Strange Pulse

There’s a bit of a joke in my family about how I don’t like people looking at me. I think it all started when I went into a diabetic coma a few years ago. I don’t remember it, but I was lying with my eyes open refusing to co-operate with my husband, who was trying to force sugar down my throat to save my life. The kids were standing in the doorway staring, and apparently I said to them, in a bratty voice, “What are you lookin’ at?” It became a bit of a joke, one of those crazy things mom said when she was in a coma, you know how that goes.

But a few months ago Daniel was just sitting on the couch next to me, looking at me, and it bothered me. I said, “Why are you staring at me?!” and he started laughing.

Well today we went to a Sprint cell phone store with our friend Dave, who is spending Christmas with us. He was talking to his boss on his cell phone in our bathroom, and dropped it in the toilet. I haven’t asked what exactly he was doing that made him drop it in the toilet, but apparently it required standing right next to the toilet. And it ruined his cell phone. So we ran out to get him another, as well as take care of some other last-minute shopping…that turned into hours of running around.

The Sprint store is a small rectangular space with a cashier station in the center, and phones along each wall. Above the phones are giant posters/ad, each with a picture of a person smiling a huge smile. Looking directly into the camera. With giant eyes. Kind of like this:

Only blown up to cover a wall. Huge pictures. Several of them, all around the space, all staring with their big eyes down at you.

I mentioned to my husband that I couldn’t work there with those posters staring like that. So of course we started joking around–”Quit staring at me!”–and he pretended to be the fictional boss who comes in after I’d worked a shift, and says, “Why’d you cut out all the posters’ eyes?!”

OK, so maybe I’m crazy. But those eyes were disturbing.