Strike!

Back in College, I used to bowl every Monday. I'm not sure why I capitalized college like that, as if I went to a school called College. Anyway.

It was supposed to be a bonding experience for my store and several other stores in the mall I worked at.. You couldn't even imagine the level of high fashion layering going on in that place on Monday nights. I think at times we were wearing six or seven layers of clothing and it was still surprisingly revealing. I'm not sure how that worked, actually. But at the time, layering was in at my store. I think it was to encourage the customers to buy more clothes...if they saw the employees wearing a tank top, a tee-shirt, a button down, and a sweater all at the same time, artfully arranged to show at least a sliver of every layer, they'd be more likely to buy all those things for themselves. Or corporate just liked to make us look silly. But regardless, I could rock some layers. And I sometimes wore bowling shoes at work because I thought they looked cute.

So we bowled every Monday. I was a pretty bad bowler in the beginning, which worked in my favor as when people weren't laughing at me, they were giving me tips, and after a while I was bowling much better and learning to throw (roll?) a mean curve ball. I loved it. Even as I got to be a better bowler, though, I was never an attractive bowler. I could never figure out how to do the whole leg-kick behind you thing and so I just kind of walked up, paused, kind of bent a knee awkwardly, and sent the ball down the lane. But at least I wasn't granny bowling, right?

I haven't bowled much since those good old days, but apparently being in Christmas break and having some free time made me go a little crazy. Today was dollar bowling day at a local alley, and about a thousand kids from Ava's school met up to play. Or at least it felt like a thousand but it could have been about five hundred running around a lot. I figured it would be funny and entertaining and I could catch up with the other moms from school.

It was something, alright. Evany slept in the bassinet (sometimes I second guess that passed hearing test...that baby sleeps through everything.) and Seth crawled up and down the steps to the lane every two minutes and kept trying to crawl out onto the gutters. Jace actually did run down the lane at one point. None of the kids could figure out how best to throw the ball, and every time it rolled down the lane agonizingly slowly and every once in a while it didn't even make it to the pins...it just sat there, halfway to it's destination, looking forlorn. After about two frames, the kids lost interest and we had to go drag them out of the arcade to get them to bowl when it was their turn.

One game took two hours to play.

It was, literally, the longest two hours of my life.

I'm not even joking. It was like I was in the movie Groundhog Day and every time I thought we were on the last frame I would look again and another one would have appeared. We were on the last turn for about 45 minutes, no joke. I've never seen anything like it. It was hilariously ridiculous, and by the end, the adults were tossing the balls down the lanes to skip the turns of the kids who weren't in easy hailing range. It turned out a lot of them preferred pretending to play arcade games than actually bowling. Kids these days.

Apparently it's going to be awhile before I'm bowling regularly again.