barefoot and pregnant in louisiana

drinking my dinner (slimfast is yummy), on a saturday evening, i have spent the entire day playing peekaboo and insisting to a 3 year old that shaggy is the best part of scoobydoo (even though scooby doo fucking sucks). i'm entirely glad to be home and back in my underwear again. damn, now would be a great time for my evening imaginary cigarette.

ah, that's better.

so, let me tell you that i work with the perkiest and yet most emotionally unstable girl that i have ever met. she positively obsessed with the portrait studio and comes in every month with her "step-kids." barely twenty-one and five months pregnant, she's flying to vegas next week to marry her fiance who is twenty-three, divorced, with two kids. who says southern families aren't fucked-up? not only is this the beginning of her adult life, but she thinks that this is the perfectly normal way to live it. i've lived in seven different states ... that would never sound normal to me.

what happened to ... let's grow up before the babies come?

now, i'm not an advocate for marriage incentives or marrying off fifteen year olds because they're pregnant ... but seriously, when do these girls grow up? i'm twenty-two years old. my uncle still calls me "kiddo" and my grandpa says that any age before thirty is "too young to actually count."

when are these children growing up?

anyway, (inhale imaginary cigarette) this chick actually started to cry when twin boys came in the studio. a hat drops across the store, and this girl cries. her chicken sandwich looks really good, she cries. you know what i do, i laugh in her face. i think it's the most retarded thing in the world that my co-workers actually console this crying girl. i laugh at her, because i was brought up in a place where tears meant something. whether it's hormones or not, it's still funny to me that she cries all the time.

this evening, she was arguing with my boss over how much maternity leave she was going to take and who they were going to train to take her ever-so-complicated-and-stressful assistant manager position; i swear, i heard her on the phone talking to her fiance and she said "but baby, i have to work because someone's got to pay for the pictures." people, that's just sad. she was serious.

i just looked at her and said, "that child's not going to get fed, but damn, if it's going to get photographed."

then she started crying.