The Mind of Bethany Farts

Let’s Talk About Our Feelings

Recently, I asked my Facebook friends if there was anything on their minds that they wanted to share with another human being. You know, questions, concerns, or general thoughts about life on this earth. I was lucky enough to receive two very important questions that I will now add my own thoughts to.

First Question: Where did Hostess come up with their product names? Twinkies? Ding Dongs? Ho Ho’s?

Thank you for your thoughts, anonymous reader, although I think you are in fact not anonymous. Rather, I believe this question was submitted by Dawn, the mother of my nearly two-year-old, street fighting niece. Seriously, do not mess with that kid.

Anyway, I must admit that a brief glance at the catalogue of Hostess snacks does sound more like childish nicknames for the lower anatomy. This caused me to delve into some research about the Hostess Company, which of course means I went straight to Wikipedia. I found out that Hostess was started in the 30s and became a larger company as the decades wore on, buying up other bread and pastry companies.

Aside from the previously mentioned Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Ho Hos, there are a few other names I take offense to. Mainly, the “mini-muffins.” Just what do you mean by muffin, Hostess? Are you talking about a lady muffin? Because Lady Gaga sure means lady muffin when she mentions it in her song “Poker Face.”

The most popular snack cake, the Twinkie, was invented by James Alexander Dewar in Illinois at one of the Hostess factories. He claims to have gotten the name from a billboard he once saw for “Twinkle Toe Shoes.” Uh… I don’t know about you guys, but that explanation is sounding a little weak to me. Perhaps Hostess simply named their innocent snack cakes fun names so as to attract business, only to have those names develop a different meaning as the snacks became intensely popular. We may never know. Especially because Hostess has filed bankruptcy two times in the last four years.

And never forget that if you’ve had too many snack cakes in one day, you can always try to use that as a reason to get out of cold blooded murder.

Second Question: Left lane slow drivers. WTF??? Seriously, why do people not understand how to drive?

Driving requires a lot of information to be packed into our minds, and just as with Science, English, Math, or History, some people are better at it than others. I ask you to recall that weird realization when you’re making friends with someone and you come to see that they do something differently than you. Something really, really basic. For example, the way they put away their freshly washed socks or how they hold their pencil. It’s a little bit of a mind-boggling feeling. Now, take that feeling and speed it up by 60 mph and put everyone in a metal (I use that word loosely) can on wheels. That’s called road rage, and we all have varying degrees of it at different times.

Sure, maybe it would help if there was one set of rules for driving instead of slight differences from state to state, but in the end it’s really just the difference between drivers. Unfortunately, a lot of drivers don’t think of the left lane as a passing lane. They think of it as the I-Have-A-Left-Turn-In-Five-Miles, Let-Me-Get-Over-Now lane.

There are also a number of drivers who get prematurely angry. To explain this statement, allow me to describe an event that sometimes happens to me on the road. I am passing a semi on the left. Suddenly, I see a fast approaching colored blob in one of my mirrors thanks to my peripheral vision. I then glance in the mirror, only to see that a car is going 90 mph and is really upset that I’m not also going 20 mph over the speed limit. If I could talk to this person, I would explain to him or her that I don’t want to go that fast because a) I’m not real into dying young if I can at all help it and b) I’m too poor to constantly pay gigantic speeding tickets. However, I’m unable to convey my feelings to them in a clear and concise hand gesture, as they are lucky enough to do to me.

Driving is crazy. It requires us to be in close quarters with strangers who think and do things differently than us. Because of that, annoyances like the one submitted by this dear and thoughtful reader will always occur.

Public Bathrooms

I have no reservations about discussing anything involving my bowels. In fact, some people don’t even like using the world “bowels,” but when your bowels practically kick you in the stomach, causing a raise in your flesh comparable to a baby’s kick, there are obviously bigger concerns in your mind than word choice. So to the faint of heart I say, get the hell away from this spiritual intestinal journey and read something else instead. I’m quite aware that I may have just bid all two of my readers farewell, but that’s the risk I had to take.

To borrow Jerry Seinfeld’s classic 90s phrasing, what’s the deal with public bathrooms? Well, I’ll tell you what the deal with them is. They’re a source of discomfort for many of us in modern American society, which is proof that we are giant jackasses. We have anxiety over proper plumbing instead of lack of proper plumbing like millions of others who must live without. To be honest, a lot of what I do on that porcelain contraption would be better suited for a hole in the mud, especially after a particularly long night at The Olive Garden. I would say that’s beside the point, but really, it’s precisely the point. Many of us are required to make a bathroom pit stop once in awhile in a public place, and the fact that we are taking our business to a public toilet shows that what we have to do in there is grisly.

One time, I hardly made it out of one of my college classes before releasing the floodgates. Luckily for me and everyone walking the halls, there was a bathroom nearby. Once there, I waited in excruciating pain for the bathroom traffic to die down, as I knew innocent women and children need not bear witness to the massacre that would follow. Finally, I was alone and it happened. I was relieved, until I heard the squeak of the door hinges and the pitter-patter of sassy girl steps. Then a voice rang out, “It stanks in here!” My eyes were wide in embarrassment. I held in silent laughter, as I knew my identity was hidden behind the odd partitions that at all other times felt like they didn’t hide anything. As the girl had remarked, they certainly didn’t hold in the smell. I’ve commented numerous times to my friends, and to myself when they’re not around, that the giant gaps between the doors allow any bystander to peer in at you. Yet, now, they were doing their job – hiding me from further embarrassment.

I’ve wondered what would compel a person to publicly state that a bathroom smells bad when they know the person who made the stink is the owner of the two legs visible beneath the stall. I’ve concluded the girl was obviously dealing with a lot of feelings and emotions and probably could have used someone to talk to. However, I was unable to peel back the layers of her emotional onion because I was too busy trying to gracefully deal with another stinky shituation. (It should be noted that the author just thought she created the word “shituation” and had already both dubbed herself a genius and begun to celebrate by the time she Google searched it and found that she was not the first to coin it.) I made it out of that experience alive, but I did have to skip my next class for fear I had only waded through the first of many rounds.

I hope and pray that this society I’ve been bred into will one day accept poop talk as public discourse. Like with many other subjects, it certainly has its time and place to be discussed, but that doesn’t mean it should be completely ignored as it largely is today. Many people thought the poop scene in Bridesmaids was groundbreaking, and I have to say that it was. It was hilarious. However, my point is that if people think ladies having explosive poops is a groundbreaking event, I invite you to cut the ribbon at my bathroom entrance after I have movie theater popcorn and a Venti Iced Chai.

And as for public bathrooms, I’m going to try to look at them as a Godsend instead of a frightening poop prison, because they are almost always there when we need them with their modern plumbing and wax paper seat protectors.

Anxiety Naps

Anxiety naps are a unique experience. There’s a good chance that anyone reading this has endured one in their lifetime. For those who aren’t in the know, I’ll describe it by detailing my most recent anxiety nap.

This afternoon, I had one and a half hours before I had to report to work. I was very tired and thought, hey, I should take a half hour nap. So I set a few alarms on my phone for safe measure and curled up in bed. Though I slept for a mere 30 minutes, I had a nightmare. It was a nonlinear mishmash of all the anxiety-ridden thoughts I’ve had today. When I woke up, it was one of those eyes-jolt-open-where-am-I-what-time-is-it wake ups. Then all of the anxieties I dreamt about raced through my head during my first few seconds of being awake. Oh, and of course, my heart was beating fast, like full fight or flight mode. So, who’s to say if my small nap was actually replenishing or just simply terrifying.

Here’s to the last two weeks of the school year!

Recent Thoughts From Twitter

Reader Questions: Wal-Mart

An anonymous reader recently submitted a question.

He or she said, “Why is it that when I walk into any* Wal-Mart it always smells like Open Ass? (*This happens to me at any Wal-Mart I go to.)”

Here is my response to this wonderful and curious thinker:

I am so flattered that you would trust me to explain this important issue. When one sets out to broach this subject, one must also determine the definition of “open ass.” However, I wouldn’t suggest Googling the phrase, as the search would most likely turn up disturbing, perhaps even kinky, results. Instead, I turned to my friend Urban Dictionary, which lists the top definition of “open ass” as a phrase “used to describe an unpleasant smell.”

It’s funny that you used this phrase to describe a trip to Wal-Mart, as I just had a run-in with an open ass at Meijer, a Wal-Mart competitor, less than 24 hours ago. Near the pharmacy department, a woman stood in line and continually stuck her hand down the back of her pants, reaching as far as to cup the underside of her butt cheek. It was shocking, but made sense as she was wearing elastic ankle sweatpants. (They can easily create a false sense of comfort in public places.)

Anyway, to get to the point, there are a few reasons Wal-Mart stores, no matter the location, tend to smell like a rotting anus. First, there’s often a fast food restaurant located at the front of the store. In the two Wal-Marts I go to, there’s a Subway and a McDonalds. It’s my opinion that the smell of rising bread (in the case of Subway) and souls slowly being crushed (in the case of McDonalds) don’t mix well with the overwhelming scent of lead-filled, manufactured goods from overseas. Second, the low prices of the megastore attract those who think they have trouble affording soap. Notice I said think, because a bar of soap costs 99 cents. I know this because in high school I once visited my local dollar store researching the price so as to better understand why up and coming grade levels of students chose to smell like shit. I also thought about buying bars of soap and throwing it at them in the hallway, but reconsidered after imagining the TV movie that would surely be produced, with me as the villain, based on the tale.

To recap, the fast food restaurants mixed with shoppers who choose to not bathe are most likely the source of your complaint. Let’s hope NBC commissions a new batch of their popular PSAs, “The More You Know,” with public sanitary issues as the message!!! 

Listen to Me, Hollywood!

I have an opinion about something kind of important. If (aka: when) you guys get around to making a big budget, Oscar-bait biopic of Orson Welles, please consider my casting advice. (Because, as a young woman who lives in a spider-infested basement apartment, I know what I’m talking about.)

I really think Leonardo DiCaprio would be perfect, and let’s face it, his Oscar clock is ticking. I’m pretty sure he MUST win Best Actor within the next 5 years, but then again, some of the most deserving actors get overlooked in their prime (I could write a whole post about my feelings for Al Pacino).

Anyway, here’s my proof.

He could even put on weight for the second half of the movie when depicting Welles’ later life, a lá Robert De Niro in Raging Bull. Oscar voters love that shiz.

Make it happen, people. Also, can I get a job???

Why I Love My Gas Station

There’s a gas station down the road from the small basement apartment I dwell in. It’s my go-to place for gasoline, as well as fountain pops and candy, so I’ve grown accustomed to seeing the same familiar faces whenever I stop by. There are two male workers I almost always see working with short black hair and deeply tan skin. One has a sort of unibrow that’s forever furrowed into a slight scowl. The other is generally more chipper and always greets the customers.

His greeting is a point of debate because I haven’t been able to decipher exactly what he’s saying. Whenever I walk in, he either says, “Hello, there!” or “Hello, Dear!” His accent makes it almost impossible to figure out which he says. The context of the situation leads me to believe he says, “Hello, there!” since I’m entering the store. HOWEVER, he also says it at the cash register, except in a slightly different wording. When I’m paying, I swear he says, “There you go, Dear.” Either way, his kind words to me and the other customers have created a sort of orphanage style family feeling between us all.

We’re all slightly scared or suspicious of the homeless man who occasionally sits at an outdoor table just around the corner from the entrance. We all feel a little like Dorothy walking down the yellow brick road when they tape cardboard to the floor on rainy or snowy days, forming a brown cardboard path through the aisles. Okay, maybe that one just applies to me, but either way I think it’s so nice that they’re trying to help people not slip on the dull tile floor.

My routine is simple. The chipper clerk knows that I’m going to beeline it for the fountain drinks and get some sort of caffeine-free drink, or if I’m up for feeling jittery the rest of the day, a coke slushy (caffeine included). He knows I will probably, but not always, buy a cherry airhead or two for twenty-five cents each. And he knows I’ll pay with my debit card but run it as credit. It’s just how it goes.

Despite the familiarity of our exchanges, there are still a few mysteries. For one, they have never, ever carded me or my friends when, on occasion, we purchase tobacco products. It makes me wonder if they card people for the alcohol lining an entire wall of the store. I’ve never bought any from them, so I don’t know for certain, but my friends and I have agreed that we doubt they do. They sell incense and hookah stuff, and yes, there’s a small plastic display case of pipes. It begs the question, do they have drugs back there and do they sell them? My intuition is screaming, “YES, you idiot,” but for now I’ll pretend the kind clerks are as kosher as the Cowardly Lion.

Bethany’s Budget Tips

At this point in our country’s history, it appears that nearly everyone is looking for ways in which to save money. I am lucky enough to have a father who has taught me from a very young age the value of a dollar… sometimes even a quarter. So, I shall impart in this post a few of my personal tips to save money.

1. Never buy butter, jelly, etc.

We all enjoy a nice meal at a sit-down diner or homestyle restaurant like Bob Evans from time to time. But remember to take a minute out of your luxurious meal to pack some of the small, single-serving jelly/butter/apple butter containers in your purse or pockets. Some may look at this as stealing, but I’d like to remind those people that a soft drink costs you about two dollars and costs the restaurant about five cents. So really, who’s stealing from whom????????

2. Take advantage of buffets

The last time I visited an Asian buffet, I left with two pockets on my zippered hoody bulging with crab rangoon I had carefully wrapped in napkins before leaving. Some people may consider this to be unethical. I wish I could say that I painstakingly rethought my actions once I arrived home, but I was too busy feasting on crab rangoon to do anything else.

3. If you want a fountain soda pop, buy it at a gas station

This is actually a legitimate tip. Even fast food restaurants overcharge for sodas, so it’s best to go to a gas station. However, McDonald’s does offer any size drink for one dollar, probably with the hope that you’ll be too happy about saving money to remember that you’re eating McDonald’s.

4. Always round a price up

When I was a young child, I was on one of many trips to my local Kmart with my father when I found a Barbie I really wanted. I located him in another aisle, most likely browsing cleaning products, and asked him to buy it for me. He then asked me the price. I told him something like, “It’s only twelve dollars! Other Barbies are soooo much more expensive, so this is really a good deal.” At this point, I should note that I developed great sales techniques in my formative years as I worked to convince my dad to buy me toys. My brothers often approached me in secretive, back-alley deals, asking me to convince Dad to take us to Kmart whenever they wanted something. When it came to convincing him to buy it for them, well, they were on their own… I had bigger fish to fry (aka A Barbie movie theater). Anyway, Dad followed me to the Barbie aisle and there on the price tag it said, “$12.99.” He immediately scolded me and said, “That’s not twelve dollars, it’s thirteen.” He then launched into a lecture about how I should always round up when I see a price ending in .99, and it was so effective or traumatizing (I’m not sure which) that it’s stuck with me for life. However, it’s true, because after sales tax, you’re well on your way to paying two dollars more than you originally thought in your mind when saying “twelve dollars.”

So there you have it, those are my basic budget tips. If you have any questions or need some advice on how to pinch those pennies, I suggest you google Suze Orman. Or you can send me a fun question by clicking “ask” at the top of the page.