impulsereader | Lemon-based anxiety

I am the biggest dork on the planet.

So, in my head all of this lemon planting business was completely anonymous, and apparently I imagined I would suddenly develop some super-stealthy superpower accordingly. I pictured myself palming a lemon and casually putting it into play as I walked out of the café, secreting one behind a particularly apropos book in the library (chuckling smugly all the while at my choice), slipping through a crowd and made anonymous by numbers alone.

My first problem – I had four lemons. It was hard for me to imagine being stealthy with four lemons even in my deluded head. One cannot carry four lemons any distance stealthily. If you had no other concerns, perhaps you could walk around with two lemons in each hand and not draw undue attention to yourself, but I had also printed up a little blurb (oh, for those of you I hadn’t already mentioned it to, a local theatre is screening the Frankensteins and I realized that putting some lemons into play before Benedict’s turn at the Creature might net me some people more likely to help me out and move some lemons) – Are you a Benedict fangirl (or boy)? Take a lemon and help get the game moving! – and during my drive from work to the theatre had developed the additional concern – will my lemons roll? I also had to keep my camera in mind.

So I spent some time meditating on my ability to mess up anything I am trying for the first time – I swear to you that this never fails, I have had to institute test runs on pretty much everything in life in order to look competent in any way, shape, or form – but convinced myself that instead this was a situation very much like gift wrapping – at which I have a zen-like ability to excel somehow – I always end up having just the right number of items to tissue paper ratio and everything always magically manages to stack properly or fit into the bag just so. After calming myself I decided that one of the pieces of tissue paper which had cushioned my new tea pot would make a nice, minimalist ‘nest’ for my lemons to reduce the likelihood that they would roll, and this proved to fit nicely on top of the ‘tail’ end of my sign, the text of which would now pop up in front of the lemons but not obscure them. I was feeling more confident and gift-wrappable all the time.

I further decided to put just the necessary items – lemons, sign, tissue paper – into the paper shopping bag which had carried my new tea paraphernalia to work in the morning (case in point – I made a complete hash of making my first pot of tea at work) and leave all other various things – box, the remaining tissue paper, package I received at work – in the car. I didn’t want to look suspicious, you see. I thought putting the lemons into the box would amount to leaving a suspicious package lying about and I didn’t want to be the cause of a bomb scare or similar. But surely a woman carrying a shopping bag wouldn’t be cause for concern? I don’t believe I am inherently a suspicion-inducing individual; I am relatively tall at 5’8” but hardly abnormal at that height, and I was even wearing flats –I admit that when I’m in 3” heels I can feel a bit toweringly loomingish around short people – but in flats I am a threat to no one, not even men shorter than I, as I have perfected the necessary bit of slouch for such situations.

So I parked, moved everything around, tucked my camera into a handy pocket and gave thanks that I’d chanced to put on cargo pants that morning.

Problem two – the movie didn’t start for over an hour. This meant that the theatre which I knew to be fairly casual about letting people without a ticket into the lobby was completely empty – leaving the three employees nothing to do but ask me how they could help me. This is where I pretty much completely panicked – because, remember, my mind set was firmly in the realm of – I was stealthily planting lemons! This is an art housey sort of place. If I had been prepared for someone asking me this, I could have done a lot of different things here: I could have bought tickets to the Frankensteins I am genuinely planning on seeing in July, I could have told them the lemon story and asked them if I could place my lemons over where all the free newspapers reside, I could have asked if it was all right to take pictures because it’s an old theatre and it is very picturesque in the lobby. What I actually did was say, “Oh, um, I actually just wanted a newsletter – a listing of stuff.” This came to mind because I know they put these out and I had genuinely planned on picking one up while I was there.

The guy hands me one and informs me that they also have them in the green dispensers outside. Clearly I have failed completely at not appearing suspicious.

So I belatedly adopted the tourist act and checked out the picturesque lobby, and started inspecting all the posters and free newspapers, and listings for things to come, and waited for these three people to either develop something better to do than stare at me or lose interest in staring at me. I anxiously tried even harder to look like the bomb-sniffing dogs weren’t required due to my presence.

After a little while the phone rang and I seized on that being some sort of distraction at least, and dropped into a crouch to quickly deposit my sign, tissue paper, and lemons on one of the lower bookshelves offering some sort of free publication – and then hightailed it out of there. I took a quick shot of the marquee – cursing myself now through my anxiety because I’d wanted to get a pic of the lemons, but clearly my flight response didn’t allow such a luxury.

I was actually thinking – go, drive, get out before they catch that flash of yellow which shouldn’t be there and come out to find you – oi! What’s this with the lemons, lady?

So I’m driving away, making my escape, and it occurs to me that the lemons all prominently feature the journal url. These people could very well spot the lemons, check them out, open up a laptop – one of them is sure to have a laptop – and scold the hunt the lemon journal for leaving the lemons there – before I’ve even reached home!

By the time I did in fact reach home I had calmed down enough to laugh about all this, and when I got upstairs and logged in as the lemon I didn’t have any new messages, scolding or otherwise.