Golf and Buses

Skylar started medical school yesterday while I went golfing.

I would have traded him places in a heartbeat.

And no, I'm not interested in going to medical school. I'm just even less interested in going golfing.

But I have to go once a year. Yes, "have to." Don't give me that whole song and dance about how we choose our own adventures. Once a year I am invited to a work function that requires me to go golfing and I'm not totally sure what would happen if I didn't go but I suspect at least prison is a possibility and look at this face it was not made for prison.

I could, you know, practice. Then maybe I wouldn't be terrible at it and then maybe I wouldn't hate it with a hot and fiery passion. But that would require me to golf more. And I don't know if you've picked up on this yet, but I hate golfing. Kind of a lot.

So instead of practicing, I show up to a golf course in God knows where at God knows what time when it's Satan knows what temperature to play exactly one game of golf each year.


They put us into foursomes. I rarely feel bad for being terrible at the game because I'm typically grouped with people who care about golf as much as I do. Usually about four hours into playing YES THIS DAMN THING LASTS MORE THAN FOUR HOURS we start cheating a little. Not to win. We took dead last yesterday, just as my team does every year, as we fully anticipated we would. We cheat just to get the torture over with faster.

Also, I have to start cheating at some point because of how frequently I lose golf balls. Yesterday I lost 10. I started with 10. And I lost 10. For those who are bad at math, that means I only had like 4 left by the end.

Skylar tried to one up me all day through text updates about his experience, which began with a bus ride to school.

This was his first time ever navigating the Salt Lake City bus system and he was quite excited to do it. The first thing I heard about how it was a text from him that just said "a man is licking his palm right next to me."

Then, in case I was speed reading and missed it, he followed it up with "HIS PALM."

But all of the palm lickers in the world are not as bad as golfing 18 holes DID I TELL YOU I HAD TO GOLF 18 FREAKING HOLES? 18 is a HUGE number. Imagine listening to Celine Dion's My Heart Will Go On 18 times in a row? Terrible, right? Now replace that with golf holes.

SOMEHOW EVEN WORSE.

By early afternoon I was getting updates about a conflict resolution seminar they were making Skylar sit through, which means that medical school is already very not what I thought it would be.

By this point I was pretending to look for a ball in some weeds while the rest of my group was pretending to hope I would find it.

I finally drove eleventy hours back to the office, sunburned and somehow unbelievably sore, where I performed 9 hours of work in 30 minutes.

Skylar was done with his first day by this point so he texted me and asked me if I would come pick him up so he didn't have to ride the bus again "LIKE A POOR PERSON."

I did, and when he got into the car he quickly said that he was "tired of spending all day crossing his Is and dotting his Qs" and when I criticized him for getting absolutely no part of that saying right he just leaned in and insisted it was correct that way. So I think Skylar might be bilingual now.

P.S. Skylar made me wake up at negative eleventy o'clock yesterday so I could take a picture of him "like my mom used to do" on his first day of school. Then he had his mother dig up pictures of him as a child so he could compare and see if he's grown up since the mid-90s (YES I'M A CRADLE-ROBBER).

He showed me the below picture and I instantly screamed "OMG YOU LOOK LIKE CHRISTINA APPLEGATE IN DON'T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER'S DEAD." He had no idea what I was talking about. But, well, see for yourselves.

Skylar on the left.

Can I at least get some credit for the most specific reference of all time?

And, awwwwwwwwe

~It Just Gets Stranger