I'm About to Be Famous

Except for the part where I'm not, at all.  A little over a year ago, I wrote about how I kept getting recruited off the sidelines to be an extra in various films my daughter had dragged me to.

One of those movies--the one that inspired that post, actually--was a little bigger scale than the others, in that it starred Dennis Quaid, Zac Efron and Heather Graham and was directed by some guy apparently famous for shooting a plastic bag blowing in the wind or something like that.

I did not meet any of them or even see Quaid or Graham, but I did stand across the street from Zac Efron for a couple of hours while he filmed a scene over and over again. Between takes, he rode a borrowed bicycle around in the street, which was kind of cute.  Up close-ish, he still looks like a skinny teenager and I kind of suspect that photoshop or something similar is behind all those ab shots the magazines were showing us a couple of years ago.

It's called At Any Price. Here's the trailer.

If you go see this movie, you may or may not catch a glimpse of me standing on the street in front of a restaurant with Luke from the Post Office while Zac Efron jumps into a car and screeches off down the street about 15 times.  Oh, wait...probably that will only happen once in the movie.  If you do spot me, I'll look like hell, standing out in the cold wind in a sweater that makes me look huge and flat shoes that don't match my clothes--the nice heels that go with that outfit are in my car a mile or so away.

The Things that Keep Me Up at Night

Probably you know that I've been having some semi-serious medical problems.  And that I have had almost no income during the past 3+ months while I've been dealing with that.  And that I've naturally been having problems with the insurance company. And that my car went from crappy to altogether dead and I've had no transportation for over a month.

But really, I can deal with all that.  This is what's been keeping me up at night:

Sure, when you have no way to get to the store, you think about running out of things like food and medications.  But really?  In an absolute emergency, you can live for days without food.  Toilet paper?  Not so much.

Fortunately, there's a gas station with a convenience store not far from my house and we've been able to pick up a lot of basics there--paper products, canned food, milk, etc.  The thing is, it's not a high-volume store and they don't restock all that often, so the other day, during our ten-inch snowfall, I bought their last roll of toilet paper.

And then I felt greedy.

See, we still had a couple of rolls at home.  AND I have a local friend who could take me to the store in a real pinch.  We don't have cabs or buses here, but if I were really desperate I could pay $20 for a car service to take me to the store and pick me up.  So my worry wasn't that I'd bought the last roll of toilet paper and what would we do next...no, it was WHAT IF SOMEONE ELSE NEEDED THAT?

I really, really wish I were exaggerating for humor's sake, but I actually did find myself lying in bed that night thinking about the depth of the snow and worrying that someone else in the neighborhood might trek out to the gas station in desperation and find that they had no toilet paper.