Until…

I woke up 25 minutes past when I should have left for work. After showering, throwing on some clothes, scrunching my hair into a lumpy ponytail, putting on minimal makeup, and wishing I had time to eat something, or at least find some food to bring along, I was out the door.

Naturally, my car was almost out of gas. I always seem to decide “I’ll just gas up in the morning” on evenings preceding late-starting mornings. So I stopped at the Arco on my way. I pulled up to a vacant pump and saw that it had a large note in tiny print stuck on it, so I drove around to a different one. Turns out, they all had notes on them. The notes said, “Debit down, come inside.” I figured, no problem. I’ll just pay cash at the machine. This particular Arco has separate machines for paying with a card and paying with cash, and the cash machine also had a note on it that said “Out of service.”

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I like cheetahs. I think they might be my favorite animal.

I read a book once (it was a picture book, but it still counts) that talked about how cheetahs all look alike. I never really noticed that, because all lions look alike, and all giraffes look alike, and basically any group of animals in the wild look a lot like each other.

But then I looked more closely at the pictures of the cheetahs. They really do look alike. I mean, alike-alike. They have the same markings. Not in the way that giraffes all have spots, or tigers all have stripes, but they really have the same markings. The same dark spots near their eyes, for starters.

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