Sunday, February 13, 2011

Spirit

Not going to lie, I thought this blog's existence was in mortal peril again. It had been a long time since I felt motivated to come up with anything that might be remotely interesting for the random reader. But there's a reason that last sentence is all in the past tense. There's a reason I no longer fear the death of this blog. Leave it to Indiana to hand me an experience that is definitely blog worthy, right in the nick of time.

So I have been in desperate need of new scrubs for awhile. Such desperate need that it was way beyond time to bite the budget bullet and finally buy some. So yesterday was the day the figurative bullet was to be bit. Mitchell and I went to the one scrub store in Bloomington hoping to have some luck. Mitchell was parking the car when I walked inside and was presented with the most unlikely setting in which to buy medical supplies. You'd expect white walls, cleanliness, maybe even an ironic feeling that the place is sterile? That might be fitting for hospital clothing, right? Not in Bloomington. I walked into the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke, random American pride posters on the wall, and a conversation between the store owner and a customer insisting the store begin selling her line of camo scrubs. My thought- "This should be promising."

I quickly walked away from the camo scrub conversation before my urge to laugh beat my sense of politeness and began perusing a sale's rack. As I was looking at the clothes, I noticed they all seemed to be covered with animal hair. Kind of weird, but I guess not totally unexpected in a store like this one. All the sudden, the animal hair made a lot more sense. How come you ask? A dog came jumping out of the sale's rack right into my legs, almost knocking me into the next animal hair covered clothes rack. My gut reaction was to exclaim my shock and say, "Oh my gosh!! Why am I being mauled by a dog in a clothing store?! Could somebody please get this dog off of me?" But I needed to react in a more socially acceptable way, like pet the dog and say, "Hey you cute thing! What are you doing here?" But in the middle of this response I realized there was nothing normal about this situation and I decided the "socially accepted" response could not be required of me. So I interrupted the camo scrub conversation by saying, "Hey, I don't know if you know this, but there's a dog in your store." What did she say? Exactly what I should have expected in this bizarre situation- "Oh don't worry. That's just my dog, Spirit. But if he's bothering you I can throw him his pig's foot to get him away from you." Umm, no. That's ok. I'll be leaving now. So lovely to have met you, Spirit. Oh, and good luck with the camo scrubs; they sound suuuuper professional.

So there you have it, Blog. You owe Spirit a big thank you. He basically saved your life.