So this photo of an Ivanka Trump shoe really has nothing to do with the title of this post, other than to make the connection that I'm at a wedding in Girdwood this weekend, and stopped at the Anchorage Nordstrom store to look at shoes.
I picked up this shoe, and upon seeing the brand name, was torn between dropping it like a hot fire poker and buying the pair simply so I'd get to put my gross foot scum all over Ivanka Trump's gold embossed name. But then I realized this plan would give Ivanka my money without the satisfaction of her ever knowing that I purposely smushed heel scuzz between her first and last names, so I chose a different pair surely assembled by exploIted Mongolian child labor instead. I have my principles, after all.
Hours later in Girdwood--and then again the next day--I learned the same lesson twice: don't trash talk strangers in good weather.
A group of our friends was piled into a car in a convenience store parking lot, where we'd stopped for an errand. Not realizing the windows were open, one of us began loudly proclaiming that the 17 year-old boy behind the wheel of a red Triumph convertible parked beside us could not possibly be its owner.
The rest of us shushed her at first, and she clapped her hand over her mouth in embarrassment; but then we saw that the object of her derision was in such rich desert of it, that we all just continued to mock him loudly through the open window of the car.
"It's mine," the teen with a flat-brimmed baseball cap and zero sign of facial hair finally piped up in his own defense. "YEAH RIGHT! WHATEVER!," another woman in our group cackled loudly as he peeled away.
The next day, this same woman and I were returning from brunch with the initial perpetrator of the Triumph trash talk. During the meal, someone had parked incredibly close to us, so we had to squeeze our food babies into the back seat through the six inches of space that remained between our car and hers. "OH MY GOD! WHO PARKS THIS CLOSE TO SOMEONE?," asked the friend who had screamed "YEAH RIGHT!!" at the teenager the night before.
"Sorry!!" we heard from what turned out to be the open driver's side window of the car where the "who" in the "who parks this close to someone" made herself known. We all turned to each other in immediate recognition of the fact that this was the second time in 24 hours that we had talked smack to someone through the open window of a car.
And the moral of the story is: never talk smack about someone in nice weather.
