the most winning fail

That Day I Lost My Migraine Virginity

Today I knew I was going to die. It was the only logical option.

I started off thinking nothing was wrong in math class, minding my own business and writing down the homework when HOLY OLD PEOPLE VISION BATMAN the middle of my eyes suddenly went blank. I mean, I could see, but things I was focusing on, like a word or a page or a face, would just not be there. It didn’t bode well for me trying to pay attention when half of my math teacher’s face just disappeared. Of course, it being early, I tried to rationalize, and had fun looking at the clock and not seeing it and pretending I could bend the power of time.




Walking through the halls was a treat. No one had faces. It was like a trippy-ass music video.

But by the time I got to second period, I was seriously getting freaked out. I sat down in my class and all of a sudden not only did I have the blind spot in the middle of my eye, but also my right peripheral vision just…disappeared. I spent a large quantity of the class looking nervously behind me to see if I was disappearing into the Matrix or if Jesus was going to come out of the smoke and chant religious stuff at me. So that was fun for a while. Soon my right peripheral vision had just totally gone to shit and it was happening on the left, too. So I couldn’t see my class and the blind spot was getting worse and I think people may have been laughing at me because I was really tearing up and getting really hysterical, and I think I stood up and gave everyone (that I could see out of my tunnel vision) a thumbs up and sort of waddled over to Mr. Douglass, who asked me if I was okay BUT HE DIDN’T HAVE A HEAD BECAUSE MY TOP VISION WAS GETTING ALL WIGGLY AND MAKING STUFF GO AWAY. WHAT. THE FUCK.







So after that minor problem, I sat through an excruciating Spanish class, wondering if I was going to die and if my eyes were clouded over and then secretly wondering if I could wear a pirate patch the rest of my life and whether or not I could see dead people in the next phase when it just got so bad that I admitted defeat and went to the nurse’s. I was shaky, hysterical, over-tired and trying to keep calm, just in case this was like my trial for becoming like one of the X-Men or something, and when I showed up at the nurse I looked like this:











What’s the moral of the story, you ask? Well, kiddies, I Wikipedia’d migraines through and through, and apparently when you don’t eat, don’t sleep, spend too long staring at computer screens, and are emotionally stressed, your vision craps out on you and leaves you for a more stable lifestyle!! Who would’ve thought? Now I feel like an official old person, and am fully not looking forward to returning to my first couple classes on Tuesday.

Why Working Two Volunteer Jobs Is Bad For Your Health

Today I woke up. It was such an adventure. Especially when I realized that my dinner of peanuts, cinnamon rolls, and M&Ms hadn't gone down too well the night before and thusly my stomach felt kind of like this:



Yeah. It felt like Death was poking my stomach with his scythe and then he put me in his washing machine with his laundry on 'SUPER DOOM SPIN'. Have you ever noticed how stomach pain trumps all other sicknesses? Ear infection? Can still work. Cold? Lame. Stomach? OH GOD. Nothing gets done and it seems like no one ever believes you.

There's a place called McCormick Day Camp where I've volunteered for the past four years. I could have been paid this year, but that didn't work out. So every so often I pop in and put on my peppy face so that I might get a chance to be hired next year. Today was one of those days. I thought it was going to be relaxing--We were going to a nature preserve, how hard could it be??

I was wrong.

First off, it took us 45 minutes to get there. That made me realize we were officially in the boondocks. Nothing around for miles. I kept expecting to see my hillbilly family pop out from under the sparsely-seen bushes or something. When we got there, it was acres and acres of this-could-end-badly. 22 kids under my watch, and all of them were bored and wanted to buy stuff at the consession stand which clearly nature preserves do not have.

Luckily, there was a magical museum in the parking lot!!! Praise the Lord!!! Of course, we could have just gone to a museum in the first place, but no one sees this logic. McCormick's a wilderness camp, so the kids were just going to have to suck it up and eat leaves instead of buying consessions. (The kids usually have between 10-20dollars on them. It's sad to see a little girl buy a Spongebob ice cream cone with a 20.) But the museum plan diverted them from their hunger, so we took them in.

This museum was obviously booming. It had had 90 visitors (proclaimed proudly) in the past month, and it had three exhibits. A Civil War room, The History of Postcards, and Illustrated Children's Books of the 20th Century. WTF? I wonder if the nice old lady ('nice' at this point) had been a child once, sitting and thinking, 'hmm, when I grow up, I want to take a small, whitewashed building in the middle of a parking lot in the middle of a nature preserve in the middle of nowhere and make it into a museum on the Civil War, postcards, and watercolour pictures of kitties.' But the kids liked it all and all, especially the 'play room' for the children's books, which looked like one of those recurring nightmares you have with carosel music and the creepy brightly-coloured clowns.




There was literally an old, worn down anamatronic moving puppy that looked like it could use a bath, and its head would slowly move toward you as it talked in a high, feminine voice. It was on top of a plastic green hill with happy caterpillers and centipedes that wriggled. Also, if you tired of that, there were forest creature puppets that smelled like old people and failure.

Apparently the museum thought it wasn't teaching enough, because there was also a room with a sad-looking wilted teepee in it and that's it. Maybe it was where the forest puppets slept at night.

As we left this high-quality museum, the once-thought kindly old woman reminded me there was an entrance fee of 30 dollars for the eight 5 year olds I brought with me, so I waited to pay with a credit card that wasn't mine while I listened to the creepy children's music, and I wondered what I was doing there if I didn't even work there.

On the way home, I fell asleep. I drove home in a children's-museum daze, only to have an old guy run out in front of me in the street, waving his arms at me wildly. He had a newspaper in them. I couldn't tell if he was trying to flag me down, kill himself, or sell me something. I left him flailing sadly at me as I drove home, not ready to tackle more weirdness from this day that I still had yet another non-paid job full of phenomenons I had yet to see.

The Tale of the Pity Panini

Before I went to tech today, I went to the doctors’ for three overdue shots. Now, I know there’s some sort of scientific logic behind vaccines and all, but all my hillbilly instincts tell me about them is that they’re long, pointy, and filled with the type of disease you’re trying to prevent. Strangely, this is not comforting. When I have children, they’ll be going to the hippie-apothecaries who’ll be chant nice things about the sun and the flowers to heal them and hum in circles about the power and nature of being or something. No sharp pointy things. However, I will miss the band-aids. I got three. They were Tweety, pink flowers, and Snoopy. It was pretty badass.

I also got this bright idea to have all three shots in one arm. At the time, I thought this was terribly clever (I can still halfheartedly flail at things with my left arm!! I can kick stuff and maybe it’ll move!!) but after tech, my right hand had developed an uncontrollable twitch and the rest of it had about the mobility of a jelly noodle. Hm. Pair my now-badass bandaged arm with the fact that I didn’t wait the full time you were supposed to wait after those vaccines (I couldn’t stay in the waiting room. There was a scary lady there who kept looking at me venomously, like I was going to eat her babies or something.) and I was definitely a sight. I tottered out of there with pride.




I appeared at tech with maybe twenty minutes to go until lunch, so I spent that time quietly painting poster-board in Super Garish Halloween Diner Pumpkin Fest orange-and-yellow checkers, and felt useful. When it was time for lunch, it was agreed we were going to Panera.

I was so excited. I had a whole ten dollars. Besides, my friend works there now, and she told me that basically if you took Christian religion and replaced ‘Jesus’ with ‘bread’, you’d have Panera’s philosophy. This is true enough.

When we got there, I ordered a panini and some lemonade, confident in my ability to not spend ten dollars at a sandwich place. But this is Panera, remember, where bread is their Jesus, and it’s not to be taken lightly. My total came out to $10.25. I checked my pockets.




So I sat there, dumbfounded, heartbroken, and pretty damn hungry, since I hadn’t eaten and I’d just been shot up with a bunch of deadly diseases. My cashier, who was a motherly-looking, short little woman, said,

“Don’t worry about it, honey. I got it.” And she rung up my food.

I stood there, gaping stupidly for a while. Until she told me to move on. This is not in the Panera Commandments, I bet. But I did as she told and waited unnaturally long for my food, wondering if maybe she hadn’t provided for me after all and I was going to get bounced for being poor. But that didn’t happen. Instead, two paninis under my name came up. WTF? I hadn’t paid for those. I hadn’t even paid for one! But, as any good, selfish-minded girl with a magic panini-fairy-godmother would do, I took one (and made an awesome techie go get my other one) and scrambled off to my seat.

The only explanation I can come up with is that it was out of pity.

I mean, imagine me. I was sitting there, poor, and obviously malnourished, with three vaccine band-aids up my arms from shooting up or donating blood or something like that, and I probably had like a family at home to feed or something, since I didn’t have a quarter to buy my super expensive lunch. That was definitely the reason. I mean, I was a pretty sorry sight. It was humid outside so my hair was all reacted and stuff. Maybe the shirt I was wearing made me look like I was preggers. Something made my magic panini-fairy-godmother pity me, and I took that pity panini with pride, dammit, and went home quietly to a land where impossible things didn’t happen anymore.