He's White and Nerdy

We live in the land of the planet's great retail giant, and we love it. This week is Wal-Mart's annual shareholders' meeting. It's Friday, but all week long our area is swarming with Wal-Martians from all over the world. They get flown in from different countries and bussed in from stores all over this country. It is really something to see. So, this week each year, Wally and the gang put on special events to keep the masses entertained. The biggest thing they do is a series of concerts in Fayetteville, about a 30 minute drive from where we live. The concerts started Tuesday night and end tonight, and I really wanted to try to go to one or more of them. I talked with Ryan, and we decided we'd try to go to the Tuesday night concert. It was Lifehouse and Taylor Swift, and there is a very specific order of operations that happens at these things. The music starts at 7pm. The doors open to out-of-town Wal-Martians at 6pm. They get the good seats since they're our guests or whatever. After that mad scramble, they let all the Home Office geeks and their families in at 6:20. At 6:45, anyone else who wants in and can find a seat can have at it. Ryan leaves work 5 so that we can get there by 6:20. Apparently everyone else had the same idea, and it took him more than an hour and a few close calls to get home. Now I'm stressed. I don't even care about the music; I really thought it would be something different and fun (and free!) we could do together since we haven't spent much time all together in the last few months. Fine. Ryan tells me on the way he doubts we get a seat since we're so late, and he says the interstate was crammed with accidents his whole way home, so it's going to be slow going. And he's right. We spent half the duration of our trip in highway traffic because of an accident on the side of the road. We eventually got there just in time to get in on the "open to the public" round, and I'm stressing some more. We find the last parking space in town and I'm trying to go as fast as I can, and Ryan's just casually strolling. This is the first hint I get that he may intentionally be trying to provoke me. I'm not going to bite just yet. We get there and everyone has to pee and is starving, but we decide we'd better find seats first and then take care of business. You know, the hierarchy of needs and whatnot. We get seats, and we start the rounds. I take Kylie first, then Ryan takes Alex. We all sit down, and Ryan leaves to round up some food from the concession stand. While he's gone, the first act starts. I haven't been to a concert in quite a while, and I am shocked how loud it is, but it's tolerable, and the music is fine, so we're all good. He gets back toward the end of the first song. He sits down and begins to disperse his loot when the first song ends and the teenage girls behind us (they are BIG fans of Lifehouse!) begin to squeal. Ryan, being the easy-going people person he is, gives them a terribly embarrassing look and plugs his nearest ear with his finger. Alex is in the seat between him and me, so I reach over and tap him and tell him to cut it out. We're at a concert, and people are allowed to be loud. I still have some hope. Everyone has been to the potty and now they're being fed and watered, so we should be fine. And we all are, except the big one. He is grimacing at every scream, plugging his ears, chewing the inside of his face and tapping his foot like he can't wait to escape. Ok, for fairness' sake, and because I know he'll read this later and correct me, he only sticks his finger in one ear, that being the one turned in the direction of the Lifehouse fan club. Occasionally I nudge him and tell him to loosen up, get the stick out of his rear, stop humiliating me, etc.....At one point he even says to me, "It's too loud. I don't like it." I bet if this were a Star Trek convention he'd be the screaming teenager behind us (he's fluent in JavaScript as well as Clingon), but ok. He seemed to get better when the first act finished and Taylor Swift began. That could be because the girls behind us left or because the music is not as loud or maybe he just passed some gas and felt better. By this time I'm really just ignoring him and helping Kylie to understand everything that is going on. Things are fine for a while, and then Alex dropped his drink. He wanted to go into the row in front of us and retrieve it, and we wouldn't let him, so that was the end of him. He starts to complain (in that way only Alex really can) and Ryan eventually takes him out. A while after that, Kylie starts to feel restless, so we all go. Suddenly the kids are starved again, noone is happy for various reasons, and I'm regretting I tried to have fun with this pack of hyenas. The next night at dinner Ryan tells me that he had fun and he's not sure why I was so pie-faced. WHAT?!? Perhaps he can't recall the finger in the ear, or the dirty looks or the face gnawing or the intense foot tapping that was going on in his seat. Looked like fun to me! Sign me up for more! Finally he concedes that if he were those girls and some old fart were doing what he had done, he'd have screamed 10x louder just to irritate him. Oh well....I'll just have to look for alternate forms of fun. Like a lobotomy.