Well I was GOING to do some Christmas shopping today, BUT...
I failed miserably. No matter how I tried I just couldn't get in the mood to fight through a throng of other shoppers to find a Limbo Elmo or a Bratz doll that wasn't Chole.

So I went to my favorite coffee shop and drank a large mocha latte instead. I took along the little notebook and blue Pilot pen that my SF sent me today...how she knew I loved those pens, I'll never know, but I was really stoked to get not only a blue pen, but a black and red one too. Along with the little notebook and aforementioned pens, she also gave me a really cool card and some yummy..Yummy YUMMY peppermint Life Savers that I had to hide from my daughter and her friends.

As I was sipping my latte, I did some people watching. You never appreciate being a normal person (quit laughing, I am normal...my therapist says so!) til you have seen other people that obviously aren't.

Lemme explain.

In the 45 minutes that I spent people watching, I saw three teens with mohawks, one 20-something with so many piercings that it was hard to tell where the piercings ended and her actual skin began, a man who was advertising his tattoo business as a walking billboard, several women muttering to themselves (in their defense they were probably Christmas shopping for a husband who keeps changing his mind about what he wants "Santa" to bring him...not that I would know anything about that!) and about 10 men with desperately bored expressions carrying shopping bags in one hand, and a purse in the other. One of the men stopped and I believed contemplated suicide via the decorative mall fountain, but changed his mind when he realized that first, there wasn't enough water in the fountain to get his clothes wet let alone drown without rendering himself unconscious and falling face first into the water, and second his wife (I assume it was his wife) was watching him like a hawk. Or, more likely, she was watching her purse.

Suddenly, shopping didn't seem like such a bad idea. But by then it was getting late and I needed to track down Taylor. So tomorrow I'm going to shop FOR REAL. As I walk past the coffee shop mumbling to myself, covered with fake tatoos and temporary piercings, with my husband trailing behind miserably, perhaps I will give others the will to continue their shopping. I see it as my way of paying it forward. It never hurts to help. :-)

- posted by Kim @ 3:44 AM