Look at the moosebutt on that one

J-girl and I were at Albertson's today getting a discount turkey. All we had to do was buy $25 of overpriced groceries and then we could buy a turkey at 38 cents per pound. You don't have to buy much at Albertson's to make it to $25. We got a little exuberant (they had diet vanilla coke on sale!) and ended up buying $55 dollars worth of groceries, which naturally led my wife to haggle for the right to buy a second turkey at the same discounted price. I looked at the three guys behind me in line and shrugged my shoulders. I was all too aware of my responsibility as a guy not to make any other guy spend a second longer than was necessary in a grocery store. In their eyes, the only right thing would be for me to assert my commitment to law, order, and minimal line wait times by telling the little lady to back off. I'm sure they would admit, however, that if they were in my shoes, they would feel just like me—much too cowardly to stand between the little lady and a discount turkey. Nonetheless, they still expected better of me, and I could feel the pressure and animosity. I stared at my shoes, inwardly reeling at the bitter waves of resentment being sent my way.

Finally J-girl and the cashier agreed that J-girl would be able to get a second discount if she broke the purchase into two transactions. Oh-oh, I thought. That was the worse case scenario. Those guys behind me were gonna have to wait for us to get a second turkey and then wait to have the cashier split up the groceries and ring up everything again so that it turned into two transactions that totaled more than $25 each. That's when I felt the really hostile vibes. I could tell they were silently cursing me and questioning my manhood. They were sure that I must be a eunuch to let the line get held up like this. I smiled weakly at the cashier as my wife went to pick out a second turkey. I would have gone to get it just so that I could be away from all the resentment. However, both J-girl and I are clearly aware that me being a guy means that I'm too gender-handicapped to be able to pick out a turkey. So off went J-girl, leaving just me, the cashier, and the three eunuch haters.

As the other guys were watching my wife leave and silently cursing all women and their pitiful, spineless husbands, the cashier asked me if I would be willing to donate to the Utah food bank. I grabbed onto her offer like the life line it was. This was my chance to demonstrate that I wasn't eunuch material. Using standard guy reasoning, I quickly deduced that a contribution to feeding the hungry would easily compensate for my line-stopping treason to guy-kind. Even if the guys behind me didn't see that I was stamping out hunger, the fact that I was actually making a purchase would force them or any other guy to admit that I had a had a right to still be standing in front of the register.

So I told her I would be glad to contribute, after which she grabbed one of the preprinted donation forms and scanned it. Sure enough, the guys noticed that something had been added to the total bill, and while they continued to shuffle their feet and sigh heavily, I felt the hate waves lessen. I smiled a little, at the same time hoping that J-girl would hurry so that the amount I had contributed would balance my register-hogging debt to society. If she wasn't quick enough, I admitted to myself, I would probably have to make another contribution just to keep things even.

I was still trying to reason through how much a wasted minute at the register cost in terms of dollars in food bank donations when the cashier handed me the donation form and asked me to put my name on it. Let me explain that all of these places that accept donations have the annoying habit of displaying the forms on the store walls, proudly showing the names of the contributors. This practice is the main reason I refuse at times to donate. All of my dealings with the public are guided by a single metaphor: the nail that sticks out gets hammered. OK, sure, it's probably overly pessimistic, and may in fact be largely untrue. But it works for me. I try to avoid being noticed for anything, good or bad. I am always happy to  blend into the background. But writing my name on some stupid form to be seen by lots of people I didn't know was not my idea of blending. I stood there at the register, uncapped black sharpie in my hand, wondering what to do. I was already inconveniencing the cashier, so I didn't want to make a scene. Instead, I quickly scribbled my online name—Moosebutt—onto the form and handed it back to the cashier.

J-girl still wasn't back, so the cashier had nothing better to do than read the name on the form. She glanced at it with bored eyes, started to put it down, and then looked again. She looked back up at me, catching the laugh that was on its way out, and turning it into a smirk on her now attentive face. I was about to explain why I chose to write that particular name, but before I could say anything, she shook her head, looked back down at the form, and chuckled. Then she looked back up at me, eyes snapping, her lips noticeably pinched tight to hold back the zinger that was on the tip of her tongue. I looked down at my feet, and we stood like that for nearly a minute until J-girl finally showed up with the second turkey. Then the cashier scanned the turkey, inserted a key into the cash register, and punched in the code to allow the purchase of the second turkey at the discount rate. The groceries didn't have to be split up, and nothing had to be rescanned. The guys behind me sighed in relief. As quickly as I could,  I swiped my credit card, gathered the bags, and grabbed the receipt, my eyes glued to the floor the entire time. As I turned toward the exit and the cashier wished us a good day, I swear I could feel her smirk as she considered whether my butt was more similar in size to an elk or a moose. This only served to convince me that my metaphor for governing public relations was spot on.

Revenge of the pork taco

I decided on Sunday to make pork tacos (authentic local pronunciation: tack-ohs). Unfortunately, I didn't get the roast into the crock pot until 12:30, which wasn't enough time to force it to submit to being shredded at 6. I had people who needed to be places soon thereafter, so I quickly threw together a completely different dinner (spaghetti and meatballs, cauliflower, french bread, sliced apples), the whole time being careful not to step on Little J and her science project that she was gluing to a display board in the middle of the kitchen floor (the "perfect" wide-open space, she claimed). Despite scientific evidence that men cannot multitask, I somehow managed to make dinner as I jumped over and stepped around the display board,  granting glances and nods of approval to Little J every 30 seconds as she told me to look at what she had just glued to the board, simultaneously interrupting my teenager's monologue of his college social life with frequent questions (to show that I was listening), regularly glaring at the other teenager (to try to curtail his "clever" running commentary), and occasionally making sympathetic noises in response to Swine Flu Mary's (a,k.a., J-girl) groans of misery (to acknowledge that yes, this was indeed the worst illness that could be inflicted on humans and that, yes, it must be truly awful because she had fallen asleep twice during the day--never mind that that's my average score for a single sacrament meeting). I wanted to kill the pork roast, which, as it turns out, wasn't actually pork but beef instead. Yes, it was one of those peaceful, spiritually renewing Sabbath evenings.

The upside of this whole pork taco debacle was that the "pork" was finally cooked enough for tacos on Monday night. Only, it didn't die quietly. This time it sought its revenge on Josh. Halfway through the meal, both Josh and I noticed that he had huge splotches of taco juice all over the upper right shoulder of his sweatshirt. Neither of us had any idea of how it got there. He took his sweatshirt off (yeah, I know, dumb idea), only to get more juice on his shirt with streaks running down his left forearm and ending in a puddle of juice surrounding his left elbow. Josh started panicking and making squawking noises as soon as he realized the taco juice was after him. Being filled with charity and family unity because it was Family Night, the rest of us sprang to his rescue by laughing and mocking him. J-girl tried to explain to us how all of this happened based on her newly gained scientific expertise from this semester's Physical Science 100 class. Just to be on the safe side, we waited a good hour for the juice to cool and "deactivate" (Josh's term) before putting the leftovers away. We had learned that you can never be too careful when it comes to dealing with taco meat.

Swine flu comes home to roost

Yesterday (Friday) we learned that J-girl has swine flu. We probably should have known on Tuesday, because that's when she came down with the symptoms that she didn't tell anyone about. You'd think an ex-nurse would have a little more common sense about her own health, but she doesn't, even after all of the hype surrounding the swine flu. I should have known better, though, than to think that this would make a difference in her MO. Every time she gets sick, she never considers taking medication, going to the doctor, or getting extra sleep. She just keeps going until she either collapses or I notice that she is sick and prompt her to do something more responsible. Her response to these promptings is typically, "Oh, yeah, why didn't I think of that?" I constantly ask myself the same question.

You're probably thinking that she keeps going because she doesn't see any alternative. But I've learned that usually isn't the case. Her main belief is that no matter what she does, she's going to feel miserable anyway, so she might as well get something done at the same time. I'm somewhat sympathetic to that line of reasoning, but I don't see why that means she doesn't need to take medication or go to bed early. Sometimes I wonder if her insistence to keep going is a form of denial.

Whatever her reasoning, our family now clearly falls into the non-flu-fighters category. After J-girl was diagnosed, Mark admitted that he might have had the swine flu earlier. Of course we didn't know because, like his mother, he didn't bother to tell anyone that he wasn't feeling well. Josh had swine-flu like symptoms, but he got over them in two days, so I thought it was something less serious. Floppy's been eating like a swine, and so have I, so I'm thinking the only one who hasn't been infected yet is Little J. And of all of us who were infected, only Josh stayed home. We seem to have been doing our best to make sure that the epidemic continues. Floppy even tried to sneak out in public by climbing into the minivan while everyone was unloading the groceries. It took us over an hour to find him.

I'm not sure what we can do to repay society. I've thought maybe I'd make an extra effort not to burp or fart in public. Or perhaps I could make an attempt to eradicate the dandelion and clover infestation in our front lawn. But after further thought, I realized that if I did any of these things, I would stop making the people around me look so good. So I've decided to exert a great amount of self control and do nothing—well, almost nothing. If you do end up getting the swine flu, what I intend to do is take the fall for it. Go ahead and to tell everyone (over the phone) that we gave you the swine flu and that you're staying home so as not to stupidly pass it on to others. The increased esteem your friends will have for you should make us about even. Maybe you'll even owe us a little, in which case I expect you to back off a little in burping and farting in public.