But do the gears shift smoothly?

I don't know whether my ears are packing up because I am getting older, or whether I am just spending less time paying attention to what is going on around me, but my hearing is shot to shit.
People are beginning to think that I am genuinely mentally deficient (and they may have a pretty sturdy point), due to the fact that I spend half my time asking them to repeat themselves, and the other half vacantly gazing at them like a Vicodin addict while I play the conversation back through my head to try and figure out what I may have missed.

This past Saturday was a perfect example - I wish I was sane creative enough to be able to make this stuff up.

M.P. decided that we were going to spend some 'girlie' time together, as we hadn't done it in a while... if, in fact, we ever had. My idea of 'girlie' is wearing a skirt and/or not saying 'F**k'. When she suggested a 'mani/pedi', it was all I could do not to swallow my own tongue. M.P. frequently gets her nails done, but it's just something I don't do. Given the choice between a gasoline enema and a mani/pedi, I'll take the regular unleaded every time with a cheery smile and a 'Whoopsa Daisy!' I view my fingernails as implements to hook the gunk out of my dogs' eyes, and my toenails as things best hidden in high-heeled boots. But, as M.P. and I hadn't spent a lot of time together in recent weeks, I decided to swallow my terror instead of my tongue and go for it...
...Which was a mistake on so many levels.

As soon as we walked into the salon, I was overwhelmed by the sheer presence of oestrogen and had to physically stop myself from faking a seizure to escape. I was less a fish out of water and more an alien who had just landed on the Vagina Planet. I watched one girl get up from her manicure, stroll casually over to the mirror on the wall in the middle of the room and start preening. The hair was fluffed and brushed, the lipgloss was reapplied, the mascara wand was waved... the whole shebang. To me, that's the kind of thing you do in privacy - in a bathroom or something - not in the middle of a room teeming with people. She spent another full two minutes admiring herself before she smirked at her reflection and sauntered to the counter to pay. I felt like a teenaged boy who had sneaked into a peep show - was this what women really did?!

As I was goggling, a manicurist came over and said something to M.P. and I, smiled, and walked away. My mate immediately knew something was off, because I cocked my head to one side and squinted like a constipated owl.
"What's up?" she asked.
"What did she just say?"
"She said that we should go and pick a nail color..."
"Ohhhh...Well, that makes much more sense..."
M.P. frowned quizzically at me. "What did you think she said?"

"I thought she said, 'Six Speed Avocado'"

Before you ask, I have never smoked crack, but at that moment I almost wished that I had have done at some point in my life, just so that I had something to blame my wonky mind on.

M.P. and I spent an inordinate amount of time laughing about it (the same amount of time it would probably take to get a gasoline enema), and then went over to pick the nail colors...
...and as I looked at the nail polish, I wondered what a 'Six Speed Avocado' green would look like...

Note: For those of you who actually read the drivel that I write, I apologise for not having written for a while - I will try harder...