After filling my tummy with a soft pretzel at Sam's Club--for reasons yet to be determined, Sam's has the best soft pretzels this side of Philly--I headed over to fill up the car. I have no idea how people with huge cars deal with that task. My Prius has a 10 gallon tank. Any bigger than that, and I would have to bring along a sudoku to the filling station. Today, the job of alleviating my pump boredom fell to further observances of fuel cap placement as it relates to the automobile's country of origin. I am in a long-term observational project to determine a pattern to whether a gas cap is placed on the driver's or passenger's side. I was so engrossed in contemplating the Ford behind me that--contrary to most of my observations to date--had the gas cap on the passenger side, that I did not notice the man in his early 60s on the opposite side of the pump from me, staring at my chest.
Guys staring at my chest is not usually a blogworthy occurrence. I get that a lot (thanks, Mom, wink). This guy was different, though. Rather than trying to pretend he did not see me noticing what he was up to, he actually initiated conversation with, "I was just reading your shirt."
I had to look down to see which shirt he was talking about. After all, who remembers what shirt they put on? This morning, in my pre-coffee bleariness, I had pulled on my shirt advertising Austin Grossman's novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible. On the front, it has emblazoned in big letters, "This is what a supervillan looks like." Emp. Peng. has the other one in the set, "This is what an evil genius looks like." I borrow that one for Mensa meetings sometimes. The man in the Men's Garden Club baseball cap continued, "So that is what one looks like."
Yup. A gal pushing 30, leaning against an aqua Prius and shaking the last remnants of a brain freeze from the 4-berry milkshake that didn't taste half as good as the black raspberry ice cream. The quintessential supervillian. I answered with the only thing I could come up with on short notice. "Of course. If we looked like we look in the comics, people would find us."
1 comment:
Over the years I, too, have enjoyed reading the shirts of young ladies, sometimes having arrested their progress to do so. (In a seaside town, it was not considered offensive).
Nimrod
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