hey, i'm responsible. right?

why is it that whenever you are home alone, everything is ten times scarier?

today is the beginning of what i hope will be a monumental week. until wednesday night, i've got the entire house to myself.

i am ridiculously excited about this. not because i can invite all of my friends over and we can party (with a job and classes i have no time for such shenanigans and don't approve of them anyway), but because i can pretend like i'm a real person.

let me clarify real person.

real person in this context: a working person who lives by themselves or with a spouse, has a house, and is responsible for taking care of some form of dwelling.

this week, i feel like i fit into those categories, and it makes me excited.

working person: i have a job that i will be getting up for six at forty-five. i am a working person.

living: well, right now i'm living by myself. married at twenty is a bit scary to me. and i think scarier to my boyfriend.

house: well, i don't own my house, my dad does. but right now i'm currently responsble for it.

i've been a real person for twelve hours, and so far, i've had fun. i managed to cook my own meals. i've been checking the list that my mother left me on the fridge of things that i must have accomplished during the week almost compulsively. and then i did a true adult thing: i went grocery shopping.

my mother had left me a short grocery list of things to buy, including fruits i don't like for when my brother comes on wednesday to end my solitarity. my list had raspberries and peaches (neither of which i will eat), strawberries (heck yes, favorite food), more milk because i had run out at lunch, and croutons because every salad needs a good crouton.

and thousand island dressing. i didn't buy any. but every good salad needs some kraft free thousand island dressing to cover those kroger brand seasoned croutons.

i went grocery shopping after my parents called me from their layover in las vegas. i have never been to las vegas, but i do know that my parents took ten dollars in nickels to try slot machines. i want a picture of this because if they actually use these nickels to play said slot machines, i need proof. i don't think it will really happen.

my parents called me decently late. so i ended up going grocery shopping around seven thirty in the evening.

god granted me with mysteriously long legs and my mother's walking habits. this means that when i go somewhere, i get there in a timely manner. i got my cart, checked over my strawberries and raspberries, and was already feeling up some peaches before i'd quite realized that i'd moved. i was on a mission. i was also slightly afraid that i'd run into someone at the grocery that i didn't particularly want to see. i'm not sure why i had this fear. but i had it, and i walked very very quickly toward the croutons.

maybe i'm stupid, but i think that a decent place to find croutons would be with breads. croutons are just pieces of really dry, seasoned bread. so when they weren't in the bread aisle, i became slightly confused. the next aisle over was dried foods, and i figured, surely they'll be here, because again, croutons are just pieces of really dry, seasoned bread.

no, they weren't there either.

i found them next to the dressing. which now that i think on it, makes sense. but the aisle wasn't the salad aisle, it was the kool-aid-salad-dressing-other-almost-liquid-stuff aisle. (my father, being a man of science, would call this aisle "the aisle of mismatched slightly viscous or soon to become viscous products.") so do salad dressing and croutons magically go together everywhere? or just my grocery store?

i ran into a traffic jam at the milk. i guess it was really on sale, more so than the other things i was buying. after waiting for what seemed like forever behind some mothers who go grocery shopping so often that it's a sport, i managed to snag two gallons. i was suprised there was some left.

i felt extremely awkward at the check out counter handing them my discount card. i managed to swipe my credit card the right way, but the girl behind the register kept looking at me like, "you're really grocery shopping?" i kept wondering if there was something obscene on my face, the way she was staring at me. i walked out to the parking lot with my precious foodstuffs as quickly as my myteriously long legs would allow without me tipping over the cart and spewing berries everywhere.

after putting away my groceries, i realized that the story of my life had once again played out: i had had terrific fantasies of feeling awesome grocery shopping, but all i had really felt was efficiency and terrible awkwardness.

i'll get there. and my grocery list will appreciate it.

but getting back to the first thing i mentioned about things being scarier at night. after checking my list right before writing this blog, i realized i had forgotten to water my mother's hanging pot on the front porch, and that's underlined about eight million times. which means it's pretty damn important.

the watering can is on the back patio, next to our three season room. i turned on the kitchen light and the patio light, but while i was bending over filling up that watering can, i felt like someone was watching me.

then when i closed up the back porch, locked it up tight, and wandered to the front porch to water the potted plant, i felt like there was someone in my pantry. i turned on the front porch light and angled myself so that i could see the entire street. but when i was watering that silly hanging plant, i felt like that unassuming character at the beginning of a criminal minds episode.

you know, the one who's about to get stabbed.

everything is scarier at night and not adult when you're not really an adult and you're home alone.

if there's one thing i have to learn about my first day as a real person, it's to not save stuff for the evening. be responsible during the day, because at night, that's when there really is a serial killer there when you pull back the shower curtain like a paranoid girl with an afro from a bad eighties movie. and when you're home alone, there's nobody there that's going to hear you scream.

that sounded incredibly melodramatic. we'll just stop blogging here before i become poetic and increasingly paranoid.