What's with Old Ladies?

never get married
Originally uploaded by hellmar.

What’s with old ladies who wear tons of make up and perfume? I was just crossing the parking lot back from my lunch break and I saw a flock of these old bats, festooned with jangly gold jewelry, leathery wrinkled lips painted in bright red and pink, and hair of purple lilacs. I was actually surprised that I couldn’t smell this pack of zombies from the moment I opened my car door. The only thing more disgusting than an old lady with too much makeup on, is an old lady marinated in a half gallon of cheap perfume. I’ve had the bio-hazardous privilege of being stuck in an elevator with one of these old skunks for a couple floors at the doctors office, and literally, I’m not exaggerating, it made my eyes water and induced a fit of sneezing that didn’t go away for 5 or 10 minutes after “it” left the elevator. The older you get, the wiser you are supposed to get, right? Well how is it that everybody learns in high school or earlier, the perils of wearing too much “personal scent,” yet these women have somehow forgotten? At some point early on, somebody teaches us all, the “spray-in-the-air-and-walk-into-the-cloud” trick. So I don’t understand why old ladies think that 17 spritzes aimed directly into the most absorbent part of their clothing will make them more pleasant to be around. Don’t they notice the plants withering in their path as if they were some musk & potpourri Ring Wraith? Or the paint peeling off nearby cars from the alcohol vapor? Perhaps these vapors are the cause for the discolored hair. You know what is a nice looking hair color for an old lady? Grey. Not purple, not blue, not fire engine red. Fucking grey. White looks nice too. Shades of silver, but not UV. It’s surprising they don’t have bees attacking their heads or flocks of monarch butterflies nesting on them. I suppose the alcohol fumes kill the poor critters before they can land.

You’d think that after so many years of the same morning routine, one would learn the pitfalls, consequences, and subtleties of personal grooming. Personally, I have over the past 10 years, learned the intricacies of shaving, for example. The stroke length and direction, the importance of the right amount of moisture and how hairs react to water. The thickness of the lather. The difference in pressure needed for the cheek versus the upper lip. The life span of the blades. When I was 17 I could still shave properly, but the art has been steadily refined over the past 10 years. I can only assume that judging by the example set by the elderly, this skill will reach a stage of great decline and my morning shave will become utterly haphazard. Should I expect that in my twilight years, I will walk out of the house with huge splotches of different length hair, dabbles of shaving cream still on my chin and cheekbones, an open wound on one side with blood streaming down my face and molars exposed? Old men seem to still know how to shave just fine. Why do old ladies forget how to properly apply makeup, perfume, and hair color? I guess to be fair, its only a minority of old ladies, most of them age with dignity and style.

But those pathetic few. Why do they do it to such a sensory overloading extreme? I can’t suppose it’s to attract men. Most of them are married anyway. Don’t they know that such an appearance is far more of a repellant? Like one of those poison arrow frogs, bright markings mean danger, at least in the wild. Maybe its because old men’s eye sight is bad, so they need bright beacons to guide them in, like a runway in a snowstorm. “Roger, the two bright blue blurry spots are the eyes, and the single bright pink blurry spot is the mouth. Affirmative… Marker. Engage tongue.”

Or maybe its because their own eye sight is bad, as well as their sense of smell. Maybe their olfactory powers are so weak that they just keep going, “sniff sniff. No I still can’t smell anything, It needs more, way more.” I suppose I should cut the elderly a break and let them do whatever they want, they’ve earned it. Hey lady, if you want to look like Bobo the clown, go right ahead. I’ll laugh at you, but you don’t care anyway. I respect that. But when the level of perfume emanating from your undulating, turkey-skin neck flap melts the breathalyzer on a cop’s belt you’ve just walked by, you’re probably invading the personal space of others. And that’s not cool.

Would You Like Some Help Out?

Ever wonder what good this service actually does? I'm referring to when you're at checkout in the grocery store, and around the time that they're bagging up the last of the groceries, the bagger will ask you, "would you like some help out today?"
Who ever says yes? What are they actually "helping" you do? Let's take a moment to over analyze this shall we?

I always assumed that this is a service offered to the elderly, to whom the burden of lugging heavy groceries around can be too much, and the baggers are offering to help with the load, like a boy scout helping an old lady across the street. What I don't understand, or, what THEY don't seem to understand, is that this person is using a grocery cart, and that the process by which the groceries were delivered to the checkout counter wil be the exact same process by which the groceries will be transported from checkout to the car. In otherwords, "I was able to get them up here, I think I'll be fine to cross the parking lot." If the customer didn't need help pushing the cart around the store, its highly unlikely they will need help pushing it to their car. Perhaps they are accounting for the disparity of friction coefficients between the smooth linolium floors of the grocery store and the rougher asphalt of the parking lot. But only a very weak and very feeble person would notice the difference in terrain smoothness enough to actually require assistance. I also thought of the scenario in which perhaps moving around the store was manageable until that last item was placed in the cart, at which point it was all the strength the customer could muster to move the cart from the cotton balls isle to checkout, and going all the way to the parking lot with this final load would just be too much. A variant of this theory would be that the grocery weight WAS manageable, but the added weight of the grocery BAGS tipped the scales of impossiblity, therefore requiring outside assistance. I suppose these explanations are feasible, but they still seem unlikely. For a while I considered that maybe the lifting of individual grocery items from the shelf to the cart was viable, but the combined weight of several items in one bag was too much to lift, so that an employee would be required to actually lift the heavy bags from the cart to the trunk of the person's car. But then it hit me like a ton of groceries, how does the person get them from their car to their home!? This dilemma invalidates all the previous explanations. No matter what the reason, if a person needs assistance getting their groceries into their car, how do they get them out of the car?

I must conclude that the only reason this service is offered is as a form of lip service. We're going to make it look like we'll go the extra mile to lend a helping hand, but really, it doesn't help you do anything you couldn't already do. "Would you like a customer care agent to hold your penis for you while you urinate? Thanks for shopping at Ralph's."