted by minors in Malaysia, so I stopped a couple of Gen-X UCLA students and asked them where I could find the nearest Gap and they answered tersely, "There isn't one in the village. ANYMORE." I think I heard them mutter "Die Yuppie Scum" under their breaths, but we were running late so we didn't have time to run them over with our VW station wagon or give them a lecture on the merits of finding a good accountant. We pulled into a parking spot right in front of Urban Outfitters around 3:20 and I was off, knowing that I had a scant 20 minutes to fulfill my mission.

Finding the crop jeans of my dreams turned out to be harder than I thought, as I was soon to discover that finding any pants whose waist band actually came up past my butt crack was nearly impossible - really, why bother with the upper six inches of fabric anyway, why not just sell the damn pant legs with a garter belt? (The earth is shaking right now, set in motion by the heads of billions of men, nodding vigorously in agreement) Realizing that righting the world's wrongs was going to take more than five minutes and could not be accomplished by a housewife standing in her panties in a dressing room, we left the store, my only purchase a belt that I could use to hold up my old-fashioned pants that came up almost to my navel.

We made it to our massages only ten minutes late and being pummeled by an overzealous Japanese woman with the fists the size of small boulders turned out to be the perfect ending to our day. Driving home we were happy - Rigel aglow with the prospect of eight more days off and me contemplating the millions I was going to make with my garter-belt jeans.

Archive File: Married | This Life

Tweet Pin It