Books, Gum, and Pretzels

I love love love free things.

It doesn’t matter what form the free things take.  If I can have it and I don’t have to pay for it (and I won’t go to jail for this act of not paying for it), I love it.

During my four years in college I accumulated a good amount of religious literature because it was always being handed out on campus.  By the time I moved out of my apartment I had a nice little stack of New Testaments in my bookshelf, and when one man offered me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita as I hurried to class, I skidded to a stop, stared for a moment, and then blurted out, “I can keep this!?” (much too loudly, I remember, because he looked kind of startled and for a second I was afraid he was going to change his mind and take his book back).  I also once accepted a DVD that turned out to be about psychosomatic medicine, and I think Scientology (I never actually watched it, but just stuck it with the rest of my movies in the living room).  On the cover was a scientific-sounding quote about the value of the video which was attributed to simply “Medical Doctor.”  For a while I considered hiding the DVD somewhere in my apartment building for someone to find, but that idea sadly never came to fruition.

There was another time when there was a box of books sitting in some grass on campus with a sign that said “FREE BOOKS!  TAKE ONE!” and after a moment of pure excitement, suspicion set in.

You set out cheese to catch a mouse.  You set out honey to catch a Pooh Bear.

You set out free books to catch a Kendra.

But then I realized that was ridiculous, so I grabbed a book and went on my merry way.

I also got a lot of free gum throughout my time in college.  Every time I accepted a piece of sample gum from someone on campus, I was certain that this was the time the gum was going to be poisoned and I was going to die the painful death that results from loving free things too much.  But that didn’t stop me from going out of my way to grab some gum whenever I saw those people handing it out.

One time some guy gave me a full handful of Stride Uber Bubble bubble gum (I remember that it was Uber Bubble because I was in a German linguistics class at the time and my thoughts were: “Why, isn’t this interesting.  The word ‘über’ seems to have become an English word, as evidenced by the loss of its umlaut.  Since neither the letter nor its corresponding sound exists in the English language, we have altered it to fit our speech and adopted it as our own.  Fascinating!”  Just kidding.  It went more like this: “Oh, hey!  German!  I love German!  And I love the word über!  Oh, look, it doesn’t have an umlaut.  Weird.  I love umlauts!  I love gum!  I LOVE FREE THINGS!”).

Anyway, I pocketed my gum and walked away (making an annoying crinkling noise with every step) only to find someone else handing out more Uber Bubble bubble gum a little farther along my way.  I, of course, made a bee-line to this person (trying to walk less noisily so my crinkling pockets wouldn’t give me away as the gum hoarder I am) and held out my hands like Oliver (“Please, sir.  I want some more.”  “MORE?”  “I mean some.  Some gum.  I don’t have any so I can’t have more.  At least according to Alice.  The hatter might disagree.”  And then he would punch me for mixing my allusions.)  He gave me a handful of gum too!  I filled up my other jeans pocket and finally got to class, where I triumphantly moved my gum from my pants to my bag to be chewed at a later date.

More recently, I was ending a less-than-successful shopping trip (I hate hate hate shopping.  I probably hate shopping exactly as much as I love free things.  If there were a spectrum of things I like and don’t like, shopping would be on one extreme and free things would be on the other) and I decided to stop for a cinnamon sugar pretzel.

Cinnamon sugar pretzels would be placed just slightly below getting free things on my spectrum of likes.  I love ‘em like I love something I love a whole lot.

So I asked for my pretzel and was paying at the register when one of the guys behind the counter asked me if I had tried the place’s new cinnamon sugar sticks (I think technically they’re Stix, with an x, which incidentally was my nickname when I played basketball in high school.  Well, briefly, because it started out as Sticks, which then became Stix because x-es are space-efficient, and then it became Stixx because if one x is space efficient two x-es must be extra space-efficient.  Right?  Right?  Then it became Bamboo, but that’s a little harder to explain so we’ll just move on).

I said that no, I had never tried their cinnamon sugar Stix.  The guy then asked me if I would mind if he gave me some Stix too because my pretzel pretzel had been sitting there for a while and might actually be a little bit stale.  I hesitated while I tried to think of a response more appropriate than, “WHAT KIND OF A MONSTER WOULD MIND BEING GIVEN FREE FOOD?” and I think this pause made him think I might actually be offended by his offer because he gave the sort of awkward (but much appreciated) explanation: “They’re exactly like your cinnamon sugar pretzel, only...less twisted.”

So I rolled my eyes and said, “FINE.  You can give me free things, if you must.”

I lie, of course.  I’m pretty sure I just grinned, nodded, and shouted, “COOL!” because I was afraid he would take back my Stix if I acted too weird about it (I don’t know why I always think people who give me things are going to yell “PSYCH!” and snatch it all back, but if this post is any indication, that seems to be a regular reaction of mine).  So he gave me my pretzel and my Stix.  I was feeling so happy with my good fortune that I shoved it all into my purse and went and bought a pair of pants that I hadn’t been sure about earlier in my shopping trip, trying not to smell too much like a pretzel when I opened my purse to get my wallet out.

The cinnamon sugar Stix were super delicious too.

But the pretzel was a little stale.

These are the parentheses who have taken a few of my good friends hostage in order to persuade me to use their parenthetical family members a million times in this one post.

I don’t usually interrupt my(have a good day!)self this much, I swear.