Cap'n George Washington Crunch

Hello and welcome back to Blogalicious! This week, we’ll be examining the two main worlds of Elise’s summer—FYE and home.

FYE, the nut hut formerly known as Coconuts, is a place where the fine residents of Stow and Kent may purchase and sell CDs, DVDs, video games, and body jewelry. We’ve also got a few giant Johnny Depp standees, but I’m hoping those always remain in the store for me to gaze upon. Working at FYE is an easy job, mostly consisting of leaning against the register and shouting “What can I help ya find?!” over the obnoxiously repetitive R&B and Rap music that is a favorite of the FYE managers. There’s also free gum and occasionally, we get to watch a movie of the manager’s choice (either a horror or action flick or Eddie Murphy film, sometimes a combination of all three (Norbit)). My favorite manager left to work at Chapel Hill’s FYE (she invited me to work some shifts there as well, considering I’m getting anywhere from 4-20 hours a week at Stow’s FYE, but I declined, saying “I’m scared of Chapel Hill” which is entirely true). I get along with the new manager, but since being promoted to being head manager, she is getting somewhat power-hungry and very “by-the-book.” The few menial tasks I did have to make me feel like I had some sort of purpose have been taken away and replaced with “Work on customer service.” Every hour, about 2 customers come in, therefore, working on customer service is the equivalent to working on my basketball skills. It’s pointless. I can’t really blame my manager for doing this, since she is the new head manager and she is just going by the book (all associates should do is customer service—really), but if she is going to be so stringent with the rules, I wish she would also employ the rule of not talking about personal situations with employees. I do not want to hear about her recent break up, I do not want to hear about the chick she met on the Internet, and I do not want to hear about her night at the strip club. When she’s not talking about her personal life, she’s pointing out all the reasons why I am the whitest girl in Summit County. She didn’t really like my “catch the grape” dance move and deemed me too white to dance right. When she played a song on her cell phone to me and I didn’t know what it was, it was because I was white. And when I had never eaten collared greens or spent a night at the clubs in Cleveland, it’s because I’m a suburban, preppy, white girl. To all of this, I respond; “I go to Notre Dame, what do you expect?”

The best/worst part of working at FYE is the colorful cast of customers we get. There are a few regulars (at a CD store? Yes) including Myron, whom you might remember from last summer’s blog. Myron does not come into FYE as frequently as he used to because he got in a fight with one of the managers and the district manager called him and told him to stay away. He still stops by occasionally to ask a million questions, not buy anything, then tell me what he’s having for dinner (steak or that KFC bowl that looks like Colonel Sanders vomited in it). There’s also an odd family that I do feel sad for, as three of the four members have some sort of mental disability, the father being the one out of four. They come in about once a month, with the mother screaming at her children and the father calmly perusing the DVD aisle. Besides those regulars is the trainer from the gym next door who is so beefy, he can’t put is arms down; the thief from Wal-Mart who, every new-release Tuesday, brings in brand-new copies of the newest movies to sell, claiming he has watched all 25 of them in the 6 hours they have been on the shelves (he even goes so far as to give us a review of these movies); fat hillbillies in short shorts; the Asian guy who only buys porn; the creepy guy with the long beard who only buys Anime (and asked me why we don’t have a bigger selection of “anime smut”); the 30-something guy who buys way too many video games and has way too many Spiderman shirts for his age. There are probably more, but those are the most interesting regulars. From the fat hillbillies comes my favorite story of late. Two women and one dude come in one day to browse through FYE and talk about how things are so much cheaper at Wal-Mart. The one woman is short and round, but wouldn’t look so bad if she wasn’t wearing Nair-esque short shorts and sporting a tiny T-shirt. To top it off, she was looking at the body jewelry and telling my manager and me about her new belly-button piercing (my manager even got to see it! Thank goodness I had dodged down another aisle). As they were about to leave, the man came up to the counter and inquired about a pre-order he had made. “Yeah, I just, uh, wanted to know about that new Harry Potter movie that’s coming out. I put a dollar down on it, so I want to make sure it’ll come in on time.” I responded politely with, “Oh, did you order a movie we didn’t have in stock?” Hillbilly: “No, it’s that new movie. The one that’s coming out on the 21^st!” Me: “No, that’s the book. The book is what we were taking pre-orders on.” Smelly: “No! I ordered a movie! It’s the new movie I want!” Me: “The new movie is in theaters. The book is what’s coming out!” Idiot: “No, it’s a movie. Why would I want a book?” Me: Shrug and raised eyebrow. Him: “I’m going to Chapel Hill. They’ll know what I’m talking about!” His women-folk paid for their $1 body jewelry and left. I’m sure that man was quite disappointed when he received a book on July 21^st and didn’t know what to do with it, not knowing how to read.

Now onto the second world of my summer: Home. I am really enjoying being home this summer, maybe because I know I will be so far from it this fall and because this may be my last summer at home. Plus, I really get along with my family, especially when we have conversations like the following

Me: Is Cap’n Crunch a pirate?
Mom: In a strange, twisted sense of the word, yes.
Me: How does that work?
Mom: (exasperated by these questions coming from her 20-year old daughter) I’m not sure
Me: Keep in mind that he’s not actually a captain, but that he’s a cap’n with an apostrophe
Mom: Yes, of course.
Me: I guess he’s the Cap’n of cereal. So he’s a cereal pirate. Or is he a serial pirate?
Mom: I pirate conspiracy right in our grocery stores.
Me: Gosh darn you, General Mills!

Later, I proposed the same pirate question to my father. So my mother spoke first.

Mom: He’s not really a pirate, he's more like George Washington.

Me: .....what?

Mom: Because of his hat. George Washington had the same one

Me: Pirates had those hats, too.

Mom: No they didn't! Just George Washington...

Dad: (finally chiming in) He wasn't a pirate, he was the captain of a British war ship.

Me: Why British?

Dad: Ok, he was the captain of an American Navy Vessel.

Me: I was thinking he was the captain of cereal.

Dad: (considering this for a moment) Well, maybe.

Me: So could it be a pirate cereal ship?

Dad: No, because pirates are bad. They scare children

Me: Not all pirates are bad. And they're not always scary. Kids love those pirate movies

Dad: Yes, but they don't eat them [movies]. Kids need good things and pirates are bad so Cap'n Crunch can't be a pirate

I guess that answers that question. In other memorable family moments, I told my Dad that he danced like he had Downs Syndrome and he replied with "That's because I'm gettin' doooown!!"

My brother is funny is his innocence and interpretation of the world around him. This is what led him one day, while describing the mobile Deli he would one-day own, to say that his slogan would be like that commercial, "Mamma Mia! Pizza Pizza Meat-a-ball!" He was referring to the old commercial where the guy says "That's a spicy meat-a-ball." I, being the wonderfully caring sister that I am, corrected/insulted him. But I hope that mobile deli thing works out. That would be fantastic.

In the same car-ride, I mentioned that video on YouTube with the prisoners of that prison in the Philippines doing the thriller dance (you should really see it, it's incredible). After I was finished describing how the prisoners did such a perfect job recreating Michael Jackson's hit video, Alex chimed in with "Then they all had butt sex!" leading my parents to turn around inquisitively. Instead of telling him not to say things like that, my mom asks him to explain what butt-sex is, to both embarrass Alex and see if he actually knows what he's talking about. Turns out he kind of did, as he said, "It's a gay origy." Again, I corrected him with some name-calling and biting sarcasm to let him know the word is orgy, not origy. He's growing up so fast...

So that basically sums up my summer. It's been a good one, but if I have to work at FYE one more summer, I will go as nutty as the customers.