Schnarchen. (verb) To Snore: The Second

So last time we all learned that I was a paranoid only child afraid of DemonBearHog at night who grew up to be a hyper vigilant adult who swears you shouldn't eat soup if the date on the can is at all in the past lest you'll get botulism.  Same goes for ketchup.


Oh wait, while we're on it, this whole "Best if used by" thing tends to be a bit of a struggle in the house.  I refuse to eat things that are more than just a few days past that day, but my parents are all "It ain't gonna hurt ya! I been eating things past the date since I was little and I ain't dead am I?"  The universe tended to avoid messing with me on this, until we bought French's Zesty Brown Mustard.  I'm not exactly sure if we've ever purchased a new one or not, so I don't know how long the one that's in the fridge has been there, but I avoid it like the plague until I'm making a sandwich.  Then I want something spicy and I look all over the stupid bottle like a date is going to magically appear knowing that I'm never going to find one.   So after searching for the El Dorado of use by dates, I realize my quest for a spicy turkey on white just isn't realistic and I place it, sadly, back in the fridge for the cycle to happen a good month point five later. 


I digress, back to etymological adversities.


Well, turns out, there are few more issues I've had with things that start with SNOR-. 


First is the inevitable snorting of things you don't ever want to snort.  No I'm not some cocaine addict.  I'm already crazy enough as it is, I don't need substances to make it worse.


Exhibit A:  We all know soap burns if it gets in your eyes and your nose.  So what do we do? We make an effort to ensure our eyes and nostrils are safe.  Whatever you do in the shower is your business, I won't judge.


So here I am, all excited because I'm about to make my hair daily clarified (as opposed to all-day volumized which I've done before).  I lather, massage thoroughly through hair and begin to rinse when this rogue asteroid of suds flies from my hair and lands right under my nose.  What does the universe do then?  Well, it makes me have to sneeze so of course I inhale, asteroid included, and sneeze the single most fiery and painful sneeze I've ever sneezed.  You are not supposed to daily clarify your nose hairs.  EVER! I don't even like when water goes up my nose, let alone Sodium Laureth Sulfate and Ammonium Chloride!  This burned for so long, it made my eyes water and my head hurt.  I would imagine snorting Tabasco would be more pleasant.  Seriously.


After all this nonsense, I sure as hell am not going to do the "Repeat" part.


And this is a general occurrence with me.  If something is going to burn when snorted by accident, I'm probably going to snort it by accident. 


But the Snorture doesn't stop there.  Oh no.


Imagine the beach.  Nice white sand.  Clear blue water.  So clear, you can see fish and coral and downed planes and more fish.  It's so nice, it makes you want to be able to dive deep and look at all the shiny fish and possible lost flights that took off 75 miles away and became confused and went down in a blaze of glory.


And what sort of thing allows you to do this?  Well, for the fancy, there's scuba diving.  For the tourist who is only staying for about 7 hours before getting back on a giant boat, there's snorkeling.


Oh snorkeling.  What an awesome idea.


No.


I'm all 16 and excited to try something new and I like oceans that I can see my feet in.  Underpaid college drop out hands my friends, my dad, and me our snorkeling gear.  Very simple gear: Goggles (I got these down pat), snorkel (should be easy), vest with emergency "Help I'm dying" feature (yay safety!) and flippers (they were yellow and I looked like a retard duck).   By the way, he gave us no instructions.


We get out to the now craniate infested small plane and decide, it's time to snorkel.  This should be simple.  You put your face down, you breathe like normal, you don't let the tube get submerged. 


Not if the universe hates you.


You put your face down, you swim 7 inches, you take one breath and your body panics and is like "YOU ARE NOT FISH! UNDERWATER BREATHING NOT OKAY!"  so you emerge in a stupor of "why did I just fail at that?"  You continue to go through this cycle of face in water hyperventilation for a good 8 rounds until  you're tired.


And by you, I mean me.


After this, I'm sort of over this whole snorkeling thing.  As I work my way back to shore with my retard duck feet, I realize shore keeps getting everything but closer.  I eventually resigned myself to floating until I died all the while thinking "If I pull this Oh shit string, they'll save me but then I'll look lame".  No 16 year old wants to look lame. All I wanted was just some way to inflate this freaking vest to help me out, but the only way I knew how was to pull the string.  So, I rested in the water, too tired to kick my feet and barely keep my head up so I can breathe.  At this point goggles and snorkel are all weighing down on random parts of my face.  It was a mess. 


I do make it to shore safely (as noted by my presence now) but I exclaim that I'm not doing this again.  Two hours later, my dad walks up.  He looks at me and goes, "Hey guess what we learned, you can use these and blow your vest up!" He proceeds to show me the tubes and inflate his vest.


Universe 5.  Me. 1.

Schnarchen. (verb) To Snore.

When you grow up completely unaware that there is this is thing called "The Universe" which happens to be out to get you, you: 1) Become an overly anxious child who continues to be hyper anxious about trivial things in later life and 2) assume monsters are real.   As you can see, these two create quite the paranoid six year old. 

But why did I do this to myself?  Oh maybe because, like all children do, I used my super awesome imagination—which by the way, I developed because I am an only child who had  no one to play with until he was in third grade—to make sense of the world around me.  What kind of things did I conjure from the depths of my mind?

Let's see, there was the evil gorilla man who always tried to watch me while I napped, but the blinds on my great grandma's door stopped him from doing so all I could ever see of him was his shadow being cast on the blinds.  Yeah, he was pretty mean.  I was positive he was going to strangle me in my sleep like all gorilla men are wont to do.  

Turns out he was just a coat rack, some coats and a hat that hadn't moved since the 40's.  I didn't learn that til I was like 10.  

But then there were times where it wasn't so easy to close my eyes and make the bad things go away.  Oh, no.  Visuals you can get rid of but not sounds.  

Snoring haunted me like...a ghost haunts a house?  Whatever, go with it.  Point is, it was there and I couldn't see it and it was getting on my nerves.  Unfortunately at this hyper vigilant point in my life, I was oblivious to the direct product of nasal congestion and/or sleep apnea.  I equated allergies with not being able to eat Oreo cookies or drink Hershey's chocolate milk as they would break me out into this weird red rash thing.  I grew out of this, don't worry.

So there I am, trying to sleep at my grandparents' house (you see where this is going) and I hear this awful, vicious demon-bear-warthog with chainsaws for teeth standing outside my bedroom door.  This DemonBearHog has obviously just finished running 3 kajillion miles from the depths of hell to torment me as not only is it snarling, but it has to exhale deeply from all the running.  I mean, I couldn't even run down the street without getting tired so I could only imagine how tired this unsavory beast must have been. 

I tried to make it go away, but it just never did. No amount of eye closing or singing to myself ever made the beast stop.  So I just stayed there all curled up, eyes wide as I had resigned myself to my fate of being gnarled up by whatever this was.   And because I was a good kid who prayed at night and got straight A's, I did not bother my family with my childish beasts of which I knew they would not be able to see or hear.

I eventually learned that this thing called snoring existed and my grandpa did it.  However, I also began to learn that anything with the word "snore" as its root, was part of the universe's plan to take me out.

But I'll tell you the rest next time. 

Universe: 4.  Me: 1