The time I found my people

I never dated much in college. I was a socially awkward curvy girl with low self-esteem and a chronic case of word vomit. So not much has changed. Throw in the fact that I live within the confines of the Seattle Freeze, and my perpetual single status was inevitable. So I wasn’t prepared when the unexpected happened. I was sitting at the coffeehouse on my college campus when a casual acquaintance I knew through a school club plopped down beside me on the heavily loved couch I was perching on. He didn’t waste much time before asking me if I wanted to go swing dancing with him sometime. I stared blankly at him for a minute while my mind caught up to what was happening. In that time, his nerves got the best of him causing his verbal diarrhea to flare up. He began telling me about the sweater he was wearing, made for him by his grandmother. It had a wolf howling on it and he told me the exact thread count of the sweater. Recognizing the signs of a nervous babbler, I rescued him by saying I wanted to focus on school. I didn’t have the heart to tell him we didn’t really have much in common and I wasn’t interested. We never really hung out after that, but I know he is happily married. He just needed to find his people.

I recently volunteered in the first aid tent at a Renaissance Faire. I got to help people with cuts, heat exhaustion, and even anaphylaxis, all while wearing a corset. It was the most fun I’ve had in a long time. Part of the whole experience was camping on the festival grounds, along with every other vendor and volunteer. The community atmosphere was as refreshing as the Aloe vera I spread over my entire body. There is no Seattle freeze within the Renaissance Faire, just camaraderie and fun with like-minded people. So I let my guard down and allowed myself to just be the amusingly awkward, nerdy person I love to be.

Once the festival ended for the day, the vendors and volunteers gathered for some after-hours fun. I was walking from my tent to the meeting spot when a woman joined me on the path. I instinctively reached for my phone, as most Seattleites do, before remembering I was free to chat. Without even asking her name, I told her about what was in my head. My roommate had found a cat she wanted to adopt after losing her beloved furbaby Thundercloud to old age. She had a lot in common with the 10-year-old rescue cat and wanted to give her a loving home. The only thing standing in the way was the adoption fee. I had decided earlier that day that I would pay it for her. It seemed like it was a relationship that was meant to be. I told all of this to my new nameless friend. By the time I was finished, I expected her to give me a passive-aggressive response and put in her ear buds. But she didn’t! She liked the story and thanked me for sharing it.

So I babbled, just like my coffeehouse friend had. It was about a cat, not a wolf, but close enough. I also have no intention of making a sweater using cat fur (though I know that’s been done). I’ve learned that random, often awkward, chatter is ok when I’m surrounded by my people. Maybe that’s the key to thawing the Seattle freeze?

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The time a stranger wasn’t my cat

I am a self-proclaimed crazy cat lady. My two cats are my best friends and I love them so much I actually miss them while I’m grocery shopping. Or at work. Or even on a sunny vacation! The last time I had a fuzzy craving I ran over and picked up one of them with such fervor that it took a couple minutes for me to realize I had stepped in wet, slimy, squishy barf. So then I had to choose between setting the cat down again and washing puke off my foot. It wasn’t any easy choice. Then again, I work with bodily fluids on a daily basis so my gross-o-meter wasn’t registering anything amiss.

We have a new intern at work and she has been a wonderful fresh perspective. We were joking around when she asked why someone was on the floor in the hallway. I was half way through telling her people are just quirky from the heat when it dawned on me that I am a medical professional working in a hospital and should probably be concerned. Sure enough, an older woman had parked her arse right in the middle of the hallway. She sat straight up, legs out straight in front of her, and appeared to be eating oatmeal with the grace of a ravenous one-year-old. The bowl was upside down behind her and oatmeal was in her hair, all over her face, and down the front of her pants. If my coworker hadn’t just shot me with a nerf gun I may have figured out sooner that it wasn’t actually oatmeal.

As I approached the woman, the unmistakable putrid smell of vomit finally tickled my nose hairs. It turns out that oatmeal was no in fact in her hair, on her face, and down her pants. There wasn’t even a bowl. That was just a large pile of vomit that looked like a bowl from inside my office. When I kindly asked if she needed any help she told me no and to go away. Something tells me she was a little embarrassed. Too bad it was about to get worse. The door to the elevator located about 10 feet from her opened and a boy somewhere between 6 and 9 years old decided the entire floor needed to know there was “stinky barf” everywhere. One of the doctors who works next door to me came to lend his aid and was swiftly rebuffed as fast as I had been. The sad thing is, she said she wasn’t embarrassed. She just needed go because she was supposed to be translating at a client’s medical appointment in a few minutes and didn’t have time to be sick. She then finished wiping all the vomit off herself, tried to stand up, got dizzy and collapsed backward right into the pile of vomit that I had mistook for a bowl earlier. Thankfully she then reconsidered her plans for the day and accepted our help.

For the record, it turns out she had in fact eaten oatmeal for breakfast. That seemed important to include.