Take A Number

Today was a marvelous day indeed, friends! It was the first day in my entire life that I went to the DMV and didn't want to perform paper cuts on my eyeballs with the little ticket number they give you so you know when it's your turn to be called. ("Now serving E67 at desk 5. Now serving G59 at desk 21. Now serving your will to live straight up in a mahogany coffin, with a side order of desperation and ennui.") That usually sets in after about forty-five minutes, but today I didn't even have to spend forty-five minutes at the DMV: I was in and out in about 32, which really isn't bad for a person wanting to renew her driver's license on a busy Tuesday afternoon.

Have to say, though, I rather wish I'd known I was going to have to get my picture taken, as I'm certain I wouldn't have made this particular outfit choice for a photo I'm going to have to live with for the next five years. Then again, I probably wouldn't have timed last week's bang-cutting the way I did either, because while I'm pretty sure I'm going to be done with them in about six months, those bangs are going to live on in infamy in my driver's license photo until I am thirty-six, all "remember that time you were watching the Oscars and decide to cut the front portion of your hair like Mark Ruffalo's wife?"

This is not my driver's license picture. This is a picture I snapped in the dressing room at Target on Saturday to see if the blazer I was trying on made me look matronly. It did not. Success! I bought it. Anyway, there are my bangs.

Forget sharks and algebra mid-terms, by the way; I think the most frightening feeling in the world might be standing in line to have your driver's license picture taken and realizing, as you are scrabbling through your purse, that you do not have any lipgloss. Wait, I think that needs to be in all caps to accurately convey the horror: THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE ANY LIPGLOSS. Without lipgloss, you see, I look like the living dead; such is my dependence on my favorite lipgloss, in fact, that I have long lamented that I cannot buy it in bulk in Costco. Why can I not do that? I do it with diet coke! I do it with paper towels! I buy so much of this lipgloss that I am pretty sure the executives of Cover Girl are laughing it up in a penthouse suite in Cannes or Monaco---or maybe just in Baltimore; Cover Girl is based in Maryland---as they cackle with glee over the fortune they are making from me and my sad addiction to their Lipslicks. 

(PS: I know you're on the edge of your seat and everything, so I shall set your mind at rest and tell you that I did have my lipgloss after all, a welcome surprise after several seconds of panicked scrabbling. I mean really, I was this close to going all MacGyver with a cherry Jolly Rancher I found at the bottom of my purse.)

Anyway, it all ended well---although I may be singing a different tune in four to six weeks, when my license finally arrives in the mail---and I left with an alarmingly flimsy piece of paper that the woman behind the desk assured me would be taken seriously as an interim license by the rental car company in Austin. I am going to Austin on Thursday, you see, for the SXSW festival, and I am very excited because I've never been. To fill my downtime at the conference, I have made a to-do list with three things I want to accomplish during my time there. This boils down to:

a) Barbecue at the Salt Lick

b) Milkshake at Nau's Enfield Drug

c) Staying the hell away from the Chugging Monkey, the bar owned by current ABC Bachelor Brad Womack

It's a good start, right? Although if you've been to Austin, I'd love to know a little more.