What Happens in Vegas...Sometimes Almost Doesn't Happen At All

I have a confession. Today I found out I made a mistake. A big one. Like, a really, really big one.

I'm only going to share it because look, it happened. I am a human. We live in an edited world of glossy, social media selfies, Facebook funnies, and only-take-a-photo-from-my-best-side reality. But kiddos, we actually live in the real world. Sometimes shit goes sideways. I feel the need to share this story with you so I can make you feel better about accidentally hitting "reply all" to 78 people on a personal email. Or accidentally dropping your phone in the toilet. (I have done all of these things, btw.) We should all feel better about being a flawed, stupid, dumber-than-a-box-of-rucks human being sometimes.

Let me tell you what happened. 

Several months ago, my husband and I concluded that it's totally still okay to use our birthdays as an excuse to go on a vacation. We forwent the traditional dinners out and sugar-coma inducing cakes and instead decided to go see our Lord and Savior Justin Timberlake on his just-announced tour. At the time Kansas City wasn't one of the tour stops, so we took it as a sign to fly to one of our fave places to watch JT kill it in April...

            


I consider the two of us to be pretty cultured, but damn we are suckers for Vegas. We love the eat-your-feelings-buffets cuisine. The shopping. The music. We love a quick little stint at the Roulette table. And we love the fact that if you're savvy enough, you can fly in, have a great time for two days, and fly back without blowing the budget.

Because the JT Concert was obviously going to sell out, I laid out my plan. I first became a Tennessee Kid in order to have access to the presale. Bye bye, $25.00 annually. Then I hunkered down like a GI Joe in a WWII fox hole and waited impatiently for the moment to arrive. When 10:00 AM arrived, I did my little click click click, found affordable-ish seats in the arena and booked it.  

              


Everything was set. We were going to Vegas.

Fast forward to this morning. I'm there in my home office, catching up on emails and maybe shopping at Target for shit I couldn't possibly need, when an email notification popped up from JT's tour. My knee-jerk reaction was to delete it, but something told me it might be relevant to our upcoming trip this weekend. I opened it.

It was an automated email from Justin's tour asking me to give my feedback on the amazing concert last night. Did we have fun? Was the arena clean? Would we be coming back to Quebec soon? How was the-

QUEBEC? EXCUSE ME?

                        


No. It couldn't be. Right? This was an email glitch. Surely.

With trembling hands and repeating "no no no no no no no no" like Rain Man, I pulled up my email receipt with the JT tickets, only to find my. worst. nightmare.

This is what my worst nightmare looks like.

I had bought tickets to Justin Timberlake in CANADA for the week before his Vegas performances.

Now, for those of you that are clenching your butt cheeks for me and feeling my pain, add in a few more clenches for when I realized this:

• If I had tickets for Canada, then I didn't have tickets for Vegas
• I had to tell my husband

                    

Every marriage has a moment like this. One person effs up and the other has no idea it's even happened yet. Like when Carrie cheated on Mr. Big in Abu Dhabi or wherever. For a hot minute, I considered keeping the secret. I mean, I could get away with it. He very rarely checks the credit card statements. If I bought tickets to the Vegas show now, he'd never even know.

And that my friends, is how the slippery slope toward everything unholy in a marriage begins.

I knew I had to tell him. 

Here's another fun fact about me. I can't sit quietly on big news. Good, bad, or otherwise, I have to get it off my chest NOW.

(This is maybe why my friends don't ever tell me anything.)

And so, like the thoughtful wife I am, I called my husband at work at 9:02 on a Monday morning and sobbed into the phone, "Babe I have to tell you something, and I don't know how to do it. It's so bad. It's SO so bad and I'm so sorry and I don't even know how it happened."

(As I'm typing this I realize he probably thought I was confessing infidelity, and considering I wasn't, maybe I'm a little more of a genius than I realize.)

Anyways, I told him what had happened and he was basically like:

                   

Can't blame him.

We had to choose. Option A: Cancel. Southwest flights were refundable and the hotel was refundable until midnight on Wednesday. Option B: Bite the bullet and buy tickets again, but at the correct venue.

We didn't think about it very long.

This was our vacation, and it was becoming more and more obvious that I really needed one. Justin Timberlake is our Elton John. Our Michael Jackson. Our fave performer in our fave city. Ultimately we opted to take it on the chin and purchase tickets to JT in Vegas. The other tickets from Quebec obviously can't be refunded and that investment is just...ugh I can't even think about it.

(By the way, you're welcome Quebec-ians at the concert that were able to spread out in our absence. Hope you enjoyed the extra leg room!)

At this moment, I still don't understand how it happened. I distinctly remember clicking the "Las Vegas @ T-mobile Arena" link. But how many times have you clicked on something and actually landed somewhere else? I think in my haste to GET THE TICKETS, with the impending doom of a sell out looming over me, I probably goofed and ended up on the wrong tour date. Either that or I was busy buying the afore mentioned shit at Target and just wasn't paying enough attention.

Look, we're lucky. The Kim and husband of 10 years ago would have been out the money, cancelling the vacation and doing this instead:



To our credit, my husband and I have worked hard and we've saved a little fun money, so we are able to make this work. We are incredibly fortunate.

Needless to say we shan't be returning home with souvenirs and will likely eat at McDonalds for each and every meal, but we will still belt out "Mirrors" and cry to "Young Man" and create everlasting memories. That's what truly matters.



So just remember, no matter what you see on FB or IG or Twitter, no filter can keep you from making a mistake. When it does happen, you can hide and pretend it didn't happen (which hey, you do you) or share it with the world (or in my case 50-ish readers), learn from it, and do your damnedest to never let it happen again.

Stay imperfect, my friends. I need the company.

What a Zoo: My Unasked-For Take on Harambe and the Little Boy That Could

I'm taking a minute away from the infertility world to talk about the Cincinnati zoo incident from the weekend. I feel like we need to discuss this.

I don't usually take a stance on controversial issues because I typically have friends and family with their feet firmly cemented on both sides of whatever topic is trending. But something about this particular issue stuck with me.

First of all, I am a huge animal rights activist. Cecil the Lion being shot absolutely gutted me. I hate puppy mills. I think Pit Bulls are lovely creatures who are misunderstood and raised by the wrong people. I don't like to kill Lady Bugs. I would never wear real fur and I've tried 29 times to become a vegetarian. (I'm still working on that one. Bacon, people. Bacon.)

However...

This was a child's life. An innocent little four year old boy who was doing what four year old boys do. Crawling, playing, testing boundaries. He managed to, according to the zoo, get "under a rail, through wires and over A MOAT wall to get into the enclosure."

Ya'll, he Mission Impossible'd himself in there. (The CIA should maybe recruit him after this hubbaloo dies down.) He wanted in and he was going to find a way to do it.

Reports have varied, but it sounds like at the beginning of the incident, the gorilla wasn't interested in harming the boy. Until the crowd got involved and understandably started to freak out. Then it agitated the gorilla and he became more violent, as the video shows. 

(Also, what kind of asshole takes a video of this happening? More on that later.)

All this aside, the fact remains, that little boy was probably going to be killed. Was the gorilla doing what gorillas do? Yes, it is a wild animal. Does that mean zoo should have sat by and let the little boy die? No. This was a total and complete freak accident that probably wouldn't happen again if you tried to recreate it three million times. 

What bothers me the most is the public outcry toward the mom of this child. I don't know her, and I don't know her story, but let me tell you a little story about me this weekend. 

My son is eight months old. He's essentially immobile, except when he's in his walker that he loves more than me. While cooking lunch on Sunday, I opened the pantry door to get out some bread. As I shut the door, I notice it was resisting. I thought maybe one of the hinges was broken. It never occurred to me that in the 2.3 seconds I had the pantry door open, my son had waddled over in his walker and stuck his meaty little fingers in the opening of the door swing. I HAD NEARLY CLOSED THE PANTRY DOOR ON MY SON'S FINGERS.

Incidentally, he's fine. There were tears and for a solid twenty minutes, I contemplated hurling myself off a bridge while screaming, "I'm a terrible mother!" on the way down. The fact that the one thing I love more than anything was hurt because of me was almost too much. And this was just some bruised fingers.

What if I had been that mom at the zoo? What if my squirrely little son had wandered off while I took a moment to ogle at the splendor of an amazing animal in front of me? 

Well, apparently you aren't allowed to do that in this world. The mom from the zoo has become a villain by the peanut gallery of nincompoops. Apparently she should have a leash or string around her child at all times. Because that's not weird or anything. 

Look, I get it. People think she was being negligent because that's an easy dart to throw. I, on the other hand, tend to err on the side of humanity and believe that she thought her kid was right next to her. For those that aren't parents, let me just inform you. Kids are smart. as. hell. They know when a parent is distracted and they take full advantage. Can we offer a little kindness to this mom whose son is laying in a hospital bed and whom she had to watch be dragged by a 400-pound (innocent yes, but still 400-pound) gorilla? Can we have some compassion, for f*ck's sake?

And now, the gorilla. My heart aches that Harambe is gone. This is by and large my main problem with zoos to begin with. We take wild animals and put them in enclosures so we can stare and laugh at them when they throw their poop at us. Then we're surprised when something unexpected happens and the animals act accordingly to their nature?

DID NO ONE READ CHAOS THEORY BY IAN MALCOM?

There's loads of outrage about whether a tranquilizer should have been tried first, but as I understand it, tranquilizers can take time and cause extreme agitation. The zoo had no way of knowing what the gorilla was getting ready to do, nor did they have time to sit around and think about what the Twittersphere would think. They had to act. 

And that sucks. The whole situation is a gigantic hurricane of suck.

I'm so torn. As a mother, I want the zoo (or amusement park, or Chuck E Cheese or Sky Zone) to do whatever they have to do to keep my son safe, even if he is being a little asshole. On the other hand, I know this gorilla  did nothing wrong. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and none of it was by his own choosing. He is dead because we feel the need to capture him and watch him for our own personal pleasure. But at the end of all of this, with the crap circumstances being what they were, I don't feel the  zoo was wrong. My heart breaks for the zookeeper that had to fire the shot. He didn't take that job hoping to get the chance to kill an endangered, beautiful, amazing creature. And yet, here we are. There is no cut and dry answer. There is a lot of drilling down into the nitty gritty that could potentially be explored. But that won't happen. It's easier to call the mom a piece of trash, the zoo trigger happy and the kid a brat.

Welcome to the human race.

I feel like this, along with other stories like fatal gun shootings, will fade into the background as the next news cycle comes in. And that makes me sad. Harambe is gone, but the boy is alive. A little boy who didn't understand the implications of what he did will reap the repercussions of this for a long time to come.

As for the mom in this story, I hope she's the innocent I'm making her out to be. I hope it doesn't turn out that she's a terrible mother who leaves her kid in a hot car while she runs in to the post office to mail a letter. I hope she doesn't sue the zoo. I'm giving her the benefit of the doubt, because I hope someone would give it to me. I hope my daycare provider sees my child's swollen fingers today and knows that life happened yesterday. Messy, sucky, painful life.

Lastly, you better believe I'm not blaming the walker company or the hinge company for my son's injury. And he will still play in his walker. I'm not going to wrap him in plastic bubble wrap. 

Yet. 

Be kind to each other. Be kind to animals. And be kind to yourself.

XOXO,