Seriously. You’d think games — simple board games — would be simple enoughish to find.

Am I right here or am I right? Or is my thinking that I should have been right right? Right?

Tomorrow a.m. is The BF’s gift exchange with his family and thankfully I asked 24 hours in advance who we were supposed to buy gifts for and what those gifts are, because The BF …

People, he was all, “there’s plenty of time to do gift shopping.” And I’m all, “hellooooo, it is Saturday afternoon, this is happening tomorrow morning.”

I’m a procrastinator in many ways, but gift giving isn’t one of them. I’m that person who has gifts tucked away, waiting, in case I forget or something comes up. I’m like the triple prepared gift giver. I’ve got shit down and covered.

Do I get a holla for that?

Back to my games quandary … I find myself in the games aisle in Wal*Mart, where I have to ask three employees where the normal versions of Pictionary and Cranium are.

All three of them looked at me like I had two mouths and four eyes and asked, “what do you mean normal?”.

Isn’t that a loaded question — one I absolutely felt was directed at me, and justifiably so. Clearly I’m not normal, but that’s getting off topic.

Topic at hand : how does one describe what “normal” Pictionary and Cranium are? So I tried. By saying what it did not have that these did have, like this actual weird person thingy you’re supposed to use to write and draw on for Pictionary {say what?} and Cranium … um. I didn’t even undy this one. It was so weird, and all I knew was that the original Cranium comes with a multi colored box and this one was purple and maybe if I just color specified they’d get it.

Yeah. Didn’t happen.

I opted for the weird Cranium and called Meijer. All the while wishing I had just originally gone to The J as planned, but that’s the thing about traffic and five extra miles, it will dis-sway you. Every time, People.

Meijer tells me they have the normal Pictionary, as I breathed a huge sigh of relief that finally! Finally, someone understood me. You can imagine how shocked I was when I show up to Meijer only to be face to face with the weirdo Pictionary. Again.

I thought, at this point, I might lose it. I really did. And I know that’s so stupide of me, all over children’s board games. But it felt like a hell of a lot more.

It felt like an entire representation for confusion when all I wanted was the simple, original versions. What were wrong with those? Why do we have to have 79 different choices of the same game? And where can you go to find all versions together? Is that even possible?

See. Do you see the dilemas I was being faced with? It was beginning to get too overwhelming so I do what I do when I always feel overwhelmed in these sorts of situations before I get even more flustered – seek out the book section.

I headed straight for Young Adult, because I find those books easier and more fun to concentrate on. A much lighter distraction for me. It worked.

I can’t even tell you what I read … because … there was this adorable chubby kid sitting on the floor … I thought, had I been a boy, that’s exactly what I would have looked like at 9 {because that was exactly what I really did look like at 9 – his girl counterpart} and he was so into the book he was reading.

I asked if he liked it and he became so animated, passed it along to me, and got another copy for himself. We sat there. Side by side. Reading. Okay. He was reading. I was trying to recenter and caught about every other sentence and fifth word.

When his mom showed up and eyed me up and down like I was a Meijer pedophile, he kind of gave me apologetic look. That said, I’m sorry I have to leave you now, will you make it?

I smiled and nodded, complimented his choice of literature and as he stood up, asked him the best question I could think of : would he want to play this person thingy drawing Pictionary? I also requested that he give me a straight up answer. No candy coating here.

He gathered up his coat, still holding the book, looked at me and said without hestitation, “Definitely, ma’am.”

WTF is up with the “ma’am”s I keep getting? So disturbing.

I watched as they walked off. Thinking how a 9 year chunkster just saved me. And he knew it. He got it. And he knew that I knew that he got it.

My recentered, calmer me went back for weirdo Pictionary. What a combo – a weird Pictionary and Cranium. Well, I guess they’ll complement each other.

That is all.