Blast that Walkway

I spent last weekend up in Waco, watching my sister graduate from Baylor. We had a good time, and of course it was exciting to see her cross the stage. However, for about three hours during graduation itself, I was convinced that I had somehow entered my own personal version of hell. That is because, sitting directly behind us, was the grand duchess of beeyatches. If she were a dinosaur, she would've been Tyrannosaurus Beeyatch. If she were an overweight film star of the late 70s, she would've been Dom de Lubeeyatch. In real life, she was just an ill-mannered fat woman with personal space issues.

There was one central issue that consumed this woman throughout the graduation ceremony. Her point was simple: the row she was sitting on wasn't a walkway. It happened to be the row in line with the two exits, so to get from one exit to the other, a lot of people did, in fact, use her row as a walkway. This drove her insane.

I would estimate that I heard her bellow "This is not a walkway!" 75 times on Saturday afternoon. In the lulls between "This is not a walkway!", she was pressing her daughter to form a barricade with her legs and to get her daughter's children into the blockade. They got into it with a few people. One guy really rose to the challenge. The first time he passed through, he ignored "This is not a walkway!" The second time, they tried to block him with their legs, so he knocked their legs down and said, "It's a walkway now." (I was very close to throwing my wallet at that man in admiration.)

All of that sounds fairly annoying, but the real issue was that the row she sat on was a walkway. They got there late, so they untarped the seats on the walkway to allow for more seating; that explained why the row was between the two exits and twice as wide as the rest of the rows. Logic was not a friend of the Thunder Beeyatch, however. Of course, when the ceremony was over, I too used the not-a-but-actually-yes-a-walkway, thus sticking it to those villains very slightly in my own way. If there's any justice in the world, a freak tornado swooped up the hippo poop piles from the zoo and dropped it on those ladies, then picked the poop back up and dropped it again.

Not much else is going down here. I will note that Tony Soprano scares me more than ever, and that both Laura and I succeeded admirably in our quest to watch less than 3 hours of tv each last week. I got the itch again Sunday and watched an hour's worth of infomercials on no-money-down real estate, so I'm not really sure I made any permanent progress.

Our challenge for this week is to hit the gym 4 times. I'm actually not worried about that, simply because the gym is weird enough to entertain me. Example: there's a machine there called the Butt Blaster. Like every other literate person in the joint, I'm absolutely terrified to get near it and yet I can't wait to see someone attack that thing. The good thing about going 4 times this week is that it seriously boosts our odds of seeing someone actually get their hind quarters blasted. Don't worry, everybody; I'll keep a running tally of the blastings here.

Posted by Cody at May 14, 2007 8:31 PM