A quick search of the internet for signs of the coming zombie apocalypse yielded results that I feel are fairly inaccurate.  Bizarre parasites, mutations, and idiotic political leaders don’t seem to herald the end of times to me.  Maybe it’s just the time I grew up in?  But today something hit much closer to home.

Do you guys remember Fish?  He came to live with us in March.  Well my friends, today Fish died.  Again. I mean,  I think.  I’m almost certain of it.

Shortly after Fish came to live with us I was in my kid’s room and I looked at the tank… there was fish motionless, limp, and floating.  My mother was visiting at the time and I called her in to counsel me, after all, Fish had only been with us a few days.  I wasn’t entirely sure how to break the news to my girl.  But as first my mother and then daughter came in to the room to see what all the commotion was Fish began swimming around jauntily.

What, you’ve never seen a swish swim jauntily?  They can.  Fish does.  Stop mocking and keep your comments and questions until the end please…

That little fucker had some sort of fit, went into paralytic shock, had a seizure and was rendered unconscious, or he died.  Or he has one hell of a sick sense of humor.  He scared me nearly to death.

Well today while my kid was out I went in to her room to put away an errant lip gloss.  As I walked past his tank I chimed Hey Fish. He didn’t reply, but he’s a fish so that’s cool.  What wasn’t cool was when I stooped down to take a look at how my fishy friend was doing I noticed that he was entirely motionless floating belly up in the corner of his tank.

Fuck.

That’s what I said, because what else do you say in a situation such as this?  Remembering his fake-out last time I tried to push the panicked feeling back and I watched.  I sat down on the bed and stared at his tank and waited while tears welled up.  I fished my phone out of my back pocket and dialed speaking into the headphones I was already wearing.

I babbled and ranted and cried, not knowing exactly how to deal with this damn dead fish.  Should I flush it before she gets home? Wait for her to attend the flushing?  I wasn’t ready.  Not that I ever would be, but I was particularly unready for a dead fish at that moment.  On this day.  It’s going to be a crazy enough week without a fish corpse to deal with.

I paced from room to room and babbled and listened carefully to comforting words.  And I felt completely ridiculous.  All this over a fish.  I mean, not just any fish, Fish.  But still, I’m a grown ass woman.  I can handle stuff.

And then I walked back into her room to take another look at the corpse and that beautiful red bastard was not floating where I expected him to float.  He was on the other side of the tank.

Right side up.

Swimming.

Fish is a fucking zombie.  I think the rest of them are coming.

Can something be a pet peeve if you’ve only experienced it once?  I ask because something happened over the weekend that made me bat shit bonkers annoyed and I never ever ever want to see it again… but the times being what they are I’m quite sure it’s going to happen at some point.  You see this is about shoes.  Yes.  That’s right.  Shoes. Kind of.

Now I love me some shoes.  I do, I most certainly do.  Even now I’m contemplating what shoes I’d like to wear tomorrow.  It’s been a while since I’ve been able to go out and indulge my love of shoe shopping but that doesn’t mean it isn’t very real to me.  All that being said, I’m not much of a sneaker girl myself.  But I understand that they are a necessity for many and they have their place.  I’ll wear them if I’m exercising.  Most other activities I firmly believe there is a boot for, but exercising is mostly a bootless activity.  I accept that.

Exercise is not at all the activity I am thinking of though.  I got off track a little.  I think it’s fine for people to wear sneakers.  Viva la fitness shoe.  Especially kids.  Awesome great!  Keep those feet healthy and comfy.  And they do great things with sneakers now.  I love it.  Have you seen those knee high Converse?  Be still my heart.  Really!  There seems to be a sneaker for everyone.  I’m a little sad that I can no longer find the awesome sneaks I wore in my teens.  I think they were called Side One or something like that.  They were black leather and rubber with an over-sized tongue that folded over the laces.  Other than those I was a Converse girl all the way.

Over the weekend though I met my sneaker nemesis.  A shoe I never really worried over in the past made it to my list of irritations.  Because it became a rudeness thing.  RUDE.  That’s what this is really about.  I was at the movies in the dark theater enjoying a very funny film when I saw out the corner of my eye a camera flash, or what I assumed was a camera flash.  I did my best to ignore it, irritated.  Then again.  And again and again.

MOTHERFUCKINGDAMNTITSTOPTHATRIGHTNOW!

I looked over my shoulder and saw nothing.  I faced forward.  I watched the movie.  I laughed and then FLASH FLASH.

Ah.  It’s a camera with a red eye reducing flash set on it.  I looked around.  Irritated.  It had stopped again.

I cautiously turned to face forward and then whipped my head back around quickly thinking I might catch the perpetrator.  And that’s when I saw it.  This is also the moment when my sneaker rant starts to make a little sense.  It was a little girl with the fucking flashy light sneakers that were so popular a few years ago.

It’s totally possible that they are still popular with kids now and I’m just unaware.  I may be out of the loop on little kid sneaker trends.

But as I was saying, this little girl was wearing them in the movie theater.  Happily stomping her feet and kicking away making bright flashes of light every few minutes.  I should make it clear that I don’t blame her.  She’s a kid.  But I do wish her parents or whatever adult took her to the movie had thought that one through a little better.

So that is my new crazy pet peeve.  People wearing flashy light shoes in dark theaters and kicking things.  Just don’t do it, okay?  Okay.  Also?  I won’t be calling those things sneakers anymore because I don’t know how you could sneak up on someone in them.

Okay.

I sat with needle and thread.  And tweezers and scissors.  And an ice cold drink, just in case.  But I sat with needle and thread and mended things that needed mending.  A button here, a ripped seam there.  And the zipper of my favorite bag.

The end stop had come off and when I unzipped it I really unzipped it.  The teeth parting neatly all the way until none of them met.  Fuck.  Damn. Shit. Motherfuckingpieceofshit. I can’t take this.

It was a frustrating day.  I remember that, though I don’t remember what the specific difficulty was.  Some days enough is already enough and then something small is dropped on top like a rotten cherry and the world seems to fall apart around you.  That zipper was the rotten cherry.

I tried halfheartedly to fit the pull back to the two separate lines of teeth but with hands shaking in frustration it didn’t happen.  I cursed some more and set it aside with the end stop and the zipper pull tucked inside for me to tackle another day.

And tucked away it stayed for several months waiting for a day I had the wherewithal to deal with it.  Yesterday was the day of much wherewithal as I tackled a mountain tiny tasks that needed tending to.  But fixing the zipper on my favorite bag gave me, by far, the most satisfaction.  So much so that I felt like celebrating.

As is so often the case, it’s the little things that make or break me.