The annual St. Patrick's-themed entry! (Posted a day early, to keep you on your toes.)

Back in the MySpace days, I used to write blog entries - while at work - about my coworkers using false names (because it was the mid-aughts and no one understood the internet yet so it was still fun).

This was what I wrote about on St. Patrick's Day 2006.

March 17, 2006, "The Walgreens"

The more I think about certain people at work (namely August, who spends ninety percent of her time alone in her office talking to herself) the more concerned I become that there is some honest-to-God mental degeneration going on around here. So today I'm going to respectfully decline from writing about dementia in my coworkers and instead talk about dementia in Walgreens. And then throw in a cat story for good measure.

It’s St. Patrick’s Day. In an attempt to cut back on my neon sour worm intake, I found myself at Walgreens buying gum at the end of my lunch break today.

My checkout lady was an ancient woman who has been working at this Walgreens much longer than I’ve been on this Earth and probably should have retired fifty years ago. (For some reason, there are several extremely nice but very, very old women working at this Walgreens.)

Luck o' the Irish

I gave her my money, she handed me my receipt, and told me to “Have a nice…”

An uncomfortable five to ten seconds passed. Her eyes dropped to my outfit.

“…St. Patrick’s Day,” she mumbled at last. “You’re not even wearing green!”

Except I was wearing green. Lots of green. In various shades, no less.

“Well, some of those colors are almost like that but not quite…” she said, trailing off again. I saw this as an opportunity to remove myself from the situation, so I smiled and turned toward the door, only to be stopped by the shouting of a man who looked to be older than dirt itself.

Carting around a supply of oxygen and apparently doing his shopping solo, he had, unbeknownst to me, walked up behind me in line. “I don’t do that!” he barked. “Them…ENGLISH!!”

And then I had to leave.

Completely unrelated but equally inexplicable, I went to the dentist this morning and my hygienist had the television on Animal Planet while I was getting my teeth cleaned. I was fortunate enough to catch parts of two episodes of Emergency Vets, one of which featured a story about a cat that had been impaled on something. The volume was down, so I didn't catch everything that was going on, but I fully understood the skinning of the cat's leg and the multiple close-ups of the gaping wound. WHO WATCHES THIS STUFF? I mean, besides my hygienist, who frequently looked up from her work to watch the screen while pointy things were still in my mouth?

I was reminded of my senior year of college when I was taking Comparative Vertebrate Morphology, and we dissected a cat over the course of a semester. We skinned it, and then at the end of each lab period, we'd pull the fur back up and it would almost look like a whole cat again. Toward the end of the semester, more and more parts were starting to hang out and the skin didn't quite fit as well as it used to.

Dear God, why am I telling you this? Maybe I’m the one with dementia.