a few things to start with.
it's not really my black friday virginity. i went out last year at nine in the morning, and the year before that late in the day.
but on black friday of this year, my mother and i ventured out to target at midnight.
normally on black friday my family stays inside like it's the freakin' zombie apocalypse. like the abnormal family we are, we stay inside and read together. my parents go to bed early on thanksgiving night, and i stay up unusually late and research serial killers and watch criminal minds. i'm not sure what my brother does. i feel like it's not as creepy as what i do.
but this year my mother surprised me by saying that we were going to target at midnight. and so my tale begins.
my mother is a morning person. i am a night owl. she had to take a nap, and i was instructed to wake her up at eleven thirty. i ended up waking her up at eleven thirty four because i simply couldn't bear to pull myself away from the criminal minds episode i was watching. (corazon, if you're wondering. the one where reid gets headaches and beats down a college professor with a pipe. go reid.) i then fluffed my hair and we set off for target.
we went to the target by the mall, which was a bad idea from the get-go. the parking lot was completely filled up, so we parked a good distance away at an expensive restaurant called granite city. while waiting in the car, my mother found the target line. it snaked around the building. i tweeted excitedly and yawned.
so. my mom has her purse and i have my gamma phi bag. she's wearing her nice winter coat and i'm thinking we're not going to stand in line for anything, so i have on a cardigan, no coat. and then she's all like, 'hey emily let's go walk to the mall.' the mall is a good quarter mile away, but my mother and i are fast walkers. i agree.
so we set off toward the mall. my mother has her car keys clutched in her fist like a weapon and she's telling me that she's ready to shank someone down if we get mugged in the parking lot. i point out to her that it's way more likely that we'll get hit by a car because we are literally walking in traffic. nonetheless, she clutches her keys, i shiver, and we run into the mall. no muggers. no terrible drivers. just my mom clutching her car keys.
we make a beeline for macy's because we have a coupon. the entire world seems to be at the front of the store, and my mother, in her five foot two way, manages to push her way to the back where we accost the on sale dress pants and cardigans. in no time we're in a dressing room and i'm trying on future teacher clothes. it's twelve fifteen in the morning and my phone is alive; i'm tweeting and jessica (my cousin/sister) is texting me and telling me that she's outside this huge mall in detroit. then i look over and my mom has out two coupons and a calculator.
the woman has out a calculator.
when i ask her what she's doing, she says, "we have a fifteen percent off coupon and a ten dollars off coupon, i have to see which one is cheaper. YES THE TEN DOLLAR COUPON GETS US SEVEN DOLLARS OFF, NOT SIX!" i love my mother so damn much.
we buy our purchases happily and run to new york and company.
at new york and company, i find a pair of dress pants for seventy dollars. while trying them on in the dressing room, i get a text from one of my friends dropping some big news and that she has to talk to me now. i text back saying that i'm half naked in a dressing room. the responding text is, "sure thing, i love you, why the hell are you in a dressing room at one in the morning." ahh... well... the pants fit.
the line to buy said pants (that were fifteen dollars after the coupons and sales) was pretty long. my mom left it to go peruse more pants. when she returned with a pair, she said, are these the same? i replied with "si, pero es negro, no gris." but it's black, not gray. as soon as those words left my mouth, the woman in front of me turned to her ten year old daughter and began to speak very rapidly in spanish. real spanish. spanish like i-grew-up-speaking-spanish-stop-speaking-my-language spanish.
i shut up so fast.
before leaving the mall, i peeked into the aldo. it was closed up, but i pressed myself up to the bars and got on my tiptoes. what the hell, there was no gigantic poster of matthew gray gubler modeling their shoes. i lamented loudly to my mother, who grabbed my hand and dragged me away. i really wanted to see a poster of him and embarrass myself by screaming and getting excited and fangirling all over the place.
after i scored my teacher clothes, we decided to head back to target. we ended up walking across the part of the parking lot that was rather barren, except this one lone car that looked scary. my mother clutched her car keys again. for fun, i began to tell her all the serial killer facts that i knew. instead of being freaked out, she asked me completely seriously, "are there serial killers in india?"
well, yes. where there are humans, there are serial killers. england has quite a few, let me assure you.
we managed to get into the target store without being run down by a car or a crazy stay at home mother. but once we got inside of target... well. there were so. many. people.
we, of course, headed right to the cardigans. there were, of course, none to be had. i was sorely disappointed, beginning to yawn, and becoming hungry. starbucks seemed like a good option, but the line for starbucks curled outside of the target, and i did not need caffeine.
we headed over to boots. i go to school in michigan where it snows a fair deal, so boots were a good thing. i found an adorable gray pair. of course, i was wearing my toms and didn't have socks to try them on, so we stopped in the aisle and i used my mother's socks. this is true mother/daughter love, my friends.
then we headed to DVDs with me clutching this gigantic pink box with boots in them. the electronics line was making its way into the shoe aisle, so we had to battle our way through it. i had a slight advantage; i'm really tall and was carrying a large box. we busted through some frantic women and i found myself facing a mid-life crisis.
criminal minds season six was not on sale.
i know. i know. but really. i was super upset. so i stared at the small picture of reid on it and thought about the nonexistent matthew gray gubler poster back at the mall. i resigned to watch criminal minds upon arriving home if i wasn't too tired.
trying to get to check-out lane involved going through the toy aisle. some lady almost knocked me out by swinging around some gigantic robot toy for her kid, and in the commotion of being happy that i still had my head, i lost my mother. when i took off running to find her, i ran down some poor target employee who probably didn't want to be there at all. i hope he heard me apologize. when i found my mother, we walked quickly toward the front of the store. what we passed was really odd; from the candy aisle at the back of the store all the way through cosmetics to the front of the store, people were snaked through each aisle with shopping carts. they weren't moving.
this was the check-out line.
it was literally snaked through sixteen aisles. it looked like cedar point. and the women in line looked like bears about to maul the crap out of some unsuspecting person just trying to buy tampons.
my mother said, "go put those boots back."
i didn't need telling twice.
when we got halfway through the store, we hit a solid traffic jam of people at the on-sale DVD bins. my mother told me that she didn't really care if i just threw those boots down somewhere, but i'm a good citizen. i always put my shopping cart back, and i put things back where i find them. so i decided to battle back to the shoe aisle. after ten minutes of a furious struggle in which i pretended i was defending gondor from mordor (do NOT hate) i got the boots back. as soon as i set them down, some hysterical lady with a mullet grabbed them and i never saw them again.
my mom and i made it out of target alive, barely. i did not have boots, but i was not about to wait in a four hour check-out line. no way in hell was that going to happen. when we left, the lone police officer gave us a long look. what was a mother/daughter couple doing leaving target at one thirty in the morning without purchases?
we were simply being sensible, mr. cop. and i feel so sorry for you if you have to tackle anybody.
i am no longer a black friday virgin. a lady with a mullet practically attacked me over some boots. we did not get mugged walking to the mall and back while we discussed the fact that are thirty-three active serial killers in the united states at any given time. i got some good deals on teacher clothes. i texted half-naked in a dressing room at one in the morning. i threw a small temper tantrum at the lack of matthew gray gubler in an aldo.
i had fun. and i don't think i'll be doing it again. especially when jessica texted me back and said that she still hadn't gotten into the mall in detroit yet.
but seriously. i just wanted to see this beautiful human being at that aldo.
post script: i just want to say that human beings are crazy creatures for the havoc that we wreak every black friday. i count myself among the crazies.
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