Two Hours

In a deviation from my usual blog fare, I feel the need to share with you, my readers, about a very special seminar I attended this past week.

I’m currently finishing up my certification program for music education.  At the moment, I’m about 1 1/2 weeks away from completing all student teaching requirements.  Every week, we are required to attend a 2-hour seminar on Tuesday afternoons…a seminar which sits on the tail of a very long day for me.  Typically, when I’ve attended these weekly meetings, I practice the art of sleeping with my eyes open.  It in no way reflects my feelings towards the content presented in seminar (except the paper folding lesson…THAT was boring); I just usually am so mentally/physically exhausted that I have no choice but to take a brief power nap with eyelids fully opened.  And that takes effort.  (Apparently, after a Google search, people can actually do this!)

However, this Tuesday was different.  We didn’t learn how to fold a circular piece of paper in 14 shapes (true story). We didn’t watch a teacher go nuts while dressed up as a witch (true story).  Instead, our leader opted to deliver a life lesson to us all that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

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Old McDonald had a farm (and now my money, too)

Well, folks…it’s official:  the season of giving has begun, and Ronald McDonald is the proud owner of my first $1 bill given to a charity this year.  And you’d think, with all that money, he’d at least be able to buy some new clothes (I mean, c’mon…red and white stripes are so 1973).

Today’s RAC was supposed to involve me surprising a friend with a cold, refreshing Mocha frappe from McDonald’s.  If you haven’t tried a McD’s frappe, let me take a minute to perform another RAC for the day by telling you to run and try one.  It’s like someone took the silkiest cream from God’s dairy, combined it with the purest coffee beans from Juan Valdez himself, and blended it together with Santa’s own ice supply.  It’s a mini vacation in a 12 oz. plastic cup (complete with caramel or chocolate drizzle).

My intended RAC, however, did not end up being my official RAC for the day.  Why did I change my mind, you ask?  Because of Angel, McDonald’s employee extraordinaire* (no lie, her name really was Angel, unless the “o” in “Angelo” got scratched off somehow, but, seeing as how she was a girl, “Angelo” really wouldn’t have applied…unless…)….

(*=I say extraordinary because, frankly, I prefer to think of the employees who wait on me to be the best workers McDonald’s can find.  I’d rather not imagine Billy Joe Ray preparing a Big Mac for me if I think he’s got lice, an equal amount of missing teeth and fingers, and a less than sub-part work ethic….and dirty hands…and a cough…with phlegm.)

Moving on!  It’s a long and complicated story of how I met Angel.  We crossed over obstacles to meet one another, and spent years of our life writing back and forth, until that fateful day, we met on the Titanic and swore to “never go hungry again!”

Actually, I can’t back that up…but I will say that it took an enormous amount of time to actually make contact with Angel.  The good madam in front of me at the drive-thru must have been shopping for the Three Bears, because it took about 4 minutes to complete her order.  On top of that, she was multi-tasking:  placing an order while getting the contents of the order from somebody else on her cell phone.  How courteous!  It only took her 3 minutes longer than the average American drive-thru-ee.