He showed me his squirrel skull…

I had an adventure today.

One of my final tasks to complete before departing my internship was getting a background check at City School Headquarters. All volunteers are (supposedly) required to get background checks prior to spending time alone with kids in the schools, which makes sense, except that I have been working with kids in these schools for about 5 months and now that I will not be doing it anymore, I will have finally completed the requirements to do so. The assignment isn’t as futile as I’m making it sound. The point was for me to go through the process so I could guide (via written summary) future volunteers through the process.

I drove myself up to HQ and found a nice little parking spot (to my utter shock). The problem is that in this part of town, they still have the old-style parking meters. You see, once I finally got good at carrying change around in my car to feed meters, the city switched to meters that accept all payments except change. So now, I’ve gotten used to not needing change, but of course, I needed it here. Anyway, I had a couple of dimes and nickels, so I jumped out to see if this meter accepted those coins without realizing that I had locked my door and left my keys in the car. To be more specific, I left my keys in the ignition… with the engine running. Miraculously, this is the first time I have ever done this. I really only panicked for a split second before I just resigned myself to shifting priorities. “I was going to get a background check. Now I’m going to figure out how to get my keys out of my car, preferably before it runs out of gas or starts raining.” I’m grateful for the gift of calm headedness. I know others who are not so fortunate.

I called a locksmith. They said it would be between 30-40 minutes, which ended up being more than two hours, but whatever. Meanwhile my car is spewing exhaust into the atmosphere, while I stand around, entertaining myself by texting people who I think have a minute to share in the amusement of my predicament. I actually learned that one of my friends locked her baby in her car! That made me feel a little bit better.

During the two hours or so I waited for the locksmith to come, I got hit on by roughly 10 guys. I can also expect to get hit on just about daily, either on my way to or from work. This city has the most aggressive… uh, flirters I have ever encountered. Now I am not particularly attractive… average at best. I dress modest to frumpy, so there is nothing special about me that renders men unable to control themselves in my presence. And I do not understand what is going on. Do some women find hitting on any girl you find attractive enough to fuck once flattering? To be clear, I am not talking about good ol’ fashioned flirting, which is necessary for the propagation of our species. I’m talking about the cat-calling and mindless, blind flirting (I feel like there is a better word than flirting) that happens as women walk down the street, generally minding their own business and usually trying to accomplish things totally unrelated to love (or sex) interests. I just don’t get it, and I can’t imagine it’s very effective. OK, rant over.

The locksmith finally came, and in under a minute he had my door unlocked. It was actually pretty anticlimactic. I filled out a bunch of paperwork for the background check and got fingerprinted by a woman who couldn’t be bothered to be nice to me or explain what was going on.

Has anyone else been fingerprinted lately? They had me clean off the ink with this disgusting stuff that looked like warm margarine and smelled like lemon-scented motor oil. You smear the stuff on your hands and wipe off the ink with paper towels, but you cannot get this stuff off your hands to save your life. It was nauseating I can assure you. I wish I were allergic to it, so I would have an excuse never to use it again.

And that was my adventure. I came back to the office. Tried to tie up loose ends. Cleaned out my desk. And went home. Just like that.

So long, UMB, and thanks for all the fish.