If your parents were like mine, you were probably taught fairly early on that it was impolite to stare. I grant you, there's a wide world of interesting people out there, some of whom deserve a good 30 seconds to a minute of intense scrutiny. But we're adults, who can maturely hide our gaze behind sunglasses or a strategically placed newspaper. Children are incapable of such discretion. They'll just gape, slack-jawed, until a responsible adult grabs their head and swivels it in another direction or swats them on the ass.
Why do I bring this up? Funny you should ask. On Friday, we were in a Family Dollar store for reasons I can't recall right now. She Who Shall Not Be Named had her head wrapped almost completely in gauze (it's a long story, but no - she isn't hurt or anything). She was her normal chatty self, but did have the look of someone with major head trauma.
Enter a woman and four of her seven kids. How do I know she had seven? Because she conveniently offered this information to the cashier after making a half-assed attempt to discipline one of them. Her rationale for allowing the child to knock over a display of potato chips was that, since she had seven, it was hard to keep tabs on all of them.
I had a few thoughts on that, as you can imagine, but kept my mouth shut. I was outnumbered, after all.
Owing to my general sense of paranoia, I knew these little darlings would, at some point, notice the giant head wrapping on SWSNBN. I was counting on it, in fact.
Sure enough, as we were walking out the door, around which the four future meth addicts had stationed themselves, the youngest girl shouted out to me, "What's wrong with her?" I stopped, smiling inwardly to myself, and turned to them. Giving my daughter a nervous glance, I said, "She can start fires with her brain."
We left quickly, so I missed the uproar that followed. The Wife, stuck in line, helpfully clued me in that the girl immediately reported this earth-shattering scientific news to her mother, for which she was apparently rewarded with a thorough dressing down (not for being nosy, mind you, but for telling lies), and a - you guessed it - swat on the ass.
I almost felt bad when SWSNBN set fire to their car.
I held my breath for that Oscar post and blacked out, you bastard! But that was kinda fun. Lemme try it again....;)
a family dollar store in houston, texas--can't imagine running into any over-reproducing, loud mouthed, ill-behaved, child-abusing people in a place like that. maybe y'all ought to take the step up to walmart or big K.