The 5 Finger Discount

So the last time I wrote I was in a certain café that will remain nameless. I typed and typed away, while eating a grilled chicken salad & drinking way too much coffee (more on that later). I had just moved a few weeks prior to my last update and was seriously hurting for cash. Since moving was so hectic I had started getting my coffee crack on the go and that didn’t help my budget. But the real problem was that I hadn't yet replaced the free coffee machine I had dropped and broken into a million pieces. So every time I got a coffee to go I would request or grab extra splenda. I did this for two reasons: There’s a resident coffee machine at the clubhouse of my complex but they have this stuff called “sugar”. ICK. They also have sweet & low, eeewwwwaa! Secondly, some places don’t have splenda and that way I would always have some on me “just in case”. I’ve had a habit of carrying around copious amounts of splenda in my purse for quite some time. You think that’s strange? Today a bunch of ten year olds at a birthday party could very well do a scavenger hunt exclusively within my purse. If you need it, I’ve got it. I am a traveling pharmacy. I also have the stir sticks, socks, makeup, gas-x (don't ask), earrings, a rainbow of highlighters….and well you get the point.

So back to my story...I’m at the café where I’ve been served a coffee plate (is that what that tiny plate is called?) with like 10 splenda, 4 creamers and a few other things. But I only need 1 splenda per cup. I had noticed earlier that an old guy at a table full of senior citizens had been staring at me for quite some time. So when I was just about to go, I quickly looked behind me at the waitress behind the register, grabbed the leftover splenda, shoved it in my purse and then proceeded to leave----BUT between shoving them in my purse and standing up out of my chair, I noticed that old guy’s stare. Except this time it was a different stare. It was the stare of judgement: a damning, hard, guilt-tripping stare. The kind directed at serial killers as they enter the courtroom on trial for butchering an entire family. My fashion aviators (they make me look so hot if I do say so myself), provided a small buffer between my mortified self and the “you’re going to hell” stare. But they weren’t enough to shield me completely from his eyes as he ever so slowly turned his head without blinking, following me as I walked away, my eyes too unable to look away for several steps too many.

What was I supposed to do?? Go digging through my tote looking for all of them so I could return them? I mean, hadn’t they already planned on me consuming those? Even if not all at the café? I felt like a hardened criminal, like someone just waiting on bad karma to hit me at any given second in the form of some uncalled for speeding ticket for driving 5 miles over. By a trooper. On a motorcycle. A female trooper. I couldn’t bat my eyelashes out of this one. Or help the ladies to “perk up”. I mean, COMMMEE ON! No matter how disproportionate his stare was to my minimal theft (if that can even be called a theft), his eyes had pierced through me, straight to my own personal Jiminy Cricket. Fuck.

I couldn’t shake my excessive guilt and mortification for the next week. (make that MONTH). Since then I have been doing unnecessary things in hopes of balancing out my karma: tipping $1 at a coffee shop when my only purchase is a $1.50 bottled water and keeping my mouth shut when that big booty ho cut in line in front of me at the grocery store while avoiding eye contact because she CLEARLY knows what she did and what I really wanted to say is “OH NO YOU DI-ENT!” I have continued doing unnecessary nice things all because that old fart made me feel like a hardened criminal. Normally I don’t care about what other people think of me, but this time I felt different……and I've told myself over and over that he MUST have been such a pervert for staring at me in the first place and that he too, is going to hell.

Ok, so I’m not gonna write anything about new years’ resolutions…..I’m gonna finish my breakfast and coffee in bed while reading unnecessary celebrity gossip columns, then head over to Town Lake for my former jog that has now become leisurely walking while listening to Jack Johnson and scope out today's eye candy. Happy Memorial Day!