All right, some of you know this, but some of you don't...I really love ZombieKim.com. The author of the site, Kim Swanberg, is a supervisor at the Borders I work at. She's got a bunch of random rants and advice columns and everything that are absolutely hilarious. I try to link to her as much as I can here, but I know people don't click around on links a lot.
I decided to ask Kim to do a ZombieKim exclusive, just to give people a taste of what kind of stuff she puts on her site. So, here it is.
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On my website, zombiekim.com, I don’t rant too much about things that affect me personally—except in the sense that douchebags affect all of us—so when Andrew asked me to write an exclusive for his site, I wanted to share a personal story. And that story is about Disneyland.
The happiest place on Earth and I have a rocky history. The first time I went was when I was nine years old, with my mom and my godmother. Well, she wasn’t my godmother, so much as she was a manic-depressive Christian Scientist who liked to paint cutesy/country crap, and later tried to kidnap me and brainwash me into being her kid. What can I say, I was irresistible even as a Lil’ Kim.
Anyway, at Disneyland, I was all excited to get on Gadget’s Go Coaster at the newly built Toon Town. Unfortunately, about halfway through the ride, I became convinced that I was going to die and get mashed into squishy red Mickey-Mouse-ears-shaped chunks. I started bawling as soon as we stopped moving, and to this day I can’t sit on a rollercoaster without going into a panic attack.
I visited again in the eighth grade, this time with my wealthy aunt and some of my girl cousins. There are only two things I remember strongly. The first is that one of my cousins got lost and spent the afternoon on the Indiana Jones Adventure while the rest of us waited around for hours at the meeting point. The second thing was when my aunt told me to stop thanking her for every little thing, after she bought us lunch at the Blue Bayou restaurant in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, and it was horribly awkward in front of my cousins. Listen, I grew up welfare-poor. To a kid like that, the conspicuous consumption of Disneyland is like winning the lottery. $5 ice cream cones, $30 baseball hats, and $200 lap dances from the Little Mermaid? Manna from heaven.
I think I went to Disneyland a couple of years later, at Christmas, but for the life of me I can’t remember (I must have gotten attacked by Pluto or something equally traumatizing). But the real keeper was the last time I went. It was high summer, with temperatures in the 90s, and Disneyland was so busy that they gave us free tickets to the California Adventure across the street and told us to come back at four. Apparently, the thing that’s so adventurous about California can be summed up in one word: rollercoaster. Unless I wanted to spend the day crying in the fetal position while a gaggle of Disney princesses tried desperately to shield me from the children, I knew that rollercoasters were not an option. Seriously, you know what the real California adventure is? Eating avocados. And I totally would have been down for that. But whatever, Disneyland.
So, since I couldn’t ride the Awesometastic Wave Teacups, or I don’t know what, I went to the Who Wants to be a Millionaire—Play It! show. I’m not making that up. I think they should have at least called it the Who Wants to be a Californaire and decorated the stage with some palm trees, or something, but no. It was a WWtbaM (Wet Bam)-style stage with a Regis Philbin-wannabe host. Ant it’s occurring to me now—why? Why would I go to a fake version of a show I didn’t even watch on TV? “Well, I don’t like that Millionaire show, but if it was being performed by a mediocre-looking shlub making minimum wage, on a stage half the size of my apartment…yeah, I could really get into that!”
It was about as boring as you’d guess, but eventually we made it into Disneyland, and that was okay. It was Disneyland’s 50th anniversary, and all summer long they were celebrating with the Parade of Dreams. With a name like that, I should have known something awful was going to happen. I mean, as parades go, it was pretty cool. I think it’s hard for the modern urban American to get truly excited to watch people walk around in fancy costumes (unless it’s on “Project Runway”), but we all try to pretend that we like them, don’t we? I was actually in a parade once. I was in elementary school, and my friends talked me into joining a local dance troupe where the dancing consisted of a lot of clapping and stomping…I think there’s another thing I kind of blocked out. I was the only white girl in the troupe, and they were nice enough to let me carry the banner in the parade.
But I digress. I was watching the Parade of Dreams from the courthouse steps (I guess that’s where they sue people for getting naughty tattoos of Disney characters), standing a few feet behind a preteen boy with his dad. The kid was cramming his face out of an enormous bag of Cheetos, and I thought, “Man, Cheetos sound pretty good right now.”
Little did I know.
Moments later, out of nowhere, the kid puked up like two liters of Cheetos vomit. It was all over the steps, and it instantly smelled disgusting—I mean, Cheetos have a strong but not terribly appetizing smell anyway, so throw in the aroma of stomach bile and it made for a nasty odor. The dad quickly led his son away, and yeah, it probably sucked for that kid. But the thing was, I was stuck there. Even after everyone scooted away from the vomit, no one moved enough that I could get through to where my family was standing, in a retch-free zone. No one nearby could possibly stand to miss one single second of the PARADE OF DREAMS OMG, so I was stuck there, standing next to this reeking puddle of vomit, in 90-plus degree weather, for ten minutes.
I couldn’t eat cheese for months.
I have to say, I do have nice memories of my Disneyland trips (like I’m sure Andrew has some non-freaky-ass memories of Boy Scout Camp), but isn’t it funny how the things that stick out are the gross, the embarrassing, and the terrifying?