Funny

This video literally made me laugh out loud. It was one of those uncomfortable, stifled "I am watching something at work that I should absolutely not be watching and it's hilarious" laughs. So warning, if you're at work you should probably wait until nobody is around.

I know, I know, I am not the first person to have ever seen The Stiffy Goats. Everyone should know, though. Everyone.

It’s officially summer. Even though we’re only in the Month of April, the temperatures are beginning to hang above springtime with regularity. All of the trees are green and most of them have finished blooming.

I want to play hooky. My boss is going on vacation for a few days and it’s everything I can do to not call in sick so that I can just spend an afternoon in the sun. I guess there are no laws against this. It’s not socially acceptable though. I am supposed to show up – be present! Put in my forty hours. YES, I am living for the company!

And I am. I like my job and so I won’t call in sick. I just want to.

I miss Paris. Sometimes I get random flashes of streets or buildings I used to walk past and it’s still weird to me that I can’t just take the metro to get there. Of course it’s also massively cost prohibitive to hop on a plane and visit my old haunts so that’s not happening anytime soon, either. It feels like that whole life was just some long, crazy dream. Did it really happen? Was I really there?

No one ever asks me about my time in Paris. I think I thought it would come up all the time and that people would be dying for me to recount them crazy stories from when I lived abroad. The opposite is actually true. People think I am being pretentious when I talk about my time there. If I start a story by saying “In France…” people seem to automatically tune out. Or they will top me with their travel story as if I was somehow implying that no one else had ever been to France before. Wow, that’s great but you’re not that special.

So I don’t talk about it. I don’t get to tell anyone “I miss Paris,” without sounding like a pretentious asshole. Anyone would miss Paris, they think. And saying it aloud does sound pretentious. But I miss Paris in a way that I miss an old home. The way that I miss Austin and the way that I sometimes think about the house I grew up in and wonder who lives there now in the room that once had blue carpet.

I google street viewed the house once. It hurt. Someone had taken out all the landscaping and replaced it with earth colored stone. It was ugly, not at all the house I grew up in. It looked run down. I didn’t spend long on there.

With my free afternoon, if I was to take one (which I will not be doing) I would sit in the sun in a tank top and get my shoulders to brown. If I felt courageous I might sunbath in the backyard. I would make suntea and read a magazine back to front. I would only wear SPF 15. Then I would make cupcakes.

But I won’t, because I am a good worker bee.

I leave you with The Fantastic Zebras. Even though it’s not NEARLY as funny as The Stiffy Goats, Zebras are truly fantastic.

Now go play hooky for me so I can live vicariously through your lives.